Tag: civil rights

“We are going to turn America around.”

In the 1960s, black students at the Ivies organized and protested for fair treatment, their personal safety, to create black studies programs, and to stop their universities from harming local black communities through expansion and urban renewal.

How an otherwise high-minded social reformer preserved and perpetuated her white supremacist worldview.

Essayist Zandria F. Robinson considers the festivities of #MLK50.

The descendants of lynching victim Elwood Higginbotham learn the circumstances of his 1935 murder in Oxford, Mississippi.

An incident on lawyer Britney Wilson’s ride home from work exposes her vulnerabilities as a Black disabled woman.

An interview with Seyward Darby about her Harper’s cover story on gender dynamics within the alt-right.

The failures of Kathryn Bigelow’s film undercut the fullness, complexity, and beauty of Detroit.

The zombie movie is more than an easy scare. It’s also become an essential lens through which we can view society.

At Guernica, Katherina Grace Thomas turns a lens on the years Nina Simone spent in Liberia in the mid-1970s.

For talented black spellers in the 1960s, the segregated local spelling bee was the beginning and the end of the long road to Washington, D.C.

How Coretta Scott King’s “grace, diginity, and poise” in the face of horrific tragedy fuelled the Civil Rights Movement.

Judith Levine, co-founder of the National Writers Union explains how an 1863 Herman Melville novella might be the key to contemporary political resistance.

Who and what are we really commemorating on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Ijeoma Oluo unpacks the myriad ways Dr. King’s story has been softened and re-written to weaken black activism and bolster white supremacy.

In a new story for Wired, Bijan Stephen looks at how the Black Lives Matter movement uses social media to organize and fight for change. As Stephen writes, “any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it,” tailoring their goals and tactics to the media of their time. For the nascent Black Lives Matter […]

“I never did like the world-famous Mardi Gras that went on in New Orleans. It was a beautiful sight, but to me it was horrible. I have seen so many people hurt on that particular day . . . The white people would celebrate their Mardi Gras with big and expensive floats that went down the main part of Canal Street, which were very beautiful and high class . . . But for my people, for them it would be such a tragedy. “

Below are seven stories about (or by) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exploring different facets of his life and legacy.

Over the next three decades, Hank Sanders became a fixture in the statehouse, ascending to the chairmanship of the Senate’s Finance and Taxation Education Committee. From his expansive office just off the Senate floor, he controlled Alabama’s Education Trust Fund, the largest operating budget in state government. Sanders tried to exercise his power to represent […]

Nina Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone […]

The following is a free excerpt from Open Road Media’s The Children, the acclaimed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Halberstam on the early days of the civil rights movement. The below excerpt focuses on Diane Nash and the Nashville sit-ins, which started on this day, February 13, in 1960. Buy the book now.

The true story of the case that helped change the legal landscape for gay rights in the U.S.:  The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his […]