It’s no secret that I live in Washington, D.C. While I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this city for various reasons, it’s home. No matter where I go in the world, even when I’m back in Atlanta or Madison/Huntsville, Ala., at this point in life, D.C. is home. I’ve lived in the D.C. urea for 17 years at this…
I had just returned to New York City from delivering the 2018 Trout Lectures at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, when I received word that my beloved professor, now colleague and friend, Dr. James Hal Cone had died.
Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) is a living legend of the civil rights movement and we get to take selfies with him. We can touch him. Wrap our arms around his shoulders. Most importantly, we get to listen to his speeches and live-tweet them.
On April 26 of this year, the Equal Justice Initiative will open both a memorial and museum in Montgomery, Ala., dedicated to the victims of lynching in America post-Civil War. The memorial is called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the museum is called the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass…
As “one of the real racists,” I admit that I have intentionally omitted one of the most underappreciated groups of people in America:
If you had to make a list of the top 10 people whose opinions on Martin Luther King Jr. you could have gone the rest of your life without hearing, I’m willing to bet that “NRA spokesman” might have made that list.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the news shocked the world.
There is a recipe for making a hero.
After speaking to a rapt crowd on March 18, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Memphis, Tenn., as promised, to march in solidarity with Memphis sanitation strikers.
In front of a rapt audience at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Malcolm X’s third daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, talked about witnessing the assassination of her father at Harlem’s Audubon Theatre and Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965.
“Everything you thought you knew about Martin Luther King Jr. is wrong,” says Trey Ellis, producer of the upcoming HBO documentary on King’s final 18 months of life, titled King in the Wilderness. The title of the documentary, which premiered at Sundance, is fitting considering that the civil rights activist’s final…
Oprah Winfrey may rule out a 2020 run to end President Donald Trump’s reign of terror over this country, but Cory Booker might not. In Atlanta Saturday, the U.S. senator from New Jersey was a thunderous presence at the King Center’s annual Salute to Greatness Awards Gala, where he was the main honoree.
In November, President Donald Trump’s administration released declassified FBI documents on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But the release also included a batch of Martin Luther King Jr. documents filled with allegations of “abnormal” sexual behavior and of being a “slow thinker” and a “Marxist” (pdf).
In Memphis, Tenn., 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers braved the bitter cold to engage in a revolutionary 65-day action to defend their right to personhood. These men struggled against the noose of white supremacy to proclaim their dignity. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, armed with picket signs and perseverance,…
Updated Monday, Jan. 1, 2018, 5:04 p.m. EST: Shortly after this post went live, Newsweek issued an apology to Bernice King for the insensitive photo from its Twitter account:
When tens of thousands of people converge on statehouses across the nation and the U.S. Capitol in May 2018, it will be to further the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign that Marian Wright Edelman, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other freedom fighters…
Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., picked up the mic and so eloquently dropped it in response to Pepsi’s atrocious Kendall Jenner commercial.
On the 49th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI took to Twitter Tuesday to honor his life, work and commitment to justice. Along with a photo of King from the Library of Congress, the FBI included a graphic of the following quote from him with its tweet: “We shall overcome…
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proved himself to be a coward Tuesday night when he stopped Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) from reading a 1986 letter penned by Coretta Scott King about Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general nominee.
