The life and work of Jack O’Dell who died last week at 96 at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia were marked by an unwavering radical vision fused with an immovable partisanship for working people the world over. By James Campbell and Mark Solomon, Portside — Jack’s quietly effective teaching, his strategic acumen, his theoretical insight, his unbending internationalism and his generosity of intellect and spirit inspired and enriched the…
Congressman John James Conyers Jr. (May 16, 1929 – October 27, 2019) By Herb Boyd — Unlike his often convulsive, tumultuous political career, former Congressman John Conyers, Jr. died peacefully in his sleep Sunday at his home in Detroit. The iconic and highly productive representative from Michigan was 90. More than half those 90 years were spent on the battleground for civil rights and public service, including 53 years as…
By Attny. Nkechi Taifa — Congressman John Conyers, during the 2014 Congressional Black Caucus plenary on reparations which you chaired, I spoke of the words of Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till who in 1955 was abducted by whites and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. The only way her son’s beaten and horribly disfigured body could be identified was by a ring he wore on a finger….
By Ryan Born, The Daily Princetonian — I. “Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.” ― Edward E. Baptist, “The Half Has Never Been Told” When we accept that prestigious offer of admission from Princeton University, some small part of us becomes part of the great history of Princeton ― and so some part of us becomes…
By Dr. Maulana Karenga — The Anniversary of the 1965 Watts Revolt occurs in the context of a larger history of Black struggle, sacrifices and achievements: the assassination, sacrifice and martyrdom of Min. Malcolm X; the Selma March; the Voting Rights Act; the founding of our organization Us and the African American Cultural Center; and the introduction of the Black value system, the Nguzo Saba, which became the core values of…
By Julianne Malveaux — I cannot overstate my tremendous admiration for Rev. William Barber. Our connection goes back to North Carolina when I was the President of Bennett College, and he led the state NAACP. His daughter, Sharrelle, graduated from Bennett in the spring before I assumed the Presidency and as student body president, she served on the search committee that selected me. So he’s a friend of long-standing. In…
By Julianne Malveaux — The first week of July produced a somewhat positive Employment Situation report. While the unemployment rate ticked up just a bit, about 224,000 new jobs were created, nearly three times as many as were created in the tepid previous month. There was, of course, the Administration crowing about the strength of the economy, and with wage growth on the rise, an impassioned outsider might agree that…
By Dr. Julianne Malveaux — I was honored to have been asked to provide testimony at the House Judiciary Committee hearings on H.R. 40, the legislation that would establish a commission to study reparations and recommend remedies to Congress. It is relevant legislation that has been a long time coming. It is important to note that the bill does not “cash the check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King challenged when…
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…
Part. 2. By Dr. Maulana Karenga — The insistence on calling our righteous and relentless struggle by its rightful name, The Black Freedom Movement, instead of the Civil Rights Movement, is no minor matter. For it speaks to our commitment to freedom itself and reflects in a real way how we understand ourselves and our initiative and history in the world. Indeed, it reveals our resistance to plantation politics that…
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