Rosa Parks
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Recy Taylor, Catalyst for Anti-Rape Activism in the Jim Crow South, Dead at 97
Recy Taylor, whose story of sexual assault at the hands of six white men in 1944 is featured in the book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, died at a nursing home in…
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The Rape of Recy Taylor Looks Back at a Horrific but Largely Forgotten Case From the Jim Crow South
Say her name: Recy Taylor. In 1944, 24-year-old Recy Taylor and two friends were walking back from a late-night church service in Abbeville, Ala., when seven young white men in a car stopped them and threatened them with a gun. Taylor was forced to enter the car, and the men drove off with her into…
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No, Dr. Dao Is Not an Asian Version of Rosa Parks
The fact that someone actually came up with this question and thought it was good to ask amazes me. During a press conference, David Dao’s lawyer, Thomas Demetrio, spoke about his client, the man who was brutally removed from his United Airlines flight, and said that a supporter compared him to Rosa Parks. “Dr. Dao,…
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MLK Would Never Shut Down a Freeway, and 6 Other Myths About the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter
On Saturday, as protests mounted across the country following the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed explained the large police presence at downtown protests to reporters: “Dr. King would never take a freeway.” Reed’s claim was historically absurd. Martin Luther King Jr. took many a highway—most famously, perhaps, in…
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Rosa Parks Thinks You’re a Bitch.
While we were wading through the remnants of #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies and waiting for “The Wiz” we almost forgot that December 1st marked the sixtieth anniversary of the day Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and said to James Blake – “Nah.” While the actual quote may be slightly different, every year I like to…