Tracy Fessenden: Decades after Billie Holiday’s death, ‘Strange Fruit’ is still a searing testament to injustice – and of faithful solidarity with suffering
Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York.
Video: Earthsea | What the Original Wizard School Got Right
What are the literary origins of the boy wizard and the wizard school? This video takes us on an adventure through 20th century fantasy literature to explore the roots of this trope, the connection between Lord of the Rings, Earthsea and Harry Potter, and how race, feminism, gay wizards and bi witches feature in this universe.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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!
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.
Clarence Lusane: Make America Fascist Again (MAFA!)
The Future If Donald Trump Returns to the Oval Office
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
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
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.
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.
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.”
