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Jim Crow

National Guard during the 1919 Chicago Race Riots.

Plots Against America?: Jim Crow was Homegrown Fascism

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Guy Lancaster, HNN — Note: this essay quotes a sign attached to the body of a man lynched in 1919, which uses a racial slur. HBO’s recent release of a prestige adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America makes it worthwhile to examine whether fascism is really so alien to the United States as many wish to believe. In Roth’s novel, a Jewish extended family in Newark experiences fascism’s arrival…

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Slave Patrol

Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

From the beginning, some Americans have been able to move more freely than others. By Ben Fountain, Medium — They were called patrollers or, variously, “paterollers,” “paddyrollers,” or “patterolls,” and they were meant to be part of the solution to Colonial America’s biggest problem, labor. Unlike Great Britain, which had a large, basically immobile peasant class that could be forced to work for subsistence wages, there weren’t enough cheap bodies…

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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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Lawmakers on Wednesday held the first congressional hearing in more than a decade on reparations, spotlighting the debate over whether the United States should consider compensation for the descendants of slaves in the United States. (June 19) AP

‘Poison of America’: Bill on slavery reparations gains backing from Sen. Chuck Schumer

By HR 40 Congressional Hearing, News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Nicholas Wu and Deborah Barfield Berry, USA Today — WASHINGTON – Calling racism the “poison of America,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer gave his support Tuesday to a bill to set up a commission to study reparations. “The disparities in race affect everything, not just the obvious things, but the non-obvious things” like pollution and climate change, Schumer explained. The bill, proposed by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Texas…

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