Featured

Our Fathers Marched With King. Here’s What They Would Say to Activists Today. By Donzaleigh Abernathy and Avi Dresner / NYT

Dr. King leads a voter protest march in Selma, Ala., on March 9, 1965. Rev. Abernathy is in the row behind Dr. King. Rabbi Dresner is one row further behind.

On March 9, 1965, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. chose two of the hundreds of men of faith present that day to deliver the prayer that began the march to Montgomery: the Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy Sr., his dear friend and closest associate during the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and Rabbi Israel Dresner, one of Dr. King’s most trusted allies in the Jewish community.

Those men were our fathers.

Abernathy died in 1990, and Dresner in 2022. In the years since their deaths, we have often been asked what they would say on issues and events. We believe they would be appalled, as are we, by the explosion of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia we have seen in our time. We know they would march against the rolling back of civil rights and voting rights. Equally painful would be their dismay over the continued erosion of the Black-Jewish alliance. Read more

Political / Social

How Biden Could Borrow a Page From Trump's Playbook to Energize Black Voters. By Wayne Washington / The Root

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is good at politics. He gets what Democrats often overlook: the enduring value of fear.

Fear is a much more effective motivator than hope. And what about asking Black voters to cast ballots for you because you got them some policy wins? I was going to describe that strategy’s ineffectiveness…but I had to stifle a yawn. Read more

There’s a Reason Trump Has Friends in High Places. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT

Among the features that distinguish capitalist society from its predecessors, the political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood once observed, is “the differentiation of the economic and the political.” That some capitalists will turn on democracy, or at least show indifference to its fate, when it seems that democracy might impede the accumulation of wealth is useful context for recent developments in the 2024 presidential election.

According to Sam Sutton, writing in Politico, several Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who backed Donald Trump and then spurned him after the Jan. 6 insurrection have now returned to the fold, with open arms and open wallets. They are, he writes, “looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.” Read more

The Long, Racist History Of Donald Trump, From the 1970s to Now. By Candace McDuffie / The Root

Donald Trump is currently selecting his Vice President for the upcoming election, with potential candidates consisting of Republican Senators Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. Additionally, Ben Carson is also on the list.

Last month, Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes and is currently awaiting sentencing. With everything that is going on with Trump, here’s a look at how he’s gone from bad to worse over the years. Read more

Affirmative Action killer Ed Blum’s new strategy to crush racial justice. By David H. Gans / Slate

Last summer, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down race-conscious admission programs adopted by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina as violations of the 14^thAmendment’s equal protection clause. In doing so, the court’s conservative supermajority both ignored that the Framers of the 14^th Amendment were the originators of affirmative action and turned a blind eye to entrenched racial inequalities that make a mockery of the constitutional promise of equal citizenship.

Now, Edward Blum, who was behind the attack on affirmative action in the SFFA case, and other conservative litigants intent on blocking racial justice efforts have a new strategy: remake the nation’s oldest federal civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, into a weapon to challenge private efforts to ameliorate systemic racial discrimination and to redress the racial wealth gap. Read more

Duke students react to growing trend of DEI funding cuts following decision at UNC. By Madera Longstreet-Lipson / The Chronicle

Amid a reevaluation of diversity initiatives and affirmative action policies across the country, North Carolina has now been pulled into the conversation following a significant funding cut at one of its most widely recognized universities.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, $2.3 million of state funding within the university’s budget will be diverted from diversity, equity and inclusion spending to public safety in the 2024–25 fiscal year. The UNC Board of Trustees voted May 13 in support of the change, which will take effect July 1. Read more

Professor Breaks Down The True Essence Of Critical Race Theory. By Matthew Allen / Newsone

Last week Kimberlé W. Crenshaw sat down with NewsOne’s Asha Bandele to discuss the 70th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board decision.

Professor Crenshaw, who holds dual appointments at Columbia Law School and the UCLA School of Law, is a towering scholar in the field of law, an author, the co-founder and executive director of African American Policy Forum, and perhaps most notably, the architect of the current iteration of Critical Race Theory (CRT), work she began as a student at Harvard’s School of Law in 1981. Read more

“Our grandchildren will still be fighting for democracy”: Why Ali Velshi says it’s worth it. By Dean Obeidallah / Salon

Why does anyone leave anywhere?” is the compelling title of the first chapter in Ali Velshi’s new book, “Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.”

The award-winning MSNBC host shares his family’s immigration story, which spans from India to South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the U.S., and digs into why so many people around the world decide to pick up and leave their homelands. Read more

Latino advocacy group finds one-fifth of Latino voters leaning towards third-party presidential candidates. By Claudia Grisales / NPR

The poll of 2,000 likely Latino voters, conducted by Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, shows support for Biden falls dramatically when voters are offered a third option in addition to former President Trump.

In a head-to-head matchup among swing-state Latinos, Biden leads Trump 59% to 39%. However, Biden’s support falls to 47% to Trump’s 34% when third party candidates are included. For example, the poll found 12% of those voters supported independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Read more

Critics Say Jay-Z Is Supporting A Republican-Led Effort To Gut Public Education For Low-Income Students. By Christopher Smith / Newsone

Jay-Z and Roc Nation have come under fire for backing a program in Pennsylvania that critics say aims to gut public education.

A new campaign underway in Pennsylvania is aiming to get students from low-income households in Philadelphia into the city’s private schools. The Pennsylvania Award for Student Success (PASS) program is spearheaded by Jay-Z and his Roc Nation entertainment company, which also refers to the PASS grants as “Lifetime Scholarships.”But critics, including teachers’ groups, have called out the campaign for being heavily influenced by Republicans to gut public education and pointed to Jay-Z’s friendship with a key figure of the campaign. Read more

World News

UN agencies say over 1 million in Gaza could experience highest level of starvation by mid-July. By Samy Magdy / PBS

The World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a joint report that hunger is worsening because of heavy restrictions on humanitarian access and the collapse of the local food system in the nearly eight-month Israel-Hamas war.

It says the situation remains dire in northern Gaza, which has been surrounded and largely isolated by Israeli troops for months. Israel recently opened land crossings in the north but they are only able to facilitate truck loads in the dozens each day for hundreds of thousands of people. Read more

Why Canada Is Worried About a U.S. Civil War. By Alexander Burns / Politico

When Justin Trudeau meets Joe Biden at the G7 summit in Italy this week, Trudeau will probably not ask whether the United States is at risk of erupting in civil war in the next few years.

In a spring report titled “Disruptions on the Horizon,” a quiet office known as Policy Horizons Canada proposed American civil war as a scenario that Ottawa should consider preparing for. Read more

Who Will Govern South Africa? By Benjamin Fogel / The Nation

The era of ANC hegemony is over, and Jacob Zuma’s new party is threatening violence if he’s not welcomed into the government.

More than 16 million South Africans—59 percent of registered voters, the lowest turnout on record—braved long queues, device malfunctions, and credible threats of taxi blockades, attacks on voting booths, and assassinations of electoral officials to cast their ballots in what was not a smooth election but was free and fair. But now, even with the vote over, the danger of violent attempts to undermine South African democracy continues. Read more

Stevie Wonder’s Ghanaian citizenship reflects long-standing links between African Americans and the continent. By Nemeta Blyden / The Conversation

There’s a long history of African Americans settling in Ghana or keeping in close contact with the first African country to gain independence. This relationship has most recently been exemplified by musician Stevie Wonder taking up Ghanaian citizenship.

Ghana, which gained independence in 1957, became a beacon for African Americans disenchanted with their country’s racial problems. Ghana’s first prime minister, the pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, was notable for forging links between Africans on the continent and those in the African diaspora. Read more

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Justice Alito. By Kiera Butler / Mother Jones

Inside the movement to make the Supreme Court explicitly Christian.

Over the last few years, the Christian nationalist movement has gained political prominence, as its influential members have sought to make the case for an explicitly Christian society in public schools, social policy, and even in Congress, led by the ultraconservative and devout House speaker Mike Johnson. Against this cultural backdrop, calls for a godly Supreme Court have moved beyond the echo chamber of the far-right fringe. Read more

Donald Trump’s Christian-nationalist radical has big plans for America. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon

Russ Vought is a far-right number-cruncher and opportunist. Donald Trump is his ticket to power

Vought is a self-described Christian nationalist who is spearheading plans for a rapid expansion of executive power under a theory he calls “radical constitutionalism” (an oxymoron, but it sure sounds snappy.) He has been working for a right-wing network called the Center for Renewing America, which is full of Trump acolytes, many of whom would likely become high-ranking officials in a future Trump administration. Read more

An Investigation: Is Trump Like Jesus? By Julianne McShane / Mother Jones

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the former president to Christ. We looked into claims of similarities.

Upon initial investigation: Low levels of similarity to Jesus. Still, as I reported earlier this year, polling has found a majority of Republicans—not just MTG—believe Trump is a “person of faith.” Read more

Upcoming Lyke Conference to explore how Black Catholics can bring their gifts to the Mass. By Gina Christian / NCR

A national gathering will explore how Black Catholics can “embrace the gifts” they bring to the church, particularly to the Mass, according to organizers.

Some 300 are expected to attend the 2024 Lyke Conference, which takes place June 18-22 in Grapevine, Texas. The event, launched in 2004 and held annually for most of the years since, is named in honor of the late Archbishop James P. Lyke, the second Black archbishop appointed to the Catholic Church in the U.S., who died at age 53 in 1992 while serving as archbishop of Atlanta. Read more

Historical / Cultural

Supreme Court’s Civil War callback: Justice is denied with historic Trump delay. By Jeffrey Abramson and Dennis Aftergut / Salon

A stunning historical parallel: Supreme Court injustice, Donald Trump and Jefferson Davis

As important as Donald Trump’s conviction in Manhattan for corrupting the 2016 election is, justice demands that Trump be brought to trial in the most important of the three remaining cases against him. Sadly, history is repeating, or at least rhyming. It happened once before that the Supreme Court’s fingerprints, or at least those of one justice, were on the denial of justice in a case involving the leader of a failed attempt to overthrow our constitutional order. If Trump is not tried for his conduct leading up to the Jan. 6 attacks, there will be empty pages in American history books to rival the absence of any trial of Jefferson Davis for treason against the U.S. Read more

A Sweeping History of the Black Working Class. By Robert Greene II

By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, Black Folk, helps tell the larger story of American democracy over the past two and a half centuries.

The famous “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably the best-known public statement by Martin Luther King Jr., was given at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, King urged the nation on in tackling segregation and political inequality, but he also talked about economic injustice: How, he asked, could Black Americans continue to live “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”? Read more

What If Reconstruction Didn’t End Till 1920? By Eric Herschthal / The New Republic

Historian Manisha Sinha argues that the Second Republic lasted decades longer than most histories state and achieved wider gains.

Despite the growing number of popular histories of Reconstruction, many by leading scholars, few have asked us to rethink the period as boldly, provocatively, and often brilliantly as Manisha Sinha’s The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic. Sinha, herself a leading historian of the Civil War era, asks us to take a far more expansive view of Reconstruction. Read more

Why Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Starting a New Black Literary Salon. By Kaitlyn Greenidge / Harpers Bazaar

The creator of The 1619 Project reflects on the past five years of wins and losses in the unfolding story of racial justice in America, and unveils her next project: a place to celebrate Black culture in Brooklyn

The 1619 Project stands as a reminder of what journalism and reporting can do: reframe the narratives of the powerful few to uplift the stories of the many who fight injustice and attempt to live in dignity. 2024 is a different world from 2019’s, facing a distinct cultural backlash to the types of stories The 1619 Project tells. But Hannah-Jones isn’t done with her mission. Now the first-ever Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University’s School of Communications, she talked with Harper’s Bazaar about the project’s impact, the dangers of our current political moment, and the spaces she is building for the future. Read more

Tributes Pour In After Civil Rights Icon James Lawson Dies At 95.

The iconic civil rights leader was 95 and left behind a rich, decades-long legacy of fighting for racial equality. Once Lawson’s death was reported, the groups and organizations that benefited the most from his hard work seemingly spoke the loudest while recalling the good and important work he did in his life.

Lawson is being remembered in part for being a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor. But Lawson’s legend began when he was much younger as a college student at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he led powerful movements on campus, in the city of Nashville and beyond during the peak of the Jim Crow era. Read more

Pioneering Black female pilot for Air Force, United Airlines lands final flight. By Dhanika Pineda / ABC News

Capt. Theresa Claiborne logged more than 23,000 career flight hours.

Pioneering aviator Captain Theresa M. Claiborne has retired after 43 years of flying, first as a second lieutenant and the first Black female pilot in the U.S. Air Force, and then as a captain at United Airlines. Read more

Chaka Khan: ‘I found ways to hang on. Substance abuse, and all kinds of other s***’ By Stevie Chick / Independent

The ‘Ain’t Nobody’ singer talks to Stevie Chick about the rap at the start of ‘I Feel for You’, her years battling drug addiction and alcoholism and her collaboration with Sia

You’re supposed to take things easier when you hit your golden years, but clearly no one has told Chaka Khan. The 71-year-old singer is a restless tornado of activity, telling us her life story, packing for a forthcoming six-week European tour (which includes headline sets at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and the Love Supreme festival in Sussex) and, at this very moment, building up a sizeable head of steam over one of the events she’s playing this summer advertising her as “the Queen of Funk”. Read more

Sports

Shannon Sharpe New ESPN Deal Expands First Take Role and New Shows. By Alex Weprin / Hollywood Reporter

The NFL hall-of-famer will continue to appear on ‘First Take’ and will appear on other ESPN programming.

After some personal outreach from Disney CEO Bob Iger, ESPN has inked NFL hall-of-famer Shannon Sharpe to a new, expanded multiyear deal. The new deal will expand Sharpe’s role on the morning show First Take, where he appears alongside Stephen A. Smith and host Molly Qerim. Sharpe will also appear on other ESPN programs to be announced later. First Take has become arguably ESPN’s signature studio show, thanks in part to the takes and debates led by Smith and Sharpe. Read more

Mike Tomlin: Head coach signs three-year extension with the Pittsburgh Steelers. By Sam Joseph / CNN

The Pittsburgh Steelers announced Monday that head coach Mike Tomlin signed a three-year contract extension, keeping him with the team through the 2027 campaign and ending offseason speculation regarding his status with the team.

Tomlin received his first shot at being an NFL head coach when he was hired by the Steelers in 2007 and has remained with the franchise ever since. The Super Bowl winning coach is entering his 18th season on the sideline this year. Read more

Race Inquiry

Important Current Stories On Race In America

Race Inquiry Digest (Jun 13) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

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