Rep. Jim Clyburn, a powerful House Democrat from South Carolina, lashed out against the Senate filibuster Tuesday as an obstacle to civil rights and said people of color will not stand by and let archaic rules deny progress on raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee to honour civil rights icons
by Kat Stafford, The Associated Press
Posted Mar 3, 2021 10:55 am EDT
Last Updated Mar 3, 2021 at 10:58 am EDT
DETROIT Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr. was a young activist emerging from the 1961 sit-ins and Freedom Rides that fought for Black civil rights and an end to racial segregation when he received his next assignment.
It was one that would help change the course of American history.
“I looked on the blackboard and they had an ’X’ through Selma,” Lafayette, now 80, recalled in an interview with The Associated Press, referring to the Alabama city that would become emblematic of the fight to secure Black voting rights and the 1965 marches that were a turning point in that struggle.
Sunday marks the 56th anniversary of those marches and “Bloody Sunday,” when more than 500 demonstrators gathered on March 7, 1965, to demand the right to vote and cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were met by dozens of state troopers and many were severely beaten.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Author Ijeoma Oluo speaks during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, this year a conversation with history professor Ed Baptist, March 1 on Zoom. Oluo offers practical antiracism strategies in MLK Lecture
March 3, 2021
As far as author Ijeoma Oluo is concerned, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody is hardly the American hero he’s made out to be.
“The only thing that really made him exceptional,” said Oluo, author of ““Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America,” released in December 2020, “was his ability to wreak carnage on people and animals, and what a good liar he was.”
My long-lost conversation with John Lewis on his vision of nonviolence
In this never-before-released interview, the late civil rights leader and congressman talks systemic racism, permanent warfare, extreme poverty and nonviolence as a way of life.
Last summer, after Congressman John Lewis died, I posted a photo on
social media of me and John from a memorable afternoon we spent together in his congressional office. It was 26 years ago. We had talked for a
while, and then filmed a formal conversation on nonviolence.
Needless to say, it was one of the greatest days of my exciting life.
We stayed in touch over the years, and a few years ago, I ran into