Featured
Affirmative Action Never Had a Chance. By Zak Cheney-Rice / New York Magazine
The conservative backlash to the civil-rights era began immediately — and now it’s nearly complete. In their original form, affirmative action programs in the 1960s sought to give Black workers access to trade unions. Photo: Higgins/Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.
After he took office in 1969, Nixon appointed Fletcher to be his assistant secretary of Labor, making him one of the country’s highest-ranking Black government officials. The policy for which Fletcher is remembered, and that earned him the nickname “the father of affirmative action,” was introduced that June. It started as a modest tweak to the federal contracting process. The construction firms and tradesmen who were winning federal contracts at the time were almost all white, a reflection of how segregated local trade unions were.
“I consider that my little footnote in history,” Fletcher wrote of this fateful decision. “I went into that administration with the conviction that if we could change the role of Blacks in the economy, we’d do nothing short of changing the nation’s culture.” Almost 20 years have passed since Fletcher’s death, and his beloved GOP has migrated even further away from his ideal. For all his misplaced faith in his party, the Kansan knew that Black people faced too many obstacles to become full participants in the economy without help. Today, you can barely find a Republican who’ll acknowledge the problem, let alone be affirmative about solving it. Read more
Political / Social
It’ll Take More Than an Indictment to Make Donald Trump Face Justice. By Elie Mystal / The Nation
The 37-count indictment against Trump is strong, but if we want him to be held accountable, he must be defeated at the polls. Illustration CBS News
Trump has been charged under the Espionage Act with willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements to criminal investigators. Trump is in more legal jeopardy now than he has been at any time in his corrupt life. Now, the American people have to do their job: reject Trump’s bid for a second term in office and deny him the opportunity to pardon himself or cloak himself in executive power to avoid the charges Smith has brought to light. If we want Trump to face the nonpartisan hammer of justice, he must suffer another political defeat. Read more
Related: Arraigned in Miami, Trump Is in Real Trouble. By Joan Walsh / The Nation
One Man’s Foray Into the Heartland of the Far Right. By Joseph O’Neill / NYT
Alarmed by the country’s political divisions, Jeff Sharlet embarked on an anguished quest to understand the rise of antidemocratic extremism. In “The Undertow,” he documents his findings.
The premise of “The Undertow,” Jeff Sharlet’s anguished new book of reportage, is that the United States is “coming apart.” The disintegration is political. It involves the rise of the autocratically inclined Donald Trump; the attempt by members of the Republican Party to overthrow the election of Joe Biden in January 2021; and, during the Biden presidency, the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v Wade. Read more
Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas By Joel Anderson, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kodner and Joel Levin / Slate Podcast
To understand who Clarence Thomas was in the 1980s, you need to hear from the women who knew him best.
When Clarence Thomas got nominated to the Supreme Court, his behavior during the 1980s would get put under a microscope. To understand who Thomas was then and who he is today, you need to hear how he treated the women he worked with. You also need to hear from the woman who knew him best during those critical years: his ex-girlfriend Lillian McEwen. Listen here
Race and immigration issues to watch for 2024 Republican presidential candidates. By Ashley Lopez / NPR
Candidates of color in the Republican Party like Haley — as well Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott — have been talking about their identities on the trail, while also trying to appeal to a voting base that is less diverse than the country as a whole.
“And I think when we are in this time period in which a very mobilized faction of the MAGA/Trump conservatives are espousing this type of white grievance politics,” she explained. “I think they are going to have questions for Republican candidates of color about how loyal they will actually be to the party platform that they want to see advanced.” Read more
Rep. Bowman looks to 2024 for health equity legislation. By Daniel Payne / Politico
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that he’s looking to next year — and beyond the 2024 election — to make major strides in Congress on equity in health care.
“We have to vote the right people into office, number one,” he said at the POLITICO Health Care Summit of the steps needed to eliminate health care disparities. “There are solutions right there on the table for us … I don’t see much of that happening now, but that’s why next year is going to be critical toward moving the ball forward.” Read more
Cornel West Wants to Run for President With Green Party, Ditches People’s Party. By Chris Hippensteel / Daily Beast
Cornel West—the progressive scholar and activist-turned-long-shot presidential contender—is hitching his campaign to the Green Party.
“In the spirit of a broad United Front and coalition strategy, I am pursuing the nomination of the Green Party for President of the United States,” West announced on Twitter Wednesday. While West’s chances of actually winning the presidency remain slim at best, the Green Party might provide him a stronger platform as a spoiler candidate if he secures the nomination. Read more
Ajike Owens Funeral: Sharpton Rips DeSantis Silence On Shooting. By Bruce C.T. Wright / Newsone
The Rev. Al Sharpton delivered a damning condemnation of Florida’s governor while eulogizing Ajike “AJ” Owens a little more than one week after the Black mother of four was gunned down by an admittedly racist white woman. Owens’ funeral was held Monday morning in the north Florida city of Ocala, where on the night of June 2 Susan Lorincz, 58, fired the shot through her own front door over a racist confrontation with the 35-year-old’s young children. Read more
Investigation launched after 11-year-old who called 911 for help is shot by officer in Mississippi. By and
Aderrien Murry was seriously wounded early Saturday by an Indianola police officer responding to a domestic call at the home of the child’s mother, according to Carlos Moore, an attorney for the family. “This should not have happened,” Moore said. The main question Aderrien “has been asking is, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ The child suffered a collapsed lung, lacerated liver and fractured ribs. … He’s blessed to have survived but he’s still in pain emotionally and mentally,” he said. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Hampton University Establishes School of Religion. By Arrman Kyaw / Diverse Issues In Higher Ed.
The School of Religion will engage scholars on matters such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religious tradition, ideology, faith and activism, first-generation Christians, and addressing the needs of the Black community.
“Given that we’ve hosted the [Hampton University Ministers’ Conference] for over a century – in terms of timing, I think this is long overdue,” said Hampton President Darrell K. Williams. “Although we are not a religious institution, it is certainly a part of our fabric and our foundation. We see the development of the School of Religion as a natural progression. It’s not revolutionary. It is, in fact, evolutionary.” Read more
Left Out of Pat Robertson’s Obits: His Crazy, Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory. By David Corn / Mother Jones
On Thursday, Pat Robertson, the television preacher and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, died at the age of 93. The obituaries duly noted that he transformed Christian fundamentalism into a potent political force with the Christian Coalition that he founded in 1990 and that became an influential component of the Republican Party.
His The New World Order transmitted classic antisemitic garbage and the swill of conspiracism, within an end-is-near biblical narrative. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became a bestseller. The Wall Street Journal described the work as a “compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits.” Read more
Black or white? Christian minister redefines racial and ethnic identity in a mixed world. By Kathryn Post / RNS
In his new book, ‘Mixed,’ Eli Bonilla Jr. urges readers to avoid approaching ‘soul-deep complexity with skin-deep conversations.’
The son of a Mexican father and an Afro Latina mother from the Dominican Republic, Bonilla was often told he wasn’t quite Latino enough or Mexican enough or Black enough for whomever he tagged along with in the cafeteria or after school. While Bonilla is clear that the racial and ethnic components of our identities carry weight, as a Christian, he also believes reducing people to pre-packaged racial categories and stereotypes misses the breadth and depth of who each individual is in God’s eyes. Read more
Southern Baptists Move to Purge Churches With Female Pastors. Elizabeth Dias and
Some conservatives in the evangelical denomination fear a liberal drift, and are set to vote on a strict ban against women in church leadership. Two churches are appealing their expulsions. Linda Barnes Popham has been the pastor of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for 30 years.Credit…Christiana Botic for The New York Times
The letter in October came as a shock to Linda Barnes Popham, who had been the pastor of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for 30 years, the first woman to lead her congregation. She had served in ministry even longer, since she started as a pianist at age 16. But now, she read in the letter, officials of the Southern Baptist Convention had received a complaint about her church being led by a woman. The denomination was investigating, it said. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Generations After Slavery, Georgia Neighbors Find Freedom and Repair in Christ. By Melissa Morgan Kelley / CT
In the farming community of Dirt Town Valley, family friends grapple with a difficult truth: One ancestor was enslaved by another.
Friends and neighbors Stacie Marshall and Melvin and Betty Mosley chat over coffee in Marshall’s farmhouse kitchen in Dirt Town Valley, Georgia. Windows frame cattle pastures in every direction as they catch up on family weddings and local farming news. A mass of cheerful daffodils rests on the table between them. On the surface, this encounter seems like any other between close friends. But a striking history sets their relationship apart—Betty Mosley’s great-great-grandmother was enslaved by Marshall’s great-great-great-grandparents in this community 150 years ago. Read more
How Black Americans combated racism from beyond the grave. By David B. Parker / The Conversation
White Southerners refused to refer to African Americans with the courtesy titles Mr., Mrs. or Miss, depriving them of their dignity. In the late 1970s, Benjamin Mays, president of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, recounted how “‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Miss’ were signs of social equality. They didn’t call you that.”
In the 1940s, Black funeral directors in Atlanta came up with a way to combat this dehumanization: grave markers that anointed their dead with the courtesy titles that white society had denied them. The courtesy titles Mr., Mrs. and Miss rarely appeared on headstones; usually it is just the first and last name. Read more
Louisiana Army Based Named after WWI Sgt. William Henry Johnson. By Kalyn Womack / The Root
Fort Johnson, a Louisiana Army base previously named after Confederate commander Leonidas Polk, was renamed to honor the late Sgt. William Henry Johnson Tuesday, per NBC News. But who was this Black man?
Johnson, a Winston Salem native, enlisted in the Army in 1917 as a teenager and moved to New York, per the U.S. Army website. He was assigned to Company C, the all-Black 15th New York Infantry Regiment that soon became the 369th Infantry Regiment. The year after he enlisted, Johnson and his unit went on his first and last tour, placed on the front lines in western France to push back the German forces. While on duty one night, 12 German soldiers ambushed Johnson and the unit in a surprise attack. The stun of the ambush resulted in serious injuries and even some casualties. However, Johnson took initiative to protect his team and advanced toward the soldiers with nothing but a knife in hand. Read more
Liberals love Teddy Roosevelt – but his racism paved the way for Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. By Matthew Rozsa / Salon
Theodore Roosevelt is revered as a “progressive” president — but his views on race were anything but
Speaking to the National Congress of Mothers in 1905, shortly after he won his first full term in the 1904 election, Roosevelt warned of “race suicide” and implored women deemed white to have as many babies as possible. He rejected the notion that they should try to enjoy their lives as rewards for their own sake, instead imploring them to existences filled with toil in order to guarantee that their race would continue in perpetuity. Roosevelt’s ideas were primarily based in eugenics, the pseudoscience of controlling human reproduction to ensure that genetic traits deemed desirable were passed on. Read more
Slave cases are still cited as good law. This team is trying to change that. By Rachel Treisman / NPR
State courts in every state highlighted on this map have cited cases involving enslaved people in the 1980s or later. Citing Slavery Project, Michigan State University
The result is the Citing Slavery Project, a comprehensive online database (and map) of slave cases and the modern cases that cite them as precedent. They expect to add the last of their nearly 9,000 collected cases to the website this summer. The project aims to push the legal profession to grapple with its links to slavery, an overdue reckoning that Simard hopes will start with lawyers and judges acknowledging their use of the troubling precedents. He says 80% of the time judges don’t mention that these cases involve slavery at all, either because they’re unaware or uncomfortable. Read more
Memory of Samuel J. Bush, Black man lynched by mob, remembered by family, activists. By Okelo Pena / ABC News
The lynching of Samuel J. Bush in Decatur, Illinois, 130 years ago, is being remembered by family members and local activists who want to continue telling his story.
Vernon Wimberly, the great-great nephew of Bush, and Decatur activist groups Affordable Activism and Walk It Like We Talk It, said they pushed the city for years to have a historical marker dedicated in Bush’s memory. Bush, a 30-year-old Black man from Mississippi, was lynched by a mob across from the Macon County Courthouse in 1893 after being accused of assaulting two white women in the nearby town of Mt. Zion. Read more
Remembering Medgar Evers, 60 years after his death. By Julian Ring / NPR
Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963 — 60 years ago today — civil rights organizer Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway in Jackson, Miss.
He stepped out of his Oldsmobile carrying shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go.” Then, in a vacant lot about 40 yards away, a sniper fired a single shot from a high-powered rifle at Evers’ silhouette. Evers’ wife, Myrlie, rushed outside to find him bleeding in the driveway. He was taken to University Hospital in Jackson and died in the ER. He was 37. Read more
Sports
Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić has time before ‘of all time.’ By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Jokic’s performance speaks for itself. But there are many more miles to travel before he sits with the greatest.
When he was voted NBA MVP for two consecutive seasons, my antenna went up, a reaction that happens when a white player excels in a sport dominated by Black athletes. This typically results in the sports media reacting with gushing praise. It’s not enough to say the white athletes in question are great, but they are the greatest of all time, the smartest, and the most transformative. Read more
Track Star Tori Bowie Died in Childbirth. By Talya Minsberg / NYT
The track star Tori Bowie was eight months pregnant and in labor at the time of her death, according to an autopsy report shared with The New York Times. The autopsy lists respiratory distress and eclampsia as possible complications.
Frentorish Bowie, or Tori for short, a sprinter who competed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and won a silver medal in the 100 meters, a bronze in the 200 meters and a gold in the 4×100-meter relay, died at age 32. It was days before she was found. Many studies have shown a greater risk of pre-eclampsia among Black women in the United States. One of Bowie’s Olympic teammates, Allyson Felix, underwent an emergency C-section because of severe pre-eclampsia. Read more
Related: Tori Bowie Autopsy Results Spotlight Black Maternal Health Crisis. By Bruce C.T. Wright / Newsone
Kerrick Jackson Appointed Head Baseball Coach for University of Missouri, First Black Head Baseball Coach in Southeastern Conference. By Arrman Kyaw / Diverse Issues in Higher Ed
Previously, Johnson was head baseball coach at Southern University, head baseball coach at the University of Memphis, and assistant coach at Missouri. He also served in an administrative position in Major League Baseball. In 2019, Jackson led the Southern Jaguars to winning the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship in 2019 – the team’s first SWAC championship since 2009 – and Southern’s first 30-win season since 2012. Read more
He’s the first Black high school athlete to run a sub-four-minute mile. By Ian Decker / Wash Post
Tinoda Matsatsa of St. Andrew’s Episcopal will compete at New Balance Nationals before heading to Georgetown
At the HOKA Festival of Miles in St. Louis in early June, the 18-year-old became the first Black high school athlete to run a sub-four-minute mile. His time of 3 minutes 58.70 seconds put him in elite company as one of only 20 American high-schoolers to beat four minutes. Read more
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