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The Napa Valley Wine Train, the Jim Crow Car and Who Has the Right to Ride
In the context of the past year’s tensions over police violence, the story of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club—11 women, 10 of them African American and one white, ranging in age from 39 to 85—whose members were ejected from the Napa Valley Wine Train for being “too loud,” may not evoke the same…
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The Very Human MLK Portrayed by David Oyelowo Is the King We Should All Remember
There was a moment, as I watched Selma, when I became transfixed. I was fully immersed in the commanding yet nuanced performance of David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. It wasn’t because the actor looked just like MLK—he doesn’t—or because he perfectly mimicked the cadences of King’s distinctive speaking style. He didn’t seem to attempt…
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As Black Men Keep Getting Killed, We’re Seeing the Limits of ‘Respectability’ as a Shield Against Violence
A few weeks ago, one of America’s leading voices on black respectability, Lawrence Otis Graham, wrote in the Washington Post about the realization that respectability had failed to protect his son from the barbs of racial bias. In spite of his efforts as a father to make his son appear to be as accomplished and educated…
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Ferguson’s Marchers Have Shown Us That We’re Not Done Marching
I thought marches were done. Over the past 20 years, most of the marches that we’ve seen, big and small, have seemed more like stagecraft than the true reflection of a current struggle. The urgency that characterized historic civil rights marches seemed to have gone away and been replaced by careful scheduling and marketing—like last…
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Like Dred Scott, Michael Brown Was Denied His Right to Live—and to Live as an American
News out of Ferguson, Mo., has been devastating. Since unarmed teenager Michael Brown was killed by an as-yet-unidentified police officer, local police have responded to the community’s demonstration of outrage with unprecedented force—using military-style weaponry to suppress peaceful protests, arrest black elected officials and detain journalists. And Brown’s death seems to have unearthed a history…
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What the Book Place, Not Race Doesn’t Get: There’s Still a Place for Race-Based Affirmative Action
I vividly remember the affirmative action debates that raged on my campus when I was a college student in the early ’90s. Many of our debates centered on Stephen L. Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. To me, Carter was a person who had benefited from his inclusion in formerly all-white spaces who had…
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Let’s Remember Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner—and All Those Who Died for Democracy in Miss.
Freedom Summer had just begun, and hundreds of white, Northern college students had volunteered to do civil rights work in Mississippi as news broke that three men—Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, a 24-year-old full-time activist for the Congress of Racial Equality; James Chaney, a local, 21-year-old CORE activist; and Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Freedom Summer volunteer—had disappeared in…
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Shotgun Behind the Door: How Armed Black Southerners Helped Fight for Civil Rights
Most history students never learn that even Martin Luther King Jr.—arguably history’s greatest spokesperson on behalf of nonviolence—had armed guards stationed outside of his home and a pistol tucked in his sofa in 1955 when he emerged as the leader of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. But he did. As time went on, he came to…
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‘The Case for Reparations’ Reignited an Important and Long-Standing Debate
The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has set off a firestorm of debate once again, this time about race and reparations. In an exhaustive and sweeping piece, “The Case for Reparations,” he skillfully surveys American history, mining its data for evidence about the ways that enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, redlining and predatory lending has left black Americans…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
