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civil rights

  • 1/29/2023

    Latino Activists Changed San Antonio in the 1960s

    by Ricardo Romo

    San Antonio in the 1960s faced many of the same challenges of cities throughout the South; its emerging Mexican American political leadership helped steer the city in a progressive direction. 

  • SOURCE: NPR
    1/18/2023

    Maine Radio Station Apologies for Distorted Edit of King Speech

    The paper had for years run an abridged version of 1963 speech to the March on Washington—which excluded King's discussions of systemic racism and race-targeted remedies for discrimination—but faced intense criticism this year from readers concerned with the politicization of history. 

  • SOURCE: Substack
    1/18/2023

    Bemoaning Alabama's King-Lee Holiday Misses a Bigger Point

    by Kevin M. Levin

    While white Alabama still embraces the "lost cause" mythology embodied by Robert E. Lee, outrage about the holiday he shares with Martin Luther King, Jr. shouldn't blind the public to the ongoing struggle to change the commemorative landscape—in Montgomery and nationwide. 

  • SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
    1/16/2023

    The Audacious Co-Optation of Dr. King

    "No serious person thinks Dr. King would not want us to interrogate how and why inequity became baked into our systems and how to fix those systems so they don’t keep replicating themselves."

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    1/15/2023

    Two Black GI's Deaths Show the Racism in the WWII Military

    Allen Leftridge and Frank Glenn were shot and killed by military police for asking a French Red Cross worker for donuts. The aftermath showed the administrative and bureaucratic racism of the military supported and protected individual prejudice in the ranks.

  • SOURCE: Oxford American
    12/13/2022

    Exiting/In

    by Francesca T. Royster

    A family and community history in Black Nashville puts the rise of "Music Row" in the context of urban renewal projects that destroyed African American communities and institutions, and the unacknowledged Black presence in country music. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    10/13/2022

    Charles Sherrod: An Unheralded Giant of the Civil Rights Struggle

    by Ansley L. Quiros

    "Charles Sherrod is the most important civil rights figure you've never heard of"--fighting for six decades in southwest Georgia, persevering through incremental gains after the publicity of the Albany Movement faded. 

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    10/13/2022

    How Pauli Murray Masterminded Brown v. Board of Education

    by Tejai Beulah Howard

    Overcoming marginalization by male classmates, Pauli Murray made a bet with a professor that segregation could be challenged by arguing that separate was inherently unequal. Murray collected on the bet only after the 1954 ruling validated the argument, but was long denied credit. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    10/2/2022

    Libraries Do Face Attacks, but Not Like the "Freedom Libraries" of 1964

    As yet, public attacks on libraries over programming and books dealing with racism and LGBTQ issues have not escalated to the routine firebombing of the libraries founded by activist groups during the "Freedom Summer" to help Black Mississippians access books and political information.