Booked: On Their Way to Freedom
An interview with Eric Foner on the underground railroad in New York, how history helps us to understand change, and why the left should talk more about freedom.
Fall 2024
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Black Lives Matter in South Carolina
South Carolina has always been a battleground of larger, national campaigns for racial justice.
Booked #4: What Did Race Mean to W.E.B. Du Bois?
Tim Shenk talked with Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, about how Du Bois’s experiences as a black American shaped his theories of race, and how his theories relate to politics then and now.
Border City Blues
It is no coincidence that the starkest reactions to police violence—from Ferguson to Baltimore—have flared in cities strung along the Mason-Dixon Line.
How Racism Became Policy in Ferguson
The Justice Department report offers a glimpse of the systematically oppressive and petty policing in Ferguson. But in order to fully understand how racism became policy in the St. Louis suburbs, we need to look at the history of suburban development itself.
#BlackLivesMatter: An Online Roundtable with Alicia Garza, Dante Barry, and Darsheel Kaur
The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is one of the few in the United States that invites us to strike a reflective pose. Each year communities volunteer in massive service projects, children don their Sunday best and memorize great works of …
Brute Ideology
Witchcraft and racecraft—unlike witches and race—are things that actually exist.
Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus
The #FergusonSyllabus has organized a disparate population of scholars and students into a virtual movement using Ferguson to frame how struggle has shaped American history.
From Freedom Summer to Black August
Why civil rights activists should champion a little-known prisoner holiday
The Making of Ferguson
Over the course of St. Louis’s history, local segregation was enforced by a tangle of public and private policies.
The Black Church: From Prophecy to Prosperity
The rhetoric last summer at commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington was quite different from that heard at the original march in 1963. Instead of celebrating the great march, the anniversary events sounded a plea for a new civil rights movement. Largely missing from that call, however, was the strong prophetic voice of black religion.
A Turbulent Life: On Amiri Baraka
In 2002, Scott Sherman published this essay on Amiri Baraka. “Yet Baraka still has the power to surprise us.”
Freedom Dreams 
Blacks In and Out of the Left by Michael C. Dawson Harvard University Press, 2013, 256 pp. Contemporary African-American scholars across the humanities and social sciences share a preoccupation with posing big questions about the dilemmas of black life in …
Recovering the Progressive Frederick Douglass
In the face of this barrage of conservative appropriations, the time has come to set the record straight and recover the progressivism of Frederick Douglass.
What is Africa to Me?
Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith B. Richburg Basic Books, 1997 263 pp $24 In 1923, a then-little-known poet named Langston Hughes embarked for Africa. Just twenty-one years old, Hughes had produced the epochal “The Negro …
