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Buckwheat and Kingfish Demand Reparations
is a former columnist for TIME magazine and a regular contributor to The Root.
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Reparations? Forget About It!
Henry Louis Gates Jr.—whom I once admiringly described as a blend of W.E.B. Du Bois and P.T. Barnum—has a genius for stirring up controversy, even when he doesn’t mean to. It was Gates, the editor-in-chief of The Root, who last year provoked the most embarrassing racial moment of Barack Obama’s young presidency by managing to…
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The Children of SNCC
”Your world,” Joyce Ladner warned the children of her old comrades in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they celebrated the 50th anniversary of their movement in Raleigh, N.C., last week, ” is far more complicated than ours was.” True enough, but that hasn’t stopped the offspring of those graying organizers from charting their…
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The Women of SNCC
When you listen to the women of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) recount their experiences as organizers in the Deep South a half-century ago, a crystal clear truth emerges: the civil rights movement could never have succeeded without the extraordinary creativity and courage of female organizers. As Charles M. Payne, a scholar at the…
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SNCC Veterans Retain the Old Fire
There is no more dramatic measure of the distance our society has traveled during the past half century than the fact that 50 years ago signing your name could be an act of extraordinary bravery. In 1960, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C,…
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Don't Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
When I was a kid in Washington back in the 1950s, I used to watch my dad’s face change whenever we had to drive across the bridge into Virginia. His jaw would clinch, his eyes would harden, and his body would assume a determined but wary posture, as though he were preparing to enter a…
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The Danger in the Extremist Rhetoric of the Tea Party
As a youthful admirer of leftist protest movements during the 1960s, I became a connoisseur of violent political rhetoric. Which is to say that I‘m acquainted with the power of angry words to fuel explosive action. And how, like mystics chanting a mantra to enter a mindless trance, extremist activists, on both the left and…
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Smileypalooza: Right Message, Wrong Messenger
I’ve never been much of a fan of Tavis Smiley’s annual State of Black America confab, which struck me as an extravaganza of excessive Negro bloviation. And I’m not planning to watch the really big show he is putting on C-SPAN on Saturday, the “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda” conference, which…
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Sarah Palin Falls Back on Some Very Old Tactics
Of all the striking utterances that Sarah Palin delivered during her speech to the National Tea Party Convention on Sunday, none is more worthy of analysis than her claim that, as our president, “We need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” The charge is puzzling on several levels—but…
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Buckwheat’s Black History Month Tour
is a former columnist for TIME magazine and a regular contributor to The Root.
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
