Tag: civil-rights movement
The Magazine That Was a Window on America
I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor.
But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for
My Life in the Aftermath of Martin Luther King’s Assassination
The last time Martin phoned me, on the day of his assassination, the call came into my office in New York. I knew him so well that I figured I could anticipate the purpose for his call. He was in Memphis with Andrew Young and the Reverend Billy Kyles, going over the details of his schedule. I expected that he wanted to make sure he knew exactly when I’d be arriving in town to assist him. It was a matter
The Forgotten Best Sellers That Revealed America to Itself
In the years during and after World War II, the battle against fascism spread to an unanticipated front line: the national conscience of the United States. The warriors in this fight, many of them Black and Jewish veterans of combat abroad, insisted that America confront and rectify its homegrown racial hierarchy and religious intolerance. “Double V” was the slogan coined by the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, meaning victory over Hitler abroad and over Jim Crow at
The Tragedy of “Till” Is Our Failure to Grasp Its Radical Politics
An anti-racist professor faces ‘toxicity on the left today’
Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Until recently, he was dismissive of criticism of the way that the left talks about race in America. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and
Old Anti-Abortion Laws Are Taking on Unintended Meanings
Abortion opponents seem not to have expected some of the more draconian consequences of the Dobbs decision—that anti-abortion laws would prevent pregnant women who were not seeking abortions from receiving needed treatment for miscarriages, or that women facing dire medical complications from their pregnancies would not be able to get proper care. After all, the anti-abortion laws that were in force in the pre-Roe era before 1973 were almost never used to prosecute doctors treating miscarriages or providing lifesaving
What Is Organizing, Anyway? | The Nation
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The Long History of Resistance That Birthed Black Lives Matter
Donna Murch is one of the foremost historians of Black radical movements in the 20th century. Her first book, 2010’s Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, retold a seemingly familiar story with new insights drawn from oral histories and untapped archives. Murch saw the story of the Panthers as a product of the Great Migration and as a fight for, among other
Eight Books That Show How Social Change Actually Works
Saul Alinsky, the community organizer best known for his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, had a useful metaphor for explaining why some social movements tend to burn bright and then burn out before making the change they seek. A successful revolution, he insisted, must follow the three-act structure of a play: “The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience’s attention.
