Featured
How civil rights attorney Ben Crump forged his own path. By AP and NBC News
Ben Crump, the Rev. Al Sharpton says, is “Black America’s attorney general.” In less than a decade, the Florida-based attorney has become the voice for the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd — Black people whose deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes sparked a movement. He has won multimillion-dollar settlements in police brutality cases. He’s pushed cities to ban no-knock warrants. He has told a congressional committee that reform is needed because “it’s become painfully obvious we have two systems of justice; one for white Americans and one for Black Americans.” Read more
Related: Inside Ben Crump’s Fight to Make America Value Black Life. By Janell Ross / Time
Political / Social
The space filled by Al Sharpton’s prayers and politics. By Robin Givhan / Wash Post
The Rev. Al Sharpton began his remarks the way that so many ministers do. For the first few minutes that he stood at the lectern in his dark suit with a handkerchief billowing from his breast pocket like a cumulus cloud, he cleared his throat. He did so by first acknowledging the other clergy who were present at the Monday afternoon funeral of Andrew Brown Jr. Then he expressed his condolences to Brown’s family and other mourners who had experienced similar losses. Read more
Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy. By Thomas L. Friedman / NYT
President Biden’s early success in getting Americans vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of American life has been a blessing for the country. But it’s also lulled many into thinking that Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, which propelled the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, would surely fade away and everything would return to normal. It hasn’t. Read more
Related: The GOP’s devotion to Trump threatens to destroy American democracy. By Stephen Collinson / CNN
Related: Latino Republican support for Trump is still going strong in Florida. By Carmen Sesin / NBC News
Related: Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope. By Nate Cohn / NYT
Despite business warnings, GOP moves ahead with voting bills.
Attorney General Merrick Garland cites domestic terrorism and civil rights in defending budget to House lawmakers. By Christina Carrega, Chandelis Duster and Jessica Schneider / CNN
Merrick Garland stepped into his first congressional hot seat as attorney general Tuesday morning, testifying before the House Appropriations Committee to propose a multibillion-dollar budget increase for the Justice Department. Part of the funding boost is needed to combat domestic terrorism, which Garland said keeps him up at night. “We have a growing fear of domestic violent extremism, and domestic terrorism. Both of those keep me up at night every morning, virtually every morning I get a briefing from the FBI and both one or the other or both areas,” the attorney general said. Read more
Asian-American Business Leaders Fund Effort to Fight Discrimination. Andrew Ross Sorkin and / NYTSome of the wealthiest and most influential Asian-American business leaders are mounting an ambitious plan to challenge anti-Asian discrimination, rewrite school curriculums to reflect the role of Asian-Americans in history and collect data to guide policymakers. The group has pledged $125 million to a new initiative, the Asian American Foundation. The foundation has raised another $125 million from organizations like Walmart, Bank of America, the Ford Foundation and the National Basketball Association. Shown is Jerry Yang, a Yahoo co-founder, is among the backers of the newly formed Asian American Foundation. Read more
Justice Clarence Thomas, Long Silent, Has Turned Talkative. By Adam Liptak / NYT
Justice Clarence Thomas, who once went a decade without asking a question from the Supreme Court bench, is about to complete a term in which he was an active participant in every single argument. Justice Thomas’s switch from monkish silence to gregarious engagement is a byproduct of the pandemic, during which the court has heard arguments by telephone. The justices now ask questions one at a time, in order of seniority. Read more
Help, We Can’t Stop Writing About Andrew Yang. By Ben Smith / NYT
In January of last year, as the Iowa caucuses neared and before I’d heard of Covid-19, I asked Andrew Yang if running for mayor of New York wouldn’t make more sense than his improbable presidential campaign. “After eight years as president, we’ll see if I have an appetite for mayor,” he replied. But Mr. Yang’s surprising popularity may also reflect how the city’s establishment left, and its echo chamber on Twitter, are pulling the campaign away from the concerns of some voters, leaving Mr. Yang as the sole candidate speaking to them. Read more
Is America a Racist Country. By Charles M. Blow / NYT
Last Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday” that “our systems are not racist. America’s not a racist country.” Graham argued that the country can’t be racist because both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that the exceptions somehow negated the rule. Read more
Joy Reid Takes Tucker Carlson’s ‘Race Lady’ Dog Whistle, Throws It Back At ‘Tuckums.’ By Lee Moran / HuffPost
MSNBC anchor Joy Reid on Tuesday ridiculed Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s repeated derogatory description of her as “the race lady.” “The ReidOut” host noted she spends little time watching the conservative network. “Personally, I prefer my news and information to be grounded in reality, rather than monetizing my amygdala to keep me on edge and buying MyPillows and gold,” she explained. Read more
As schools expand racial equity work, conservatives see a new threat in critical race theory. By Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson / Wash Post
Some Black parents say remote learning gives racism reprieve. By Christine Fernando / AP and ABC News
Before schools shuttered during the pandemic, Ayaana Johnson worried every time she dropped her daughters off at school. Johnson, a Black woman, says racism is rampant in her predominantly white Georgia town. At her daughters’ school, a student once used racial slurs and told another child he doesn’t play with “brown people.” She says teachers are quick to punish or reprimand Black children and Ku Klux Klan flyers can be found in mailboxes. Black parents are finding another benefit to remote learning: being better able to shield their children from racism in classrooms. “Now that they’re home, we feel safer,” said Johnson, who was keeping her two young daughters home despite options being made available for in-person learning. Read more
Child Protective Services Investigates Half of all Black Children in California. By Julia Lurie / Mother Jones
For decades, researchers have pointed out that the child welfare system is riddled with inequities. Black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to be investigated as victims of abuse and neglect, to be placed in foster care, and to be permanently separated from their biological parents. “Spend a day at dependency court in any major city and you will see the unmistakable color of the child welfare system,” wrote Dorothy Roberts, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, in her 2001 book, Shattered Bonds. “The disproportionate number of Black children in America’s child welfare system is staggering.” Read more
White Covid vaccine rejectors threaten herd immunity. Can we change their minds in time? By Dr. Rob Davidson / NBC News
Vaccine refusal — not reluctance, not “maybe later,” but flat-out rejection — could prevent us from reaching the threshold when epidemiologists say we can safely and responsibly fully reopen all aspects of society. Recent surveys like this one from CNN put that number at around one in four people. In rural, overwhelmingly white places like rural western Michigan, these are the folks who stagger into the Emergency Room, sick and struggling to breathe, yet still tell nurses and doctors that neither Covid-19, masks and vaccines are real. Read more
Erica Chidi Is Helping Black Women Understand Their Bodies In A Broken Health Care System. By Clare Fallon / HuffPost
In the course of a career largely devoted to women’s sexual and reproductive health care, Chidi has been a health educator, a doula, an advocate for reproductive justice for Black and incarcerated women and a startup founder. One thing has been consistent, through a litany of roles: She wants women — especially Black women — to understand their bodies, and to be understood. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Entwined History of Freedom and Racism. By Olúfémi O. Táíwò / The Nation
Give us liberty and give them death,” said David Duke at a rally for the Ku Klux Klan in Baton Rouge, La., in 1975. His thunderous words were a play on the famous quotation from Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Henry’s statement was intended to express his commitment to the well-known American ideal of freedom, which he and his peers took to be at stake in their forthcoming revolutionary struggle with the British Empire. But when Duke gave this speech as the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he had in mind another ideal with deep roots in American history: racial domination. Read more
The First Africans in America. Black America’s Neglected Origin Stories. By Annette Gordon-Reed / The Atlantic
When i was growing up in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, my classmates and I took Texas history twice, in the fourth and seventh grades. We learned about Texas’s history in the United States, its previous existence as a republic, and its time as a province of Mexico. Among other things, we were exhorted to “remember the Alamo” and “remember Goliad,” famous events in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico. Some other aspects of the state’s history were less covered. I didn’t need school lessons to tell me that Black people had been enslaved in Texas, but in the early days of my education, the subject was not often mentioned. Read more
1619 is a pivotal date in American history for two reasons. By Rebecca Ruiz / Mashable
We look to history to help us understand who we are today. Yet history is also an imperfect, often inadequate record of events. Depending on who is depicting the past, certain truths go untold. That is indeed the lesson of 1619, a year that few people understood as significant in American and African-American history until nearly two years ago. When the New York Times published the 1619 Project in August 2019, it marked the 400th anniversary since the first Africans arrived in a mainland English colony. Historians believe this group of captives arrived in Virginia as slaves aboard English privateer ships. Read more
Related: Nikole Hannah-Jones Responds To Republican Efforts To Censor 1619 Project. / HuffPost
GOP State Lawmaker Slammed For Saying 3/5 Compromise Aimed To End Slavery. / HuffPost
Tennessee state Rep. Justin Lafferty (R) has been fact-checked by historians and accused of trying to distort U.S. history after he argued in a state House floor speech Tuesday that the Three-Fifths Compromise was established “for the purpose of ending slavery.” The Three-Fifths Compromise was an agreement reached at the nation’s founding that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining a state’s population. Slave states wanted to count their entire enslaved population for representation in Congress, and Northern states did not want them counted at all. The agreement ultimately gave slaveholders outsized representation and influence in government. Read more
VMI votes to scrub Stonewall Jackson from buildings. By Ian Shapira / Wash Post
The Virginia Military Institute, which was pressured last year to remove a prominent statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, took more steps to reduce its lingering tributes to the Civil War leader, a former professor at the college who owned six enslaved people. In its most notable decision made Saturday, the college’s Board of Visitors voted to erase Jackson’s name as the author of a quotation mounted in bronze in the student barracks — a mantra that cadets and alumni memorize and has been engraved in class rings: “You may be whatever you resolve to be.” Read more
Freedom Riders marker in Fredericksburg, Va., tells the ‘untold story.’ By Rachel Hatzipanagos / Wash Post
The Fredericksburg Greyhound bus depot was the first stop for the Freedom Riders, a group that started with 13 and grew to more than 400 Black and White civil rights activists who in 1961 rode regularly scheduled buses through the South to challenge the segregated interstate travel system. They were threatened, brutally attacked, jailed — even firebombed along the way. The revelation from a book by historian Raymond Arsenault really illustrated for Williams how little of Black American history is taught and commemorated. Read more
There’s No Classics ‘Catastrophe’ at Howard University. Brandon Hogan and
Freed by Bryan Stevenson, a former inmate writes his story. By Stuart Miller / LA Times
As a child in one of Tampa, Fla.’s poorest and most violent housing projects, Ian Manuel was abused or abandoned by each member of his immediate family. As a 13-year-old in 1990, he shot a woman in the face during a robbery gone awry. Manuel confessed to the crime, but the judge said he wanted to make an example of the boy and sentenced him to life without parole (plus 40 years). “They decided I was never fit to live in society again,” Manuel says. From there, it got far worse. Manuel was subjected to what many would consider cruel and unusual punishment. Starting at age 15 in 1992, he spent nearly all of the next 18 years in solitary confinement. Read more
Carl Lumbly Never Misses. By Cole Delbyck / HuffPost
Now, at 69 years old, the actor is finally getting his flowers for his powerhouse turn as Marvel’s forgotten super-soldier, Isaiah Bradley, aka the original Black Captain America, on “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” But, however overdue this moment is for Lumbly, it’s also a bittersweet measure of how times have changed. Nearly 30 years ago, the actor played the first Black superhero on prime-time television in “M.A.N.T.I.S.,” a one-season wonder that was effectively whitewashed after a groundbreaking pilot. Read more
Sports
Willie Mays Carries the Torch for His Generation.
His self-discipline made possible an epic career that began with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948, reached exalted heights with the New York Giants in the 1950s and didn’t end until 1973. Playing center field for 22 years in Major League Baseball, with a record 7,095 putouts and with 6,066 total bases, Mays surely ran more miles on the field, and with greater speed and more style, than any player before or since. Read more
Why were HBCU players shut out of 2021 NFL draft? By David Steele / The Undefeated
The 2021 NFL draft ended without a single player from a historically Black college and university (HBCU) being selected. In a less disrupted year, North Carolina A&T defensive back Mac McCain and Fayetteville State tackle Kion Smith, to sign as undrafted free agents, and any number of the others, as well as the players who found their way onto a roster or practice squad last season, might have heard their names called during the draft. And while the 2021 shutout fed the growing concern that HBCUs were disappearing from the NFL’s radar for good, all small schools were severely hampered by the havoc wreaked by the pandemic. Read more
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