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“If there was something to do in this town, this town would prosper, because there’s a lot of loyal people here, a lot of good people,” said Tre Lewis, who lives with his family on Youngstown’s south side.

The Nonwhite Working Class

By Editors' Choice

Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores. By Henry Graber, The Slate — YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant…

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A mural of Bob Marley at Notting Hill Carnival in 2012.

Jamaica Is Using Bob Marley’s Legacy to Market Austerity

By Editors' Choice

The reggae icon would be embarrassed by his country’s attempts to rebrand a disastrous ideology. By Keston Perry, The Nation — The island nation of Jamaica holds a special, almost spiritual significance for many people of color, as well as for anyone concerned about advancing equality and justice in the world. It is the birthplace of the Rastafari movement, reggae, dancehall—and democratic socialism before it became popular in the United States.…

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Customs and Border Protection

A Brief History of US Concentration Camps

By Editors' Choice

There is no doubt that concentration camps are in operation on US soil once again. By Brett Wilkins — Concentration camp (noun): a place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. – Oxford English Dictionary Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has ignited a…

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General William Tecumseh Sherman in May 1865. Portrait by Mathew Brady.

The Truth Behind ’40 Acres and a Mule’

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — We’ve all heard the story of the “40 acres and a mule” promise to former slaves. It’s a staple of black history lessons, and it’s the name of Spike Lee’s film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such…

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Formerly enslaved people preparing cotton for the gin on Smith’s plantation, Port Royal Island, South Carolina, 1861–1862

Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Katherine Franke — A bill calling for the federal government to “study and consider” how to provide reparations to African Americans for slavery has been introduced into every session of the US Congress for the last thirty years. The bill’s aim is “to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865.” Representative John Conyers, the primary sponsor of the…

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Cardrian Massey, left, and Kate Chandler hold hands in a circle with others from Atlanta, Ga., before joining demonstrators for reparations for slavery on the National Mall in Washington.

Reparations will pave the way to justice for all

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Cepeda, Roanoke Times — CHICAGO — In the spring of 1995, I sat in a stuffy classroom studying “Literary History of England, from Beowulf to 1800,” while overlooking Southern Illinois University’s iconic Pulliam Clock Tower. I was on the verge of boiling over. Somehow, the lone Hispanic (me and the lone black person in the tiny class were engaged in a shouting match over reparations for slavery. Rep. John…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations

By Editors' Choice, Reparations, Video/Audio

By Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker — When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to treat reparations as a punch line is to misunderstand their purpose. He argues that reparations…

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