Newark As Model City Initiative — Tuesday, April 3, 2018 the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) convened a National Town Hall dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin…
April 9th Edition of Vantage Point Topic Remembering King: Report Back from Newark and Memphis Guests Dr. Michael Roberts, Chairman/CEO, The Roberts Companies, St. Louis, MO Willie Barney, President/Facilitator, African…
By Donald Yacovone — There it sat on a library cart with fifty other elementary, grammar, and high school history textbooks, its bright red spine reaching out through time and…
By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad — As Women’s History Month comes to an end, we at the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative think it is important to reflect upon how racial economic inequality…
What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage as the driving and animating force of this abject horror. By Gerald Horne — The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth…
By Nicholas Powers — It’s hard to watch. Guns aimed at the dark. Loud yells. Loud salvo. Night drizzle in the tactical lights. Cops mistook his cell phone for a gun. I know already, he’s dead. I finished watching the video of Stephon Clark’s murder. Days later, White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders labeled it a “local matter.” President Trump has stripped Obama’s mild federal oversight of police and left…
Freedom on the Move from Cornell University is the first major digital database of fugitive slave ads from North America. By Allison Meier — Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. The notice described her in detail as a “light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very…
The movement looks to rebuild the cross-racial civil rights alliance that disintegrated during a half-century of counter-revolution. Their radical vision is more necessary than ever. By Lewis M. Steel — The critical question long-time veterans of the civil rights movement and new activists alike ask is this: Are the times ripe for a newly energized movement to break the stagnation which has shut down most racial progress for the last…
By Barbara Ransby and Aislinn Pulley — April 4 marked the historic 50th anniversary since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. At this time, it is vital to highlight the fact that King understood the depth of state violence, noting the violent effects of government policy in many spheres. As King said a year before his death, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the…
In the age of Trump, believers of the once-popular tenets of scientific racism are feeling emboldened. By Edward Burmila — Judging by the headlines, pseudo-scientific racism is making a comeback. Nineties-relic Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) is popping up on campuses and in conservative media outlets, much to the delight of those who think his graphs confer legitimacy to their prejudices. Atheist philosopher and podcaster Sam Harris is extolling Murray’s…
By Marianne Williamson — Years ago, I went with a doctor friend to see a charismatic Catholic priest, Father Ralph DiOrio. I had read his books on miraculous healing, and…
The Enduring Impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission Elizabeth Hinton, Boston Review — In his televised speech following five days of civil unrest in Detroit during the summer of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson announced the creation of the Kerner Commission to evaluate the uprisings there and in other cities, and to prescribe policies to suppress future disorder. The American public also demanded insight into why cities burned and what drove…