By some metrics, African-American women are faring better than black men. They comprise nearly two-thirds of black undergraduates and a clear majority of advanced degree holders. But these numbers tell only part of the story.
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.
What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to “uplift the race” by correcting the “bad” traits of the black poor has evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama. In an era marked by rising inequality and declining economic mobility for most Americans—but particularly for black Americans—the politics of respectability works to accommodate neoliberalism.
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 …
Guest workers are too often invisible in popular discussions of work; when they appear, it’s as outliers. But Saket Soni, who founded the National Guestworker Alliance amid the New Orleans’s post-Katrina guest worker influx, says they’re better understood as a bellwether.
Southern conservatives—including “right to work” progenitor and avowed white supremacist Vance Muse—feared that if unions united working-class whites and blacks, they could upend the Jim Crow order.
Barack Obama’s election marked a significant step in what black Americans call the long road to freedom. A survey conducted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed that 82 percent of blacks believed they were “unlikely to soon achieve racial equality.” …
From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson
The Continuing Struggle for Racial Justice in American Education
When state and municipal governments accord the rebel flag honor or recognition, they sanction all that the flag stood for: treason, slavery, and a race state.
It is a strange time, indeed, when a dead man is brought back from the grave to inspire the living. As far as we know, such an act of resurrection costs the dead nothing. It might even be a source …
With the publication of The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin presents the work on which he wants to be judged and by which he would like to be remembered. The volume contains fifty-one essays, twenty-five of them previously uncollected. …
It was an exercise in ’60s nostalgia. “Our time has come!” he shouted from the pulpits of black churches and the campaign stump. “Our time has come!” It was a cry reminiscent of the “Freedom Now” chant of the early civil rights movement, one …
A report from the February 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Durham, North Carolina.
