Featured
Washington voting rights march marks Martin Luther King anniversary. By Ankita Rao / The Guardian
Theodore Dean marched in Washington DC in 1963, somewhere in the crowd behind Martin Luther King Jr. Exactly 58 years later, he decided to drive 16 hours from Alabama to do it again. “I’m here because I’ve got grandchildren and children,” the 84-year-old told the Guardian as he and his son made their way past the White House. Dean joined thousands for March On for Voting Rights, an event organized by a coalition of civil rights groups and nonprofits. Speakers included Rev Al Sharpton and Cori Bush, a Democratic congresswoman from Missouri.
The US Senate will soon vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure passed by the House which would restore protections from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at a time when minority voters are the target of concerted Republican efforts to restrict access and participation. Furthermore, lawmakers across the US are set to redraw electoral districts, a process open to partisan abuse. Read more
Related: March On For Washington And Voting Rights Presses Congress And Biden. By Juana Summers / NPR
Related: The House debates voting rights, and it’s Jim Crow all over again. By Colbert I. King / Wash Post
Political / Social
MLK Warned Us About Moderates. Are We Listening? By Cliff Albright / Politico
This weekend, many Americans will commemorate the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. While there will be no shortage of reflections on and recitations of the “I Have a Dream” speech, which has become synonymous with that event, I find myself increasingly drawn not to the words spoken by King on that historic day but to the words written by him just a few months earlier. What I keep thinking about is King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Read more
Related: Texas House Passes Voting Bill as G.O.P. Nears a Hard-Fought Victory. J. David Goodman and
Capitol cop who shot Ashli Babbitt defends his decision — and says he saved lives. By Brad Reed / Raw Story
Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who fatally shot MAGA rioter Ashli Babbitt, defended his actions on Thursday and said that he believed he saved lives. In an interview with NBC News, Byrd argued that when he discharged his weapon during the January 6th Capitol riots, he was trying to protect members of Congress from people who were trying to break into the congressional chamber. “If they get through that door, they’re into the House chamber and upon the members of Congress,” he told NBC News’ Lester Holt. He then said that he believed that many more people would have been killed had he not acted. Read more
The Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with the police. Black Americans are paying the price. By Brandon Tensley / CNN
Brace Yourself for the Man Who Could Become California’s Governor.
In ordinary times it would be fairly ridiculous to fret about Larry Elder becoming California’s next governor. Elder is a longtime conservative talk radio host from Los Angeles, a fixture of right-wing punditry in the mold of Rush Limbaugh. His schtick is offense and outrage, and over nearly three decades in the business he has minted an oppo-research gold mine of misogynistic and racially inflammatory sound bites that would seem to doom his prospects in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly two to one. Read more
Breakthrough mayor’s race creates tough choice for Boston. By Lisa Kashinsky / Politico
After nearly 200 years of being led by white men, Boston could have its first female mayor, its first Black mayor, its first Asian-American mayor or its first Arab-American mayor this fall. Four of the five major candidates are multi-term city councilors, and the fifth spent seven years as former mayor Marty Walsh’s economic development chief. As it stands, the four leading candidates are women. Shown is Boston mayoral candidate Michelle Wu waves while walking in the Roxbury Unity Parade in the Roxbury neighborhood on July 18. Read more
How race permeates the politics of gun control. By Brandon Tensley / CNN
Decades ago, when Congress actually passed an assault weapons ban (one that, notably, was allowed to expire in 2004), the broad concern was around guns in the hands of people of color — Black Americans, specifically. Our modern Congress finds itself paralyzed now that we’re increasingly facing a different dimension of the issue: White people’s guns, and the consequences of their contested rights to have them. Read more
DNA Tests May Increase Census Count Of Multiracial Population. By Hansi Lo Wang / NPR
Their multifaceted responses to the race question for the 2020 head count helped produce the data released this month for redrawing voting maps, enforcing civil rights laws and guiding federal funds to local communities. Now, demographers and other researchers are trying to figure out what caused the number of people who identified with more than one racial group to jump over the past decade by an eye-popping 276%. Some demographers are wondering how much a relatively new trend may have contributed to that growth — the rise of at-home DNA ancestry testing. Read more
Black women and the pandemic: A crisis within a crisis. By Nicquel Terry Ellis and Adrienne Broaddus / CNN
The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries. About 700 women die each year in the US due to a pregnancy-related complication either during pregnancy or within the year after delivery, says Dr. Wanda Barfield, Director of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health. “What’s even more striking is when you’re looking at the differences between Black and White women,” she says. Policymakers say federal legislation is key to overcoming centuries of health care bias and barriers to access that have led to poor outcomes for Black mothers. Read more
Black doctors on tackling the myths that fuel vaccine hesitancy. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
According to the CDC, about 63 percent of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. were identified by race or ethnicity. Within that, about 9.3 percent of all fully vaccinated people are Black; 12.4 percent of the general population is Black. Black Americans are also getting vaccinated at a rate slightly higher than their share of the population in recent weeks, according to the CDC, at 14.6 percent. Still, misinformation has been a hurdle in getting people comfortable with the vaccines more broadly. Read more
Related: You’re the only Black person that you see’: Why support is vital for medical students, doctors of color. By Hannah Ly / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
The Black church has major generational challenges. Here’s what we’re doing about it. By T.D. Jakes and Sarah Jakes Roberts / Wash Post
As pastors with more than 50 years’ experience between us, preaching and ministering to people in several of the nation’s largest cities, we maintain that the role of the church as an anchor of the Black community is just as important as ever, despite emerging data that shows fewer young people in our community are embracing the church. Indeed, a February 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that 28 percent of Black Generation Z adults (ages 18 to 23) and 33 percent of Black millennials (24 to 39) are religiously unaffiliated, compared with just 11 percent of baby boomers ages 57 to 75. Read more
New York’s Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.
At a time when some public schools are battling over whether to even teach aspects of American history, private school administrators portray uprooting racial bias as morally urgent and demanding of reiteration. Some steps are practical: They have added Black, Latino and Asian authors, and expanded course offerings to better encompass America and the world in its complications. However, In this world — where tuition runs as high as $58,000 — the topic has become flammable. Parents, faculty, students and alumni have all entered the fray. Read more
Planting trees to offset the legacy of racist housing policies. By Joe Purtell / Salon
In the United States, Black and Brown neighborhoods, like those where Arnold works, face higher pollution than their White counterparts. According to new research, the ones that were segregated also have fewer trees. This disparity was made possible by a series of racist policies instituted in both federal and local government agencies that relegated the unsavory parts of cities to Black neighborhoods. Read more
Historical / Cultural
During the 1963 March on Washington, these Black girls were locked up in Georgia. By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff / Wash Post
It was her first civil rights demonstration. Shirley Green-Reese was 13 when she challenged segregation outside the Martin Theater in Americus, Ga., in July 1963. She tried to buy tickets at the front of the theater instead of entering from the back alley. That’s when the police arrived. “We were just children. We didn’t think nothing could happen to us,” said Green-Reese, now 72, of the moments before she was arrested. “We just didn’t know the danger of it.” She had gone to the protest without her parents’ knowledge and figured she could make it back home before they did. She wouldn’t. Instead she was transported from cell to cell in rural southwest Georgia before finally ending up in a stockade in Leesburg, where she was among 15 girls imprisoned for at least 45 days without ever being charged with a crime. The children, who ranged in age from 12 to 15, eventually became known as the Leesburg Stockade Girls. Read more
The Black Roots of “Rights and Privileges” By Kerri Greenidge / AAIHS
As we fight over police abolition, dismantling the carceral state, and economic justice, it is important that we recognize the power of Black people to challenge and shape the concept of citizenship to meet humanity’s most desperate needs. Neither Trotter nor Morris were successful in the immediate sense–we still do not have a federal anti-lynching law that would enable the investigation, prosecution, and punishment for violence inflicted upon Black people by the state, nor do we have “equal school rights.” Yet, the very notion of citizenship as a form of human rights and privileges, demanded and defined by Black people themselves, must be the foundation for our fight against legal and political injustice. Read more
U.S. boarding schools for Indians had a hidden agenda: Stealing land. By Brenda J. Child / Wash Post
Indian education in the United States and Canada originated in the same colonial project — one that imposed private property rights and Christianity on Indigenous people at a time when their lands and resources were viewed as ripe for plunder. But it’s important to note that the two school systems differed in design and scope. Canada farmed out Indian education to organizations like the Catholic and Anglican churches. Here, the federal government ran Indian boarding schools, employing teachers and staff from the Indian School Service, some of whom were American Indians. Read more
He’s In Prison For Killing A Trooper. Now, Some Black Police Groups Want Him Released. By Sharon Pruitt Young / NPR
Nearly 50 years after the arrest of a member of the Black Panther Party for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper, activists and even some law enforcement groups are ramping up the fight for his release. Sundiata Acoli, now 84, was arrested in 1973 and later convicted in the death of State Trooper Werner Foerster. Activists have argued that Acoli’s release is long overdue. His supporters filed new arguments with the New Jersey Supreme Court on Monday, arguing that he be granted parole and citing his record of good behavior and positive contributions to his community behind bars. Supporters say that Acoli has dementia and that his health issues have worsened after a bout with COVID-19 last year. Read more
‘There’s Been Moments of Intense Fear, Anxiety and Joy’: What Life Is Like for 13-Year-Old Black Genius Who Just Began His Freshman Year at Georgia Tech. By Kavontae Smalls / Atlanta Black Star
Caleb Anderson, the 13-year-old genius, who learned sign language before he could talk and could read the U.S. Constitution by 2 years old, is now a freshman at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Caleb is eager to begin his studies but admits relating to others around him can be “weird” at times. For Caleb, intense math and science is just par for the course. While many of his peers are still traversing middle school, he is one of a kind on the campus of Georgia Tech. The genius admits the next step is going to take a bit more brain power than he’s used to using. Read more
Aretha Franklin and the Futility of Trying to Portray Her Onscreen. By Salamishah Tillet / NYT
Respect,” the debut film by the renowned theater director Liesl Tommy, ends up heeding the advice Washington gives Franklin about her music: “Honey, find the songs that move you.” The biopic is less a movie about Franklin’s interior life or the origins of what her character insists are the “demons” that haunt her, and more about how she as a prodigious vocalist and brilliant pianist and songwriter channeled her pain into songs that moved not just her, but the entire world. In the end, those gaps in the plot are distracting and keep Franklin at arm’s length, rendering her as elusive on the screen as she was in public in real life. Read more
Chadwick Boseman’s death shed light on colon cancer, but rates remain high among Black people. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News
In the year since the actor Chadwick Boseman’s death from colorectal cancer, Mo Jenkins said he considered — but resisted — getting screened for the deadly disease. Two weeks ago, however, he watched for the second time the film “Black Panther” — Boseman’s most famous role — and the next day he made a doctor’s appointment. Jenkins’ physician in Indianapolis had implored him to be tested. “I wanted to know if I was OK, but I didn’t want to take the test,” Jenkins, 48, said. He added that he watched the man who had played a superhero in a movie face colon cancer. “A superhero.He looked great. He looked strong. And then . . . he was gone.” “I don’t know why watching that movie this time hit me like it did. But I made an appointment, and did the screening.” Read more
Lee Morgan’s ‘Live at the Lighthouse’ was a masterpiece that turned out to be a farewell. By Shannon J. Effinger / Wash Post
“Live at the Lighthouse” was primed to be the start of a new chapter for Lee Morgan in 1970. As someone who hardly slowed down since he first picked up the trumpet in his early teens and became a standout in the jazz scene of the ’60s, the jazz virtuoso would finally come of age at 32 with this album. “Live at the Lighthouse” would lend ample room for Morgan’s vision and his burgeoning group’s raw ideas musically. In a year that saw other similarly progressive releases — Ahmad Jamal’s “The Awakening,” Jackie McLean’s “Demon’s Dance,” and Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” — “Lighthouse” not only epitomized the turbulence of those changing times but also allowed Morgan to redefine who he was at what would tragically turn out to be the twilight of his career. Read more
A Triumphant Debut Novel on Black History and Coming of Age in the South. By Veronica Chambers / NYT
Du Bois’s writing, his ambitions, his failings and his accomplishments are the bass line of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping, masterly debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Jeffers’s book is an ambitious work set with the fine china of the oeuvre of Du Bois, a man whose life and work pulsated with questions about the inheritance of Black American history and what one does with that fraught and complex legacy. In Great Barrington, Du Bois was born into a community of free Black landowners whose heritage included African, Dutch and French ancestry. Ancestry looms large in “Love Songs,” and Jeffers has deftly crafted a tale of a family whose heritage includes free Blacks, enslaved peoples and Scottish and other white colonialists. Read more
Sports
Paralympian David Brown Is The World’s Fastest Blind Runner. By Rachel Treisman / NPR
David Brown is known as the world’s fastest completely blind runner. He was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease at 15 months old, which led him to completely lose his sight by age 13. Brown says was “living in fear for a number of years” — until he discovered his passion for running. After winning an essay contest and attending the 2008 games in Beijing, he knew he wanted to compete himself. Paralympic runners train and compete alongside sighted guides. At the Rio Games in 2016, Brown and his partner Jerome Avery ran 10.99 in the men’s 100-meter dash to take home the gold (that was the first year guides were awarded their own medals). Read more
Serena Williams doesn’t need another Grand Slam. She has nothing left to prove. By Sally Jenkins / Wash Post
Now that Williams has withdrawn from the U.S. Open because of an injury just shy of her 40th birthday, her chance of winning one more singles Slam to add to her 23 and thus officially equal Court’s career total is admittedly fading. But here’s the thing: It shouldn’t even be a pursuit. The idea that Williams is a slightly less accomplished Grand Slam player than Court is pure foolishness. Let’s look closely at Court’s mark, the whole of it, including the undistinguished lead-pencil nature of some of those titles, and give it the asterisk it deserves and quit calling it the record. Read more
Jameis Winston to succeed Drew Brees as Saints QB, beating out Taysom Hill. By Mark Maske / Wash Post
The New Orleans Saints will enter their post-Drew Brees era with Jameis Winston as their starter at quarterback. Winston won the quarterback competition with Taysom Hill and is expected to be named the Saints’ starter for their Sept. 12 season opener against the Green Bay Packers in New Orleans. The decision was confirmed by a person familiar with the situation after being reported by ESPN and NFL Network. The Saints declined through a spokesman to provide official confirmation. Read more
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