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Editors’ Choice

A demonstrator next to a fence bearing names of black people killed by police, Washington DC, June 2020.

America’s ‘Untouchables’: the Silent Power of the Caste System

By Editors' Choice

More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the soil of the future United States. To comprehend the current upheavals one must understand the human pyramid encrypted into us all: the caste system. By Isabel Wilkerson, The Guardian — In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and…

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Rev. C.T. Vivian

The Rev. C.T. Vivian: At Age 95, Gone Too Soon

By Editors' Choice

Cordy Tindale “C. T.” Vivian July 30, 1934 – July 17, 2020. By The SDPC — The Rev. C.T. Vivian, who made history the day he was brutally confronted by Sheriff Jim Clark in 1965 in Selma after 1400 black voters were prohibited from registering to vote, has made his transition and sits with the ancestors. Rev. Vivian, who was a 2016 recipient of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. (SDPC)…

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A print of U.S. President Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Tallushatchee, 1813.

This Land Is Not Your Land

By Editors' Choice

The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans By David Treuer — In his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, in 1829, U.S. President Andrew Jackson—a slave-owning real estate speculator already famous for burning down Creek settlements and hounding the survivors of the Creek War of 1813–14—called for the “voluntary” migration of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Six months later, in the spring of 1830, he signed…

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Corporations grapple with slavery reparations

Corporations grapple with slavery reparations

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Courtenay Brown, Axios — The debate over reparations for slavery has moved from the political realm to the corporate one. At least two big British companies — insurer Lloyd’s of London and brewer Greene King — promised to make certain amends for their role in slavery. But activists want them and other companies to do more. Why it matters: We usually hear about reparations as a political issue — a “societal…

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The grand buildings of Bordeaux, France, were financed, in part, by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The city has moved to address that past.

George Floyd’s Killing Forces Wider Debate on France’s Slave-Trading Past

By Editors' Choice

Rather than tear down statues, some argue that the past should not be obliterated, but remembered and explained. By Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times — BORDEAUX, France — At a bend in the river, a succession of stately stone buildings, each more imposing than the last, stretches along the left bank. Their elegant 18th-century facades had helped Bordeaux, already famous for its wineries, become a UNESCO World Heritage site.…

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