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Commentaries/Opinions

A Call to Action: Our Generation and the Evolution of the Civil Rights Movement

By Commentaries/Opinions

The horrific death of Michael Brown on August 9th was not just an “incident,” not just an “accident,” nor just “an unfortunate situation.” The reaction from communities of color across the nation and protests against police brutality that have followed are also not, as Fox Contributor Linda Chavez has put it, attempts to “enhance” racial fears and animosity by employing the “mantra of the Black unarmed teenager shot by a white cop.”

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White supremacy and slavery

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

With a sweeping and widely praised new essay on reparations in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has challenged Americans to reconsider how they view their country’s history and to place the influence of white supremacy front and center. Rather than imagine the damages inflicted against African-Americans by white supremacy as having occurred mainly during the antebellum period, Coates asks us to recognize how Jim Crow in the South and redlining in the North denied black people the means to build real, stable lives for themselves, directly explaining the disproportionate poverty we still see in the African-American community today.

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What to Do While You Wait for Darren Wilson to Be Acquitted

By Commentaries/Opinions

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, testified before a grand jury this Tuesday, September 16. Wilson testified for four hours and was “cooperative,” a source told the Post-Dispatch. At the direction of St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, the grand jury will have until January 7 to decide whether to indict Wilson on criminal charges. As of now, Wilson is still on paid administrative leave.

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Celebrating the Haitian Revolution: Reflections on Cruising Into History

By Vantage Point Articles

January 1, 2014 marked the 210th Anniversary of the Haitian Revolution, one of the greatest events in human history. Never before had an enslaved people rebelled against their slave masters to declare their independence and establish a nation. Inspired by the exhortations and sacrifice of the spiritual priest Boukman and ably led by Toussaint Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and Alexandre Petion, this is precisely what the enslaved Africans of Haiti achieved. They crushed the military forces of Napoleon Bonaparte at the pinnacle of his power and established the world’s first Black Republic!

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