TopIcs: Remembering Patrice Lumumba, “Elections Matter” Revisited. Guests: Maurice Carney (Friends of the Congo, Washington, D.C.), Earl Ofari Hutchinson (Commentator, Publisher, The Hutchinson Report, Los Angeles, CA) and Bill Fletcher (Author, Commentator, Labor/Social Justice Activist, Washington, D.C.).

By Hank Sanders — July 2nd is an important date to me. It is important to others for different reasons. Let me tell you why. I grew up in a segregated society. It was not just segregated but very oppressive. Most Americans think of segregation as just separation of the races. Separation does not even begin to tell the real story. So July 2nd is very important to me. I grew up going to…

By Ray Chickrie — Today, July 1, Suriname celebrates the 155th anniversary of the end of slavery, emancipation or Keti Kota. It is also known locally as Maspasi. Slavery came to an end in 1863 in Suriname, but prior to that enslaved Africans waged wars of liberation and freed themselves from bondage (Maroons) and signed treaties with the Dutch. The Netherlands signed peace treaties with the Nyduka (Akkan) in 1760,…

By Anya Jabour, PBS — Striking down children and adults, women and men, and blacks and whites, smallpox posed a grave threat in Civil War Virginia. “I wonder why nobody has noticed this outbreak until now?” ponders nurse Mary Phinney. Free black laborer Samuel Diggs provides the answer to this puzzle: “Nobody was looking.”

By Vanessa Romo, NPR — Congress’s three African-American senators introduced a bipartisan bill Friday to make lynching a federal crime. Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., drafted the bipartisan legislation, which defines the crime as “the willful act of murder by a collection of people assembled with the intention of committing an act of violence upon any person.” It also classifies lynching as a hate…

By Thomas J. Sugrue, The New York Times — Recent disruptive protests — from diners at Mexican restaurants in the capital calling the White House adviser Stephen Miller a fascist to protesters in Pittsburgh blocking rush-hour traffic after a police shooting of an unarmed teen — have provoked bipartisan alarm. The CNN commentator David Gergen compared the anti-Trump resistance unfavorably to 1960s protests, saying, “The antiwar movement in Vietnam, the civil rights movement…

The former NAACP head’s big win in a key gubernatorial primary sets him up as a Democrat who can run and win with a bold progressive vision. By John Nichols, The Nation — Ben Jealous entered the race for governor of Maryland with a remarkable résumé—Rhodes scholar, investigative journalist, past president of the Rosenberg Foundation, founding director of Amnesty International’s US Domestic Human Rights Program, youngest-ever national president of the NAACP, high-profile…

By Stephen Millies — Despite threatened thundershowers, 50 people took to the streets of Newark, N.J., on June 23 to demand reparations for Black people. Every year the People’s Organization…

By Rob Urban and Bill Allison, Bloomberg — The biggest private prison operators, which have poured money into Republican coffers, stand to make a windfall from President Donald Trump’s “zero…

By W. T. Whitney Jr., ML Today — The Civil War ended and Edward A. Pollard “of Virginia” immediately wrote a history of Confederate military operations. (1) There he insists…

You can’t fight injustice with decorum. By Sarah Leonard, The Nation — Michelle Obama’s 2016 declaration that “when they go low, we go high” quickly became the unofficial motto of the anti-Trump resistance. But instead of being used against Trump himself, this attitude is now being wielded against protesters confronting his administration’s obscene immigration-detention policies. Even in the face of family separations, a racist travel ban, and overt, violent white…

Bill Berkowitz for Buzzflash at Truthout — One of the noteworthy developments rising out of Donald Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy toward migrants from Central America and Mexico, is that it…