Live Webcast November 18, 2020 — The year 2019 represented the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619. In the history of the African-American experience throughout this period there have been many gains in the liberation of the formerly enslaved. However, with the continuation of the conditions of structural impoverishment and systemic and violent racism, the ultimate liberation…

By Julianne Malveaux — It took five days for the 2020 election to be called for former Vice President Joe Biden. Five days with me peeled to the television and the internet. Five days holding my breath. Five days, meditating and praying for strength. I could not imagine four more years of Trump. I actually started going through my belongings, trying to decide which one would make the cut for…

By Elle Kehres, Chapelboro — At their town council meeting last week, Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle and Council Member Barbara Foushee presented a reparations resolution for the council to approve. 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck spoke with Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle about the legacy of slavery nationally, and how the town of Carrboro is working to change the course of history locally. “Essentially, it starts out explaining and acknowledging how…

By Jonathan M. Pitts, Baltimore Sun — The Maryland diocese of the Episcopal Church has become the latest religious institution to commit to making reparations for slavery and systemic racism, voting over the weekend to create a $1 million seed fund for programs that would benefit the African American community in Baltimore and beyond. More than 82% of delegates to the diocese’s annual general convention voted Saturday to establish the…

The conversation spans the width of various touchy topics—the 1898 Coup’s lingering debt, the “trend” of the Black Lives Matter movement, the responsibility of white people—and each panelist offers their thoughtful responses, bolstered by their years of research and experience. By Cierra Noffke, UNCW — On the evening of September 15, a virtual crowd gathered around monitors or cell phones to listen to a group of activists answer questions inspired by…

By Robert Reich – Since the first colonizers arrived in the United States to this very moment, wealthy elites have used the tools of theft, exclusion, and exploitation to expand their wealth and power at the detriment of Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and marginalized people of color. It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable. The profitability of racism sparks a vicious cycle called the Oppression Economy:…

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Robert Woodward certainly couldn’t have been shocked at Trump’s answer to his very loaded question. The question was whether he could understand any of the racial pain that African Americans feel. Trump stood the question on its head and accused Woodward of “drinking the Kool Aid.” Translated: Why should he or any other white guy like him feel any guilt, let alone empathy, at the…

Nearly all the improvement in the unemployment rate over the past few months has been for white workers. By Emily Peck, HuffPost — At first glance, the unemployment rate seems a lot less terrible than it did a few months ago. In April, at the start of the COVID-19 shutdown, the jobless rate was a record-high 14.7%. This month, the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate had dropped to 8.4%. But…

The country needs truth-telling and acceptance of our moral, legal, political, and sociocultural responsibilities. By Joyce Hope Scott, BU Today — This is a transformative moment in history in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. Despite myths of a post-racial society as a result of many positive social transformations, we are today again forced to examine our inheritance of America’s great sin—slavery and its…

By Tom Hall, LA Progressive – Where do we go from here? We’ve had a long hot summer of mostly peaceful demonstrations. This is a great contrast to the pre-election summer of 1968, in which Tricky Dick Nixon road a wave of violence to electoral victory. But this is also a summer of demonstrations against police violence, and that repeats both the pattern of 1968 and of decades back through…

A historian steps back to the 1700s and shares what’s changed and what needs to change. By Liz Mineo, The Harvard Gazaette — Historian Donald Yacovone, an associate at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and a 2013 winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, was researching a book on the legacy of the antislavery movement when he came across some old history school textbooks that stopped him cold —…

In principle, white Americans support efforts to end racism. But in practice, they have long been unwilling to support the fundamental change needed to do that. Will this year’s events change that? By Candis Watts Smith — The first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, which crested after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, had the support of less than half of white Americans. Given that Americans tend…