Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.

Angele Ellis: “no margin on these pages of skin history”

In Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones weaves a personal and cultural history of racism into poetry. 

May 25, 2024 · 3 Comments

Jeffrey Sterling: A Whistleblower’s First Post-Prison Trip Abroad

I wasn’t on that stage just to scare the audience about how horrible it will be to be charged under the Espionage Act, I was there to tell them that if I could stand up against it, so can the rest of the world. 

May 20, 2024 · 8 Comments

Brett Wilkins: Congressman Mike Collins Cheers Video of Ole Miss Mob Attack on Black Student

This is not about Israel, Palestine, or Gaza. This is old-fashioned American racism and misogyny…

May 7, 2024 · 3 Comments

Howard Zinn: Thoughts on Civil Disobedience

They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.

April 28, 2024 · 6 Comments

Desne A. Crossley: O Rosie Girl

it was one thing for a white man to bed a black woman, but unthinkable that he would marry her. And it was commonplace for a black woman to be forced to open her legs to her employer or his sons. But Martha married white and returned home with the man!

April 23, 2024 · 8 Comments

Richard Michelson: Three Poems

Today, I am weary of my soul, forever dragging behind me, 
clanging for attention like tin cans left tied to a coupe fender    
long after the sacred vows.

December 17, 2023 · 4 Comments

Clarence Lusane: Make America Fascist Again (MAFA!)

The Future If Donald Trump Returns to the Oval Office

December 6, 2023 · 7 Comments

Derrick Z. Jackson: House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Climate Change Playbook — Deny the Science, Take the Funding

It took no time for Mike Johnson to establish a hefty carbon footprint as new Speaker of the House. In the first legislative act under his watch, his Republican majority last month … Continue reading

November 14, 2023 · Leave a comment

George Yancy and H.A. Nethery Discuss White Supremacy and “White Innocence”

A conversation in response to the murder of three Black people in Jacksonville, Florida by a white supremacist

September 12, 2023 · 2 Comments

Desne A. Crossley: Transfer of Courage | 1968 & 1950

He was about to bear down hard on my thighs to force me open. With a loaded exhale of breath, I growled in his face like a mad animal and gouged his eyes with my prized fingernails, lacquered blood red. I dug them in along the hollows of his eyes, my hands like two steel vices, and held on.

August 12, 2023 · 11 Comments

Brett Wilkins: 6 Mississippi ‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Plead Guilty to Torturing Black Men

Anyone surprised by this, at this point, can only be a willful denier of what Black people have said—and continue to say—about the broken culture of policing in America.

August 8, 2023 · 14 Comments

Abby Zimet: Ida Wells’ Crusade To Arouse the Conscience of America

Anti-lynching agitator, muckraking journalist, fierce suffragist and orator Ida B. Wells, used the media to fight against lynching, “that last relic of barbarism and slavery,” as “color-line murder” based on “the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women.”

July 20, 2023 · 8 Comments

Antoine Davis, Darrell Jackson: What Juneteenth looks like for prisoners

As Black men in prison, we live the tension between celebrating the abolition of slavery and struggling inside the system that replaced it.

June 20, 2023 · 8 Comments

Claude McKay: The Lynching

The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue

June 9, 2023 · 7 Comments

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