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More schools that forced American Indian children to assimilate revealed. By Dana Hedgpeth and Emmanuel Martinez / Wash Post

Ione Quigley, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s historic preservation officer, returns to her seat after speaking during a ceremony at the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks, in Pennsylvania, in 2021. The site is the former home of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. (Matt Rourke/AP)

A nonprofit group has identified 115 more Indian boarding schools than has been previously reported, offering new insight into the role of religious institutions in the long-standing federal policy to eradicate Native Americans’ culture through their children.

For more than a century, generations of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children were forced or coerced from their homes and communities and sent to live at schools where they were beaten, starved and made to abandon their Native languages and culture. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced last year that the federal government ran or supported 408 such schools in 37 states, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaii, from 1819 to 1969. Read more

Political / Social

An American Tragedy at the Dollar General. By Esau McCaulley / NYT

A memorial for the victims of a shooting at the Dollar General in Jacksonville, Fla.Credit…Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock

I do not know what took three African American people to the Dollar General in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday. It could have been toys, food, medicine, cleaning supplies or some other low-cost item. I do know they were brutally killed there, and I know that the suspect in their killing was a white man who reportedly had swastika markings on his AR-15-style rifle. Read more

After Jacksonville, Tensions Flare Between DeSantis and Black Floridians. By Nicholas Nehamas and Maya King / NYT

Days after being sworn in as Florida’s governor in 2019, Ron DeSantis pardoned the Groveland Four, a group of Black men who had been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a white woman decades earlier.

Four years later, Mr. DeSantis’s relationship with Black Floridians could hardly be worse. As he moved increasingly to the right ahead of his run for president, Mr. DeSantis pushed an agenda that cemented his status as a rising conservative star nationally but that has outraged many Black voters and leaders in his home state. Read more

The racist Florida shooter’s ideology extends to ordinary people. By Jason Stanley / The Guardian

It’s not just extremists who hold the views expressed in Ryan Palmeter’s manifesto

In less than two years, two young white men have committed two mass murders of Americans motivated by an explicit desire to kill Black people. This shooting comes on the heels of an even larger mass shooting of Black Americans last year, in Buffalo, New York, where 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 people. In the manifesto Gendron published online, which revealed in detail his motivations and thinking, the very first goal he listed was “kill as many blacks as possible”. Read more

“We call that kind of love a cult”: Experts on the latest disturbing poll of Trump supporters. By Chauncey Devega / Salon

New poll reveals that members of the MAGA cult trust Trump most: He “provides the kind of love they crave”

As I have previously explored in a series of conversations with cult and mind control expert Steven Hassan, Donald Trump meets most if not all the characteristics of a cult leader. Trump holds extreme power over his followers, who subsume their own identities and will to him. He persuades them to reject their own perceptions of reality and to trust only him and his approved messengers. To a large degree, they have lost the ability to engage in what psychologists describe as “reality testing.” Read more

14th Amendment, Section 3: A new legal battle against Trump takes shape. ByHannah Demissie and Laura Gersony / ABC News

Efforts to disqualify Trump from state ballots are starting to materialize.

That disqualification argument boils down to Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which says that a public official is not eligible to assume public office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States, or had “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” unless they are granted amnesty by a two-thirds vote of Congress. Read more

Fani Willis proves the skeptics wrong: 18 co-defendants is a big problem for Donald Trump. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon

Yes, a RICO case is tangled and difficult, but one big advantage is emerging: Defendants are fighting each other

As soon as it became apparent that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was likely to charge Donald Trump under RICO statutes for his efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, the hand-wringing began. Many observers feared that charging a whole bunch of people — in this case, 19! — for an alleged conspiracy typically described as “sprawling” would make things needlessly complicated, creating multiple legal pitfalls and potential failure points. Read more

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Loud Voice Doesn’t Echo Young Indian Americans. By Kaivan Shroff / HuffPost

Ramaswamy, an Indian American millennial, doesn’t represent the core values of the demographics invoked for his deeply cynical campaign.

Though I had already done a deep dive into the right-wing tech bro and culture warrior, I watched Ramaswamy’s debate performance with a unique sense of dread. I hoped the people watching at home knew this was no representation of either my generation or the Indian American community. Ramaswamy, 38, is one of the few high-profile young Indian American political voices, but nearly every word out of his mouth betrays the core values of the demographics he’s invoking for his deeply cynical campaign. Read more

Tennessee State House votes to ‘silence’ Rep. Justin Jones, 1 of 2 Democrats expelled earlier this year. By Dakin Andone and Andy Rose / CNN

The GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives on Monday voted to silence one of two Democratic members expelled from the chamber earlier this year, as the legislature meets for a contentious special session on public safety spurred by a mass shooting at a Nashville school.

Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville was twice ruled out of order during debate Monday by Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, automatically triggering a vote to silence Jones for the remainder of the day. The vote passed along party lines, 70-20, and Democrats walked out in protest. Read more

Biden Looks for New Ways to Energize Black Voters. By Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs / NYT

Maeia Corbett had been banking on President Biden’s promise to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers.Credit…Kate Medley for The New York Times

In 2020, President Biden promised Black voters he would deliver a sweeping “racial equity” agenda that included a landmark federal voting rights bill, student loan relief, criminal justice reform and more. Three years later, with much of that agenda thwarted by Congress or the courts, the White House is looking for new ways to re-energize a crucial constituency that helped propel Mr. Biden to the presidency. Read more

State attorney says DeSantis fired her because she was ‘prosecuting their cops.’ By Martin Pengelly / The Guardian

Law enforcement agencies in central Florida were “all working against me”, Monique Worrell told the Daily Beast, “because I was prosecuting their cops, the ones who used to do things and get away with them”.

She added: “They thought that I was overly critical of law enforcement and didn’t do anything against ‘real criminals’. Apparently there’s a difference between citizens who commit crimes and cops who commit crimes.” Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

PBS and WETA Announce Four-Hour Documentary GOSPEL with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Coming February 2024.

PBS and WETA today announced GOSPEL, a new four-hour docuseries that explores the rich history of Black spirituality through sermon and song from executive producer, host, and writer Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., premiering in February 2024 on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App.

GOSPEL reunites acclaimed Harvard scholar and documentarian Gates with directors Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris after recently teaming up on MAKING BLACK AMERICA: THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE. The series will premiere on February 12 and 13, 2024, with a special companion concert premiering February 9. Read more and watch the trailer here

The Christian home-schooler who made ‘parental rights’ a GOP rallying cry. By Emma Brown and Peter Jamison / Wash Post

On a private call with Christian millionaires, home-schooling pioneer Michael Farris pushed for a strategy aimed at siphoning billions of tax dollars from public schools

For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced. Now, speaking on a confidentialconference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said. Read more

A religious calling to protect democracy. By Chris Crawford / RNS

Attendees watch a performance by the Tai Ji Men community during the opening ceremony of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, Aug. 14, 2023. Photo by Lauren Pond for RNS.

As religious leaders gather this week for the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, we ought to reflect on the ways that our shared belief in the equality of human beings demands that we defend democracy. We should also understand the pivotal role that people of faith must play to preserve the freedoms — including religious freedom — that democracies protect. Religious people have a rich history of calling the United States to live up to its founding ideals. In her own time, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer took on the entrenched white power in Mississippi’s Democratic Party by quoting Scripture and the U.S. Constitution, telling the brutal stories of voter suppression facing Black Americans and ultimately posing the question: “Is this America?” Read more

Historical / Cultural

W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War: An Interview with Chad L. Williams. By Brandon James Render / AAIHS

Specifically, one of the challenges Du Bois faced when writing about World War I was his proximity to it. He was part of the history that he was trying to make sense of. He made the controversial decision to support the war, a decision that he would come to regret throughout the rest of his life.

One of the main objectives of my book is to demonstrate the significance of World War I in African American history. In the history of the broader African diaspora, World War I was a pivotal moment in the growth of Black internationalism, in diasporic movements for social political economic change as well. Read more

The Forgotten Radicalism of the March on Washington. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT

Less well remembered, in our collective memory at least, is the fact that both the march and King’s speech were organized around much more than opposition to anti-Black discrimination.

It was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with a far more expansive vision for society than formal equality under the law. The march wasn’t a demand for a more inclusive arrangement under the umbrella of postwar American liberalism, as it might seem today. It was a demand for something more — for a social democracy of equals, grounded in the long Black American struggle to realize the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the potential of Reconstruction. Read more

Florida Wanted “Opposing Viewpoints” on Slavery in A.P. African American Studies Course. By Ella Sherman / TNR

The DeSantis administration was fighting with the College Board for an astonishing reason, according to a new report.

According to internal state comments, the reviewers believed the A.P. course’s depiction of chattel slavery did not promote both sides of history. One lesson on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity,” reviewers noted. “There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University, told the Miami Herald. “It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come.” Read more

Edward Waters University: A Symbol of Black Resilience in Jacksonville. By Brandon Tensley / Capital One

The school has nourished Jacksonville’s Black community for more than 150 years.

A white gunman on Saturday killed three Black people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida — after he’d been chased from the campus of nearby Edward Waters University. But the historically Black school is much more than a stop on the way to the site of a murderous rampage: Edward Waters looms large in Jacksonville because it’s nourished the city’s Black community for more than 150 years. “Let me say for the record that this white supremacist presence at EWU didn’t happen by mere happenstance,” University President A. Zachary Faison Jr. said at a press conference on Monday. “He well knew where he was and what signal and message he might send had he been successful in his aim to commit this heinous act at the bastion and birthplace of Black higher education in this state.” Read more

The Day Black Boys Burned: Uncovering The 1959 Fire At The Negro Boys Industrial School. By Bilal G. Morris / Newsone

Deemed one of Arkansas’ greatest mysteries, the history of the 1959 fire at the Negro Boys Industrial School is still an enigma.

Who would lock innocent Black teenage boys into a building and set it on fire? The thought seems unimaginable, but it happened. On March 5, 1959, at 4 a.m. when the school was asleep, 69 Black students ages 13 to 17, were padlocked inside the dormitories of the Negro Boys Industrial School and the dorms mysteriously set ablaze. The boys fought and struggled to survive the burning building, clawing their way to safety by prying off mesh metal screens from two windows. The next morning, the bodies of 21 Black boys were found piled on top of each other in the corner of the burned dormitory. Read more

Sports

The Simone Biles Revolution. By Meghan O’Rourke / The Atlantic

Her return to elite gymnastics is a hopeful sign that the sport is changing.

In 2017, USA Gymnastics’ official team doctor, Larry Nassar, was convicted of molesting athletes while ostensibly treating them for injuries. Biles was Nassar’s most famous victim. But she has always resisted being a victim of the sport itself. “Her superpower is resistance,” said the sports journalist and Atlantic contributor Jemele Hill in the 2021 show Simone vs Herself. Biles shattered records at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in San Jose, California, this weekend by winning her eighth national all-around title and becoming, at the age of 26, the oldest female gymnast to win that title. Read more

Lakers unveil plans to honor Kobe Bryant with bronze statue. By Ben Golliver / Wash Post

Kobe Bryant will take a permanent place alongside the likes of Magic Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal when the Los Angeles Lakers unveil a bronze statue to honor the 18-time all-star guard in February.

The Lakers on Thursday announced their plans to recognize Bryant, who died in a January 2020 helicopter crash at the age of 41, with the statue during a ceremony before their game against the Denver Nuggets on Feb. 8, 2024. The date — 2/8/24 — is a composite of the jersey numbers worn by Bryant and his teenage daughter Gianna, who also died in the crash. Bryant’s statue will join similar monuments to Lakers greats outside the downtown Crypto.com Arena, including tributes to Johnson, O’Neal, Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Elgin Baylor and broadcasting legend Chick Hearn. Read more

US Open rout shines harsh light on Venus Williams despite admirable fire. By Bryan Armen Graham / The Gaurdian

The former world No 1’s competitive drive and taste for the fight remain the stuff of legend. But this was a tough watch

Well, that wasn’t pleasant. The grim theatre of an injured 43-year-old Venus Williams taking just two games off Belgium’s Greet Minnen before mostly stunned silence inside a half-empty Arthur Ashe Stadium and a primetime television audience probably wasn’t what the USTA had in mind when they pencilled it in for Tuesday’s night session at the US Open. Read more

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