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Editors’ Choice

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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Kearston Farr comforts her daughter, Taliyah, outside the Charleston, South Carolina, church where Dylann Roof killed nine people.

Racial Terror and the Second Repeal of Reconstruction

By Editors' Choice

How the legacy of Jim Crow haunts Trump’s America By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, The New Republic — This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key figures in Reconstruction’s history, this copiously researched chronicle also doubles as a powerful and chilling window on to our own age of violent and resurgent white nationalism.

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Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, 1968

The Language of the Unheard: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Social Democracy

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Robert Greene II, The Nation — Gone was the optimism of 1963. It had been replaced by a sense of disillusionment, a sense of urgency that America was about to lose the last chance to have its soul.” This was how Jet magazine described the climax of the Poor People’s Campaign, which reached Washington, DC, in the tumultuous summer of 1968. For Jet and for many early civil-rights activists, the Poor People’s Campaign…

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In the Name of Albert Ramon Dorsey and Dennis Todd Rogers #Boycott24

In the Name of Albert Ramon Dorsey and Dennis Todd Rogers #Boycott24

By Editors' Choice, News & Current Affairs

By BLMLA — Twice in 20 months, employees have called police on black members, resulting in their murder. 24 Hour Fitness has refused to address this. THIS MUST STOP! On March 8, 2017, LA County Sheriff deputies responded to a call from 24 Hour Fitness employees at the location in the Ladera Heights section of Los Angeles, the employee claimed Dennis Todd Rogers, another unarmed Black gym member had stayed too long…

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