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Editors’ Choice

Moderator of the panel Dr. Hilary Brown and panelists at the discussion on reparatory justice.

Reparations Not Just About Money – CARIFESTA Symposium

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By CARICOM Today — As part of the CARIFESTA Symposium entitled “Journey Round Myself”, a panel discussion on CARICOM Reparatory Justice was hosted at the UWI, St. Augustine on Thursday August 22, 2019. Panelists for the discussion included Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM Mr, David Commissiong, who gave the feature address; Mr. Dorbrene O’Marde, Chairman of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Commission, Mr Ariyegoro Ome, Chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago National Committee on…

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Freddie Jenkins’ mother attended what is now the last standing African American schoolhouse in Mount Pleasant, S.C., in the 1930s.

Slavery’s descendants say a reparations check won’t make the pain go away

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Tyrone Beason, Los Angeles Times — CHARLESTON, S.C. — Five years before the first shots of the Civil War rang out from the harbor here in 1861, alderman Thomas Ryan and a business partner opened Ryan’s Mart at No. 6 Chalmers St. Their merchandise was slaves: African men, women and children who were prodded, picked over and auctioned off to the highest bidders. The finest adult males could fetch…

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Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Black Art Spoke in a Nation That Would Silence Us

By Editors' Choice

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen, Truthout — “To create art amid sorrow or oppression is to insist on excavating meaning from the dull senselessness of pain. It is to be alive and speaking back. Art dives headfirst into the uncharted perils and delights of the human condition. For people whose humanity is often denied, taking that plunge with an audience is inherently rebellious.” —Hannah Giorgis My mother called to tell me…

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Thomas Cole: The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836)

America Is Not Rome. It Just Thinks It Is

By Editors' Choice

By Tom Holland, NYR Daily — When Edward Gibbon embarked on his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he began his narrative with the accession of Commodus. Marcus Aurelius, the father of the new emperor, was a man who, in the noblest traditions of the Roman people, had combined the attributes of a warrior, a statesman, and a philosopher; Commodus was none of these. “The…

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Civil rights advocates carry placards during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in Washington

Truth and Reconciliation: Addressing Systematic Racism in the United States

By Commentaries/Opinions, Editors' Choice

By Danyelle Solomon — 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of Africans sold into bondage arriving on Virginia’s shores. It has been 156 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, 55 years since the end of Jim Crow, and 51 years since the civil rights movement. All of these moments in U.S. history represent crossroads—moments where the country made a choice or where people demanded that the words on the pages of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights became more than words; that policies and practices were equitably distributed among all people, not just a select few…

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