Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.

George Yancy: Trump’s Education Plan Seeks to Make Cruel Domination Into “Common Sense”

Control the curriculum and you control the range of ideas that people are exposed to. This is why schooling is inherently political.

October 6, 2025 · 7 Comments

Audio: Son House performing County Farm Blues

Put you under a man called “Captain Jack”
Put you under a man they call “Captain Jack”
He’ll sure write his name up and down your back

September 27, 2025 · 9 Comments

Video: Eternity

Valerie and Alan have been married 57 years. Eternity is a look at love that lasts a lifetime, whether they like it or not.

August 30, 2025 · 4 Comments

Joseph Bathanti: Cletis Pratt

First man I ever saw in irons,
wearing nothing but a pair of scurvy white
long john britches, was Cletis Pratt

August 28, 2025 · 12 Comments

Video: Dear Philadelphia

With the help of their family, friends, and faith, three fathers unravel the incomparable partnership of forgiveness and community in North Philadelphia.

July 19, 2025 · Leave a comment

Langston Hughes | Beaumont to Detroit: 1943

You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
from the ku klux klan.

July 4, 2025 · 22 Comments

Desne A. Crossley: A Wallflower and Her Mother

Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.

June 27, 2025 · 14 Comments

Don Krieger: Juneteenth at Carter-Howell-Strong Park in Tallahassee

Two-hundred forty years after America’s Independence Day: “… one in a thousand black men [in America] can expect to be killed by police.

June 19, 2025 · 6 Comments

Jessie Redmon Fauset: Nostalgia

Lonely log cabin
On the road to Notasulga,
Sighing and sagging and quaking;
Let me breathe to the heart of your walls
A secret—

June 19, 2025 · 5 Comments

Langston Hughes: Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)

June 13, 2025 · 9 Comments

Desne A. Crossley: My Cousin’s Suicide

The first lesson in keeping secrets came in 1962, when I was eight.

June 3, 2025 · 17 Comments

Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal

My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.

June 1, 2025 · 9 Comments

Molly Fisk: Early

Small towns at daybreak are so nostalgic:
the only thing missing’s a train whistle.
Good morning, America. Mercenaries
in Portland last night teargassed a wall
of mothers. How long will we remember?

April 14, 2025 · 17 Comments

Arun Gupta: 10 Organizing Principles for Defeating Trumpism 2.0

Here are the organizing lessons I learned from movements for worker organizing, immigrant rights, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, Palestine solidarity, and abortion rights. These lessons may serve us well under Trump 2.0.

April 9, 2025 · 2 Comments

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