civil rights

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• SOURCE: WTVY
  2/24/2021
  

  Auburn Professors Working to Preserve History of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’

  Richard Burt and Keith Hébert are leading a team of researchers to preserve the site of the historic attack on voting rights marchers by Alabama State Troopers on March 7, 1965, hoping that a better-preserved public monument will clear up misperceptions of the day's events. 

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  2/25/2021
  

  Fight To Vote: The Woman Who Was Key In 'Getting Us The Voting Rights Act'

  Historian Carol Anderson explains the contributions of Amelia Boynton to the Selma movement and the erasure of women's organizing work from many histories of the movement. 

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• SOURCE: CNN
  2/21/2021
  

  Black Women's Roles in the Civil Rights Movement have been Understated -- But that's Changing

  Beverly Guy-Sheftall of Spelman College discusses the public minimization of women as leaders in the 1950s and 1960s Black Freedom movements. 

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• SOURCE: Bright Lights Film Journal
  2/23/2021
  

  A Star Is Shorn: Thanks to Woefully Underinformed Campus Activists, Acting Legend, Badger Alum, and Civil Rights Champion Fredric March Is Suddenly “Off Wisconsin”

  by George Gonis

  In 2018, the University of Wisconsin stripped actor Fredric March's name from a campus theater because of his brief affiliation in 1919 with a campus society called the Honorary Ku Klux Klan. The author argues that this misconstrues the nature of the society, which was not affiliated with the "Invisible Empire" KKK, and erases March's steadfast support for civil rights and opposition to Nazism.

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  2/16/2021
  

  How White Liberals Destroyed the 1970s’ Soul City

  by Brentin Mock

  The new book "Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia," by Seton Hall Law School professor Thomas Healy, explores the history of how and why Floyd McKissick’s experiment came to be, and its unceremonious end. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/10/2021
  

  Barbara Dane’s Life of Defiance and Song

  Barbara Dane's left politics kept her from success in the music industry, but the label she founded released and preserved protest music from around the world, a legacy now being highlighted by the Smithsonian. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/10/2021
  

  Fighting School Segregation Didn’t Take Place Just In The South

  by Ashley Farmer

  "The Harlem 9’s fight serves as an important reminder that school desegregation protests were popular and successful in the North as well as in the South."

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• 2/14/2021
  

  King’s Final Book: Both Political Roadmap and Passionate Sermon

  by Fred Zilian

  As Black History Month unfolds amid an atmosphere of crisis and division like that which prevailed in 1968, it's worth revisiting Martin Luther King's publication that year of "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" – a call for reordering national priorities toward justice through politics and for renewed spiritual and ethical dedication to shared humanity.

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• SOURCE: Points
  2/10/2021
  

  Drugstores and the Color Line: Remembering Pharmacies as Sites of the Civil Rights Movement

  by Greg Bond

  Drug stores and pharmacies have been important sites of civil rights struggle – as local businesses that have provided vital services to a broad clientele, equal service at the pharmacy has been a material and symbolic demand of Black freedom advocates dating to the late 19th century. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/8/2021
  

  The Filibuster That Saved the Electoral College

  Powerful Southern conservatives Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, and James Eastland led the 1970 filibuster that stopped the Senate from approving a constitutional amendment to elect the president by the popular vote. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/8/2021
  

  Martin Luther King Jr.’s Challenge to Liberal Allies — And Why it Resonates Today

  by Jeanne Theoharis

  The present tendency to pigeonhole King's work as a challenge to southern Jim Crow obscures his demands for deep reform to national priorities, emphasis on economic justice, and insistence that liberalism live up to its creed of equality. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/1/2021
  

  The Real Rosa Parks Story Is Better Than the Fairy Tale

  by Jeanne Theoharis

  “I don’t believe in gradualism,” she made clear, “or that whatever is to be done for the better should take forever to do.”

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  1/27/2021
  

  What Julian Bond Taught Me About Politics and Power

  by Jeanne Theoharis

  A student of Congressman Julian Bond and a biographer of Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis describes how those two figures demonstrated the real political story behind the mythologized civil rights movement. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/27/2021
  

  Make the Filibuster Difficult Again

  by Burt Neuborne and Erwin Chemerinsky

  Two law professors argue that there's no need to remove the Senate filibuster. Insisting that Senators actually talk through the filibuster and that no other Senate business could be conducted during one would return to Senate rules that made the filibuster rare, rather than a routine procedure. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/24/2021
  

  Babe Ruth’s Record was a Mythical Monument of White Superiority. Hank Aaron Tore it Down

  by Kevin B. Blackistone

  Sports have long served as a projection screen for white angst over challenges to racial supremacy. Hank Aaron's 715th home run was one of a line of Black athletic challenges to white racism and was met with similar hostility.

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• SOURCE: YouTube
  1/22/2021
  

  Hank Aaron's 715th, Called by Vin Scully

  The baseball Hall of Famer and one-time home run leader died at age 86 on January 22. Here, watch his record-breaking 715th home run, as announced by broadcasting legend Vin Scully.

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• SOURCE: History
  1/20/2021
  

  How Tuskegee Airmen Fought Military Segregation With Nonviolent Action

  Alan Osur and Todd Moye help tell the story of the efforts of the Tuskegee Airmen to integrate military recreational facilities in 1944. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/17/2021
  

  Tom Lankford, 85, Dies; Southern Journalist With Divided Loyalties

  Tom Lankford took many iconic photographs in Birmingham that publicized the cause of Civil Rights protestors. But he worked behind the scenes to cultivate relationships with the city's notorious Bull Connor to buttress the reputation of the police force while working with his publisher to squelch local demands for change that threatened the business community.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/18/2021
  

  The Words of Martin Luther King Jr. Reverberate in a Tumultuous Time

  Clayborne Carson, the founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute is part of a roundup of scholars and activists who point to King's speeches other than 1963's "I Have a Dream" as guiding lights for our time. 

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  1/15/2021
  

  A New Film Details the FBI’s Relentless Pursuit of Martin Luther King Jr.

  The new film "MLK/FBI" addresses Americans' failure to remember that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was unpopular, labeled as divisive and subversive, and subject to harassment by federal law enforcement agencies during his life.