“It’s still a source of pain that the Voting Rights Act has not been more actively enforced,” Lewis told me in 1975, 10 years after passage of the law.
Since 1958, Ben's Chili Bowl has been many things, a restaurant, meeting place, community center, and landmark. Now, the iconic DC institution is struggling to survive the coronavirus.
The comic book that helped spark a generation of young civil rights protestors did not feature superheroes, but a 42-year-old seamstress and a 26-year-old Baptist pastor.
These recent deaths at Parchman have a long historical tradition in Mississippi state-run institutions and are linked to underfunding and lack of support by the state government.
Juanita Abernathy, who wrote the business plan for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and took other influential steps in helping to build the American civil rights movement, has died.
In a new book the political scientist and historian argues that the protests of Black Lives Matter are, contrary to the critics, fully in keeping with those of the sixties.
Rosa Parks was a hero. So were the students who sat in at the Woolworth lunch counters. But they knew that their heroism was possible only because of decades of what Ella Baker called “spade work.”
Calling out these myths is more than setting the historical record straight. The “propaganda of history,” as W.E.B. Du Bois reminded us a century ago, becomes a way of “giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment”—for soothing and justifying inaction in the face of persistent racial inequality.
The bodies of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were found on a remote road 52 years ago. Nine people have been convicted in the case.
NYC school teacher Adam Sanchez says that textbooks that focus on the Brown decision and the Voting Rights Act tell students that structural racism is a relic of the past.
A largely Republican countermovement of ideologues and partisan operatives who, from the moment the Voting Rights Act became law, methodically set out to undercut or dismantle its most important requirements.
While Jack made the headlines, Rachel often bore the brunt of the hidden but nonetheless significant battles such as shepherding the family through the process of facing northern style apartheid.
