Featured
American Democracy is Only 55 Years Old – And Hanging by a Thread. By Van R. Newkirk / The Atlantic
Black civil-rights activists—and especially Black women—delivered on the promise of the Founding. Their victories are in peril.
You were 24 when you had me, your first child; American democracy, as I think of it, had just turned 23. Democracy is central to America’s idea of itself, but that idea had never been a reality until the VRA. You always reminded me of the precariousness and the novelty of this experiment—of the fact that I had been granted a franchise that wasn’t even yours when you were born.
In the fall of 2020, you tried to schedule your chemotherapy appointments so that you’d be able to cast your ballot in person, as you’d always done. When I got a call as I watched the results roll in on Election Night, I thought it was going to be you telling me about how you’d voted, and how closely you were watching on television. You died early in the morning, before we knew who won. You lived 56 years. You witnessed the entirety of what might be considered genuine democracy in America. I fear that era might not last much longer. Read more
Political / Social
Biden must make clear what Republicans know: The fight for democracy is a struggle over racism. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
As Biden honors MLK and campaigns for voting rights, the right doubles down on racist hysterics
The racial angle isn’t merely a historical matter. The racist impetus the fueled the Jim Crow laws of the past are motivating the current Republican assault on both voting rights and electoral integrity today. And it isn’t even particularly subtle. In 2019, the state wrongfully purged about 200,000 voters from the rolls in a move that the ACLU Georgia describes as predominantly affecting “young voters, voters of lower income, and citizens of racial groups that have been denied their sacred right to vote in the past.” In 2021, “Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law an omnibus bill that targets Black voters with uncanny accuracy,” the Brennan Center explains, with provisions designed to make it harder to vote in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Read more
Georgia takes center stage as Biden’s visit kicks off year of political battles. By Eric Bradner / CNN
Georgia has become the center of the political landscape — and it’s likely to stay there for the remainder of 2022.
“Will you stand against voter suppression? Yes or no? That’s the question you’ll answer. Will you stand to against election subversion? Yes or no? We stand for democracy? Yes or no,” he asked. Read more
Related: Why Georgia Voting Rights Groups Are Skipping Biden’s Atlanta Visit. By Joan Walsh / The Nation
Related: A Voting Rights Push, as States Make Voting Harder. By Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein / NYT
Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state. By Ron Elving / NPR
Conflicts between entire states are not the only way civil war may emerge in our time, or even the most likely. When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home. As West and Gale write: Today’s toxic atmosphere makes it difficult to negotiate on important issues, which makes people angry with the federal government and has helped create a winner-take-all approach to politics. When the stakes are so high, people are willing to consider extraordinary means to achieve their objectives. And what do these careful scholars mean by “extraordinary means”? “America has an extraordinary number of guns and private militias,” they write. How many? They cite the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s estimate of 434 million firearms in civilian possession in the U.S. right now. That would be 1.3 guns per person. Read more
Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick wins House seat in Florida special election. By David Weigel / Wash Post
Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick won Tuesday’s election to fill Florida’s vacant 20th Congressional District, returning her party to the 222-seat majority it held after the 2020 elections. Hastings died last April after a bout of pancreatic cancer. Local Democrats have been frustrated over the 280-day gap between his passing and the special election called by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — timing that left the House majority one seat down most of the year. Read more
Barrier-breaking Black prosecutor faces deadly racist threats. By Christina Carrega / CNN
The first Black woman to lead the US Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts was sworn in Monday as she faces an uptick in threats against her following a contentious confirmation process. The violent and often racist threats against Rachael Rollins have been reported to authorities, and she is seeking protection from the US Marshals Service, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The threats escalated shortly after the Senate narrowly voted to confirm her to the post in December, according to one source. Read more
Symone Sanders, former spokeswoman for Vice President Harris, takes job at MSNBC. By Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
Symone Sanders, the former chief spokeswoman for Vice President Harris who advised and defended the groundbreaking politician during a historic but uneven first year, has taken a job with MSNBC, the network announced Monday morning. Beginning in the spring, Sanders, 31, will host an unspecified weekend show on MSNBC and will also appear on the Peacock streaming network’s “The Choice,” a 24/7 news channel. Details of both shows have not been released yet. Sanders will remain based in Washington. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
From the Capitol insurrection to the Taliban takeover: The defining religion stories of 2021. By RNS Staff
An eventful year by any standard, 2021 had more than its share of religion headlines. Even a casual reader might have had a hard time finding a major news story that didn’t have a religion imprint somewhere in it. That trip to space? Three hundred members of passenger Wally Funk’s church gathered to cheer her on via livestream. The wildly popular Netflix horror series? A very Catholic spin on the classic vampire tale. But religion was more than a passing mention in 2021’s most significant news stories. Below, RNS’s coverage of the 10 most defining religion stories of the year. Read more
Can I get an amen? Black Americans’ faith, religious practice detailed in Pew study. By Adelle M. Banks / Religion News
“Most Black Americans, including those who go to Black churches, say that they think congregations that have historically been Black should work to diversify rather than trying to retain their traditional racial character,” said Besheer Mohamed, a Pew senior researcher. “They say that if they were looking for a new church, the race of a congregation and the race of leadership would be not that important.” Pew describes its new 176-page report, based on a survey of 8,660 Black adults, as its “most comprehensive, in-depth attempt to explore religion among Black Americans.” Read more
Historical / Cultural
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the power of collective memory. By Code Switch / NPR
A painting by artist Sidney King depicting a Dutch ship with 20 enslaved African people arriving at Point Comfort, VA in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in America.
What stories do we learn about the history of the United States? Who dreamed up those stories? And what happens when we challenge them? This week on the pod, our play cousins at NPR’s Throughline podcast talk to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones about the historical argument she tried to make with the 1619 project. Listen here
The disturbing parallels between the 2020s and 1940s in the U.S. By John Stoehr / Salon
We grow up with stories about a triumphant America that won World War II, but in 1940, it wasn’t at all clear how history was going to play out. I want American audiences to understand that, especially as we inevitably look back and reflect on our current moment, History is always events leading to and from each other. There are certainly antecedents in the 1920s and 1930s GOP. It was taking money from literal Nazi spies in order to try to sweep FDR out of power. Read more
More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation. By Julie Zauzmer Weil , Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez / Wash Post
From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation’s laws were current or former slaveowners. More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records. The Washington Post created a database that shows enslavers in Congress represented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states. Read more
Senate Passes Bill To Honor Emmett Till And His Mother. By AP and HuffPost
The Senate has passed a bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager murdered by white supremacists in the 1950s, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who insisted on an open casket funeral to demonstrate the brutality of his killing. Till was abducted, tortured and killed after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman in Mississippi, a scenario contradicted by others who were with Till at the time. Read more
They came, they saw, they reckoned? By Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson / NPR Podcast
It’s now been more than a year since the so-called “racial reckoning” that marked the summer of 2020. The country, some said confidently, was having the biggest racial reckoning since the civil rights movement. But since then, the Code Switch team has been wondering…what was actually being reckoned with? And by whom? And what would the backlash be? So this week, we’re revisiting a conversation we had with political scientists Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson about how support for the Black Lives Matter movement — particularly among white people — waxed and then waned. Listen here
Ida B. Wells, writer and activist, is honored with a Barbie doll. By Elizabeth Blair / NPR
Educator, journalist, anti-lynching activist and NAACP co-founder Ida B. Wells joins the pantheon of distinguished women honored by Mattel with her own signature Barbie doll. Resplendent in a deep blue, floor-length dress with lace details, the new Ida B. Wells doll also comes with a historically significant accessory: a miniature replica of the Memphis Free Speech, the newspaper where Wells became editor and co-owner in 1889. Read more
Maya Angelou quarters now being distributed in the US. By Jordan Mendoza / USA Today
The U.S Mint has announced it has begun shipping out the first quarters featuring trailblazing American women, beginning with poet, writer and activist Maya Angelou, the first Black woman to appear on the quarter. Angelou is depicted on the coin with her arms uplifted. Behind her are a bird and the rising sun, which are “inspired by her poetry and symbolic of the way she lived.” Read more
César Chávez’s march that changed it all is the topic of a new graphic novel. By Arturo Conde / NBC News
“The thing that stuck with me the most was his perseverance,” award-winning comic book author Terry Blas said of the iconic Latino labor leader.
He wanted others to remember him by organizing. And now, almost 30 years after his death, a new graphic novel wants to inspire young readers with the story of a 340-mile protest march that lifted César Chávez as a national champion for farmworkers and labor and civil rights everywhere. Read more
In Zora Neale Hurston’s Essays, the Nonfiction of a Nonconformist. By Dwight Garner / NYT
“I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it,” she wrote in the same essay. “I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.” She added: “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is 60 years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” A new collection of her work, “You Don’t Know Us Negroes: And Other Essays,” is out this month. It’s been edited by Genevieve West, an English professor at Texas Woman’s University, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Most of its contents were printed during Hurston’s lifetime, but some essays appear here for the first time. Read more
Anita Hill hits genealogy ‘lottery’ on ‘Finding Your Roots. By Claretta Bellamy / NBC News
Legal scholar Anita Hill and activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham take journeys through their family trees on the eighth season of the acclaimed PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” which premieres this week. Hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a historian and Harvard University professor, the show takes notable people on a quest to learn more about their ancestry. In the season’s second episode, Hill learns of her great-great-grandfather, who resided in Bowie County, Texas, in 1850. At the time, Bowie County was one of only three known counties — including Utah County, Utah, and Scott County, Tennessee — that documented the names and information of its enslaved residents. Read more
Sports
Another chance for the NFL to make progress on inclusive hiring. By Jason Reid / The Undefeated
As another NFL hiring cycle goes into full swing Monday, the league’s frustrated Black assistant coaches remain eager to finally get into the game significantly. During recent hiring periods, which traditionally begin as most clubs cut ties with head coaches on the first day following the conclusion of the regular season, Black assistants have received markedly fewer opportunities than their white counterparts to reach the highest rung of the league’s coaching ladder. It stirs resentment among them toward team owners, who rely largely on Black bodies to power their multibillion-dollar industry. Shown is David Culley who was the Baltimore Ravens’ assistant head coach and wide receivers coach before being hired as head coach of the Houston Texans in 2021 Read more
Chris Dickerson, champion bodybuilder and first Black Mr. America, dies at 82. By Harrison Smith / Wash Post
Chris Dickerson, who rose from a childhood in the Jim Crow-era South to become one of the world’s greatest bodybuilders, breaking barriers as the first Black Mr. America and the first openly gay Mr. Olympia, died Dec. 23 at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 82. In a career that spanned more than three decades and 50 titles, Mr. Dickerson was known for his diamond-shaped calves, dense and symmetrical physique, and graceful posing style, in which he seemed to transform into living works of classical sculpture. Read more
Michael Jordan’s teammate takes issue with Scottie Pippen portrayal. By Scooby Axson / USA Today
It seems that Scottie Pippen isn’t the only one who is upset about the way he was portrayed in “The Last Dance,” the popular 10-part documentary that aired on ESPN in 2020. Former Bulls teammate Stacey King got his two cents about Pippen and Jordan while on “The Lowe Post” podcast. I didn’t like the way Scottie was portrayed in certain things. In that documentary, a lot of things Scottie didn’t really pertain to that second three-peat. You know, the 1.8 seconds was when MJ was retired. In my opinion, that really didn’t need to be brought into ‘The Last Dance.’ It had nothing to do with that.” Read more
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