Civil Rights
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The Classical Liberal Foundation of Civil Rights June 27, 2025
The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism....
Long History of National Guard Deployments June 11, 2025
President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles to stop protests against his immigration crackdown isn’t the first time an elected U.S. official has sent troops to thwart unrest over civil rights....
The “Jewel of the Delta” Proves the Upside of Free Speech March 28, 2025
Margaret Brennan, the moderator of Face the Nation, recently stated matter-of-factly that the Nazis had “weaponized free speech” to bring about the Holocaust. She is not alone in holding the belief that free speech, if not constrained, will be manipu...
Did Martin Luther King, Jr. Convert His Enemies? January 20, 2025
Martin Luther King, Jr. said the goal of the civil rights movement should be to turn an enemy into a friend. It can be done, he said, because people aren’t simply good or evil. “There is something within human nature that can respond to goodness,” Ki...
Why Abolitionists Defended Free Speech December 19, 2024
Today the immorality of chattel slavery is painfully obvious, but that has not always been the case. ...
When White Supremacists Staged a Coup November 11, 2024
The 1898 Wilmington massacre left dozens of Black North Carolinians dead. Conspirators also forced the city's multiracial government to resign at gunpoint....
Watch: The History of Reparations August 27, 2024
In 2014, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article for The Atlantic “The Case for Reparations” went viral....
Site of 1908 Race Riot to Become National Monument August 19, 2024
In 1908, a white lynch mob of thousands terrorized a Black neighborhood in Springfield, Ill. The events were so horrific they led to the founding of the NAACP....
The British History of Riots and Racial Progress. August 12, 2024
Though the past few days have been painful, there is a pattern stretching back to the 12th century, says historian Robert Winder...
60 Years of Freedom Summer August 10, 2024
60 Years of Freedom SummerLegacies and Lessons from the Trailblazing Voting Rights ProjectBy Gianna BaezSocial Media StrategistIt’s 1963 in Mississippi. Black people are payin...
The History of the Freedom Waders at Rainbow Beach August 09, 2024
Velma and Norman Hill confronted mob violence to integrate Chicago's beaches during the civil rights movement....
The First Woman of Color to Run For US Vice President July 25, 2024
Before Kamala Harris, there was Charlotta Bass. Historian Sonia Grant explores the overlooked life of a journalist and civil rights activist who became a target of both the FBI and Ku Klux Klan – and who, in 1952, became the first woman of colour to ...
Buses Weren’t Montgomery's Only Civil Rights Scene July 25, 2024
Montgomery once closed all of its parks rather than desegregate them. Today, the city’s long history of racial inequality is still reflected in the state of its parks and green spaces....
Road to Rickwood: America's Oldest Ballpark July 12, 2024
Birmingham, Alabama was one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement. And in order to understand the struggle, you don't have to look any further than Rickwood Field, the oldest baseball stadium in the country. Over more than a cent...
How Well Did The Civil Rights Act Live Up To Its Promise? July 06, 2024
In the summer of 1963, an estimated quarter of a million people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington....
Boer Wars Changed Warfare May 31, 2023
The South African War, sometimes called the Boer War or Anglo-Boer War, was the first major conflict of a century that was to be marked by wars on an international scale. It demonstrated the inadequacy of 19th century military methods and raised issu...
A Newspaper Family's Story of Tulsa Riots May 31, 2023
hey called it the Eden of the West. When boosters crafted tales of the land known as the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, and eventually Oklahoma, they wrote of fertile soil that could grow any crop, yielding shoulder-high acres of wheat and melons re...
Dylan a Legend Because He Said 'No' to Politics May 24, 2023
As the children of the Sixties tried to crown Bob Dylan their poet laureate, he refused. “I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know,” he said in 1965. Dylan was the rare celebrity who downplayed the worshipful titles offered him — poet, ...
The Bitter Fruits of Forced Desegregation Busing May 16, 2023
It's the story South Boston schoolboys love to hear. On March 4, 1776, under cover of darkness, General George Washington ordered his men to position dozens of captured British cannon atop Dorchester Heights. The code word that night was "Boston" and...
Eerie Photos From Night MLK Was Shot April 04, 2023
On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men jumped into their car, raced the 200 miles to the ...
MLK, RFK, LBJ, and a Fateful Week April 03, 2023
Lyndon Johnson's presidency was collapsing. By day, LBJ watched as the Vietnam War worsened and his polls and credibility plummeted. Brave boasts by the generals that they could see the light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam had been swept away; n...
Live the Selma to Montgomery March March 21, 2023
Only 54 miles separate Selma and Montgomery, but that span changed history. A five-day protest march to Montgomery in March 1965 riveted the nation, and attracted protesters from across the globe.Follow the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights trail.When...
How John Birch Society Shaped GOP March 20, 2023
Before the 2016 presidential election and Trumpism, before Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, there was the John Birch Society: Founded in 1958 at a secret meeting of 12 men, the group was named after a young missionary and intelligence officer who was k...
Rodney King Injuries, Riots in Photos March 03, 2023
**WARNING: Graphic Content** Steven Lerman, attorney for Rodney King, displays a photo of his client during a press conference at his office in Beverly Hills, California, Friday, March 8, 1991. King's doctor outlined the extent of man's injuries for ...
Tribes Took a Stand During Overlooked 71-Day Siege February 27, 2023
Stephanie Autumn was a college freshman in Los Angeles when she and several other Native Americans joined the call of Oglala Lakota people in February 1973 to help occupy Wounded Knee, S.D., in a stand for their sovereign rights.The daughter of a whi...
This WW II Battalion Provided a Lifeline to Home February 17, 2023
In 1927, an unlikely friendship arose between educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune and future First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, based on a shared belief in the power of education. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, Bet...
From Marine to Murderer: Byron De La Beckwith February 03, 2023
Born in California in 1920, Byron De La Beckwith grew up in Mississippi. A segregationist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, he shot and killed NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. Though he was arrested for the crime, two all-white juri...
When LBJ Disappointed Everyone on Civil Rights January 24, 2023
On August 7, 1957, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson voted yea on the first civil rights bill passed by Congress in 82 years. He was joined by 71 of his Senate colleagues, including 43 Republicans and 28 Democrats, 4 of them liberals from the ...
Unmarked Graves May Be Victims of Tulsa Race Riot November 04, 2022
Another 24 unmarked graves, possibly holding victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, have been discovered in a cemetery in the city, according to an update from the state archaeologist.The newly found burials bring the total of unmarked ...
This Is the Day the Alt-Right Started November 03, 2022
Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signpo...
Grant Did Some Things Right October 17, 2022
Ulysses S. Grant's rank among American heroes rivaled Lincoln's while he lived, but after the Civil War general and 18th president died in 1885 his reputation declined.Grant had experienced great adversity during his life, much of it spent as a faile...
There Were Consequences for1968 Olympic Protest October 17, 2022
When the medals were awarded for the men's 200-meter sprint at the 1968 Olympic Games, Life magazine photographer John Dominis was only about 20 feet away from the podium. "I didn't think it was a big news event," Dominis says. "I was expecting a nor...
Horrifying Account of True 'BlacKkKlansman' Lynching August 12, 2022
The Waco HorrorAn account of the recent burning of a human being at Waco, Tex., as reported by a special agent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York City.1. The City.The city of Waco, Tex., is th...
Civil Rights Activism Gone Astray August 11, 2022
While many people this month are focused on the controversy surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I have another civil-rights-related 40th anniversary on my mind. On Aug. 11, 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles br...
Grand Jury Fails to Indict Till Accuser August 11, 2022
A grand jury in Mississippi has declined to indict the White woman who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of making advances toward her nearly 70 years ago, allegations that led to the Black teen's brutal death.A Leflore County grand jury last week hear...
'Mississippi Burning' Murders and Trial in Photos August 04, 2022
This undated file combination photo made from photos provided by the FBI on June 29, 1964, shows civil rights workers, from left, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. The three, who disappeared near Philadelphia, Miss., on June 21, 196...
Are Race Riots News? July 22, 2022
When I first saw a book with the title, â??White Girl Bleed A Lotâ? by Colin Flaherty, I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author. That is because I had encountered th...
Black Soldiers Join Bloody Battle July 18, 2022
Tired, hungry and proud, the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry stood in the light of the setting sun and awaited the call to battle on the evening of July 18, 1863. The air was filled with the rumble of big guns, and the ver...
Jackie Robinson's Court Martial July 06, 2022
ON JULY 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. Sixteen months later he would be tapped as the man to break baseball’s color barrier, but in 1944 he was one of thousands of blacks thrust i...
How Liquor Licenses Sparked Stonewall Riots June 28, 2022
The history of the gay rights movement can be traced to the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village, which is considered by many to be the launch of the modern gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights movement. June of 2009 marked the 40th...
Title IX Needs to Change June 27, 2022
The law that transformed sports for women and girls is turning 50. On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, as part of sweeping reforms to the education system. When the law ...
Real Story Behind 'Mississippi Burning' June 22, 2022
It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. All three shot in t...
Exploring Complexities of Black Community's View of Abortion June 21, 2022
Recently, the New York Times reported on the gruesome 20th century history of sterilization in the United States and centered it on two black sisters who were coerced into being sterilized when they were teenagers. At least for some, the abortion hi...
KKK Kills 2 Civil Rights Activists June 20, 2022
Murder Motivated the Civil Rights Movement June 14, 2022
He had planned to vote. But in 1946, a 21-year-old Medgar Evers left the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi, without casting a ballot. Twenty armed white men, some of whom had been his childhood friends, had learned of his plans to vote and turned up...
What Was the Tulsa Race Riot? June 01, 2022
May 31, 2021, marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, an event that only recently has come to the wider attention of the American public. Although it was one of the worst race massacres in American history, it took 76 for it to be inv...
Plessy and Road to Jim Crow May 17, 2022
In the spring of 1885, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain's friend, neighbor, and onetime collaborator from Hartford, Connecticut, visited the International Exposition at New Orleans. He was astonished to find that “white and colored people mingled f...
Bob Dylan Walked Out on Ed Sullivan. Here's Why May 12, 2022
By the mid '60s, Bob Dylan was known for toying with the media as much as he was known for his songwriting; most famously, in 1965 when he cryptically answered questions in a San Francisco press conference on the eve of his biggest tour to date (post...
Rise and Fall of Mexico's Last Emperor May 06, 2022
LATIN AMERICA has had two empires in its post-colonial history. One was the Brazilian Empire, which came into being in September 1822 as a representative parliamentary constitutional monarchy under Dom Pedro I. The empire continued under his son, Dom...
James Earl Ray's Jailbreak Inspired Ultra Marathon May 03, 2022
Petros, TennesseeCNN — Fifty years ago, a career criminal named James Earl Ray traveled from Atlanta to Memphis, stalking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was there to energize a strike of sanitation workers asking for better w...
How Jackie Robinson Changed America April 14, 2022
Jackie Robinson's story is of another place and time, another America. If you're of a certain age, you'll have trouble comprehending that it really existed. For many, it flickers only in the grainy black-and-white images of a different United States....
Return Jefferson Statues to Their Rightful Places April 14, 2022
On Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, we should take our cue from the Tulsa Star, a now-defunct black newspaper. Its masthead from 1920 included statements of religious and political faith, including a paraphrase from the Declaration of Independence: “‘All...
The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr. April 04, 2022
On October 10, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy committed what is widely viewed as one of the most ignominious acts in modern American history: he authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin wiretapping the telephones of the...
Night MLK Murdered in Eerie, Telling Pictures April 04, 2022
On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men jumped into their car, raced the 200 miles to the ...
MLK's Family Doesn't Think Ray Was His Killer March 10, 2022
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. An hour later, he was declared dead. For some 50 years, the federal government has maintained that James Earl Ray was th...
Brown Decision and Fight for Racial Identity March 07, 2022
enneth B. Clark was born in 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone, grew up in Harlem, and attended Howard University, where he majored in psychology and where he met and married Mamie Phipps. Phipps was a math major, but Clark persuaded her to switch to psyc...
MLK Didn't Just Want Civil Rights in America January 14, 2022
On July 2, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. stood behind President Lyndon Baines Johnson as the Texan signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although not the first civil rights bill passed by Congress, it was the most comprehensive.King called the...
Decline of Holmes' Supreme Court Legacy January 12, 2022
Once upon a time, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was the great modern American jurist. The “Yankee from Olympus,” as Catherine Drinker Bowen’s 1944 biography called Holmes, was the first celebrity justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, as popular then as the ...
Start to Finish of 'The Troubles' January 04, 2022
February 1967: The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) is founded as a non-sectarian organisation to tackle the perceived bias of the Unionist majority government against the nationalist minority. They list six areas of reform of local ...
Bloody, Violent History of KKK December 24, 2021
At the end of the American Civil War radical members of Congress attempted to destroy the white power structure of the Rebel states. The Freeman's Bureau was established by Congress on 3rd March, 1865. The bureau was designed to protect the interest...
A Bus Ride That Changed America November 30, 2021
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American woman who worked as a seamstress, boarded this Montgomery City bus to go home from work. On this bus on that day, Rosa Parks initiated a new era in the American quest for freedom and equ...
2 Convicted of Malcolm X Murder Exonerated November 22, 2021
Two men who for decades steadfastly maintained their innocence in the 1965 assassination of civil rights icon Malcolm X are set to be exonerated Thursday, after a nearly two-year-long re-investigation.Muhammad Aziz, now 83, and the late Khalil Islam ...
Beyond JFK's Mythology: A Beautiful Mediocrity November 22, 2021
By almost any measure, John F. Kennedy was a middling president at best, and an occasionally disastrous one. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, setting the nation on the wrong course in Vietnam, his nepotism, the spying on political ri...
Analyzing C-SPAN's Best-Worst President's List November 16, 2021
C-SPAN recently released its fourth historian’s survey ranking presidents from best to worst. Their previous surveys were performed in 2000, 2009, and 2017.Historians rated the presidents on 10 characteristics:Public PersuasionCrises LeadershipEconom...
These People Shaped Civil Rights Debate November 01, 2021
6 oppositionistsRichard RussellThe patriarch of the obstructionist Southern caucus, and long-serving Senator for Georgia. Russell repeatedly marshalled the conservative Southern Democrats into opposing any Civil Rights legislation.George WallaceTusca...
Parks Wasn't Exactly the Innocent She's Portrayed As November 01, 2021
Thursday marks the 61st anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white man — an action that got her arrested, sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, and arguably kicked off the civil rights movement as we...
Eisenhower a Key Force for Civil Rights September 23, 2021
Next week in Little Rock, Ark., former President Bill Clinton and several presidential candidates will commemorate perhaps Americaâ??s most important civil rights battle â?? the desegregation of Central High School.Fifty years ago, Democratic Gov. Or...
'1776 Unites Curriculum' Keys on American Character September 17, 2021
Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson Center focused on reviving Ame...
Unspeakable Murder of Emmett Till August 27, 2021
The dentist was a few minutes late, so I waited by the barn, listening to a northern mockingbird in the cypress trees. His tires kicked up dust when he turned off Drew Ruleville Road and headed across the bayou toward his house. He got out of his tru...
Most Destructive Riots in U.S. History August 11, 2021
On January 25, 2011, the people of Egypt took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to protest the government of President Hosni Mubarak, who has kept the nation under a state of emergency for three decades. The riots have continued unabated into t...
Voting Rights Act and Battle of Voter ID August 05, 2021
A landmark federal law used to block the adoption of state voter identification cards and other election rules now faces unprecedented legal challenges. A record five federal lawsuits filed this year challenge the constitutionality of a key provisio...
Lies, Law Enforcement, and a Lynching August 04, 2021
It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. All three shot in t...
Was Andrew Johnson a 'Defender of the Constitution?' July 27, 2021
The House impeachment was cast as the culmination of a partisan witch hunt (though not using that phrase) and the Senate acquittal was characterized as safeguarding democracy and constitutional government. The former home of Andrew Johnson in Greenv...
Why Chicago Went Up in Flames July 27, 2021
As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full ...
Pepperdine School of Public Policy Instills Civic Duty July 02, 2021
“The teaching of civics and American history must be framed as a welcome to all who would seek to be engaged citizens,” says Pete Peterson, dean of The Pepperdine School of Public Policy (SPP). Civic education, he notes, should produce “humble and pa...
History, Legal Look: Mississippi Killings June 21, 2021
In Mississippi, in the 1960s, when segregation was king, racism the status quo, and bigotry the law, it was young people who rose up and challenged the system. In racially segregated and economically depressed Neshoba County, Mississippi, it was the ...
Segregationist Ex-Governor Dead at 99 June 07, 2021
John M. Patterson, a defiant segregationist who defeated and preceded George C. Wallace as the governor of Alabama as the South plunged into the violence and turmoil of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and ’60s, died on Friday at his home ...
Tulsa Massacre: A Family Ruined June 01, 2021
Jack Scott, a 33-year-old professional boxer-turned-trainer who lived in Tulsa’s thriving Greenwood neighborhood, would often tell his wife Daisy, “We’re going to be rich one day.”On May 31, 1921, he found himself outside the county courthouse, one o...
How Armed Koreans Beat Back Rioters April 27, 2021
The nation's largest Korean-American community is grim, armed and determined to repel racial violence in its riot-scarred corner of the city. A vigilante Korean security force, wearing white scarves, is patrolling the burned and looted shops of Korea...
1776: Natural Rights, Religious Liberty April 21, 2021
he meaning of religious freedom remains one of the more contested areas of our constitutional politics. The progressive left tends to emphasize freedom from religion, especially freedom from the influence of traditional religious sexual morality. Soc...
Robinson's MLB Signing Wasn't All That Simple April 15, 2021
On Thursday, every Major League Baseball player will don a No. 42 jersey in honor of Jackie Robinson Day. The annual event, celebrated officially since 2004, marks the anniversary of Robinson’s major league debut in 1947, which broke baseball’s color...
A Bloody History of 'The Troubles' in Ireland April 08, 2021
“The Troubles” between Northern Ireland and Ireland date back to 1167 when England first laid roots in Ireland, but in recent history “The Troubles” refer to the 30 years of conflict over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. The Unionist si...
How Gospel Singer Inspired 'I Had a Dream' Speech April 05, 2021
Long before his most famous August 28, 1963, speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. He talked about that dream the previous April at a 16th Street Baptist Church meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, of “seeing Neg...
True Texas Western Story Beats Fiction March 18, 2021
"Glory Road" is a magnificent story. A high school girls basketball coach gets the job at Texas Western, an obscure mining school in El Paso, in 1965. He and his family live in a dormitory. With no talent and no recruiting budget, he talks seven blac...
'Bloody Sunday' Pushes Civil Rights Forward March 05, 2021
Sunday, March 7th, is cold and windy. Tension grips the city, and the air seems pregnant with potential violence. Cars filled with white thugs prowl the Selma streets looking for trouble. Just over the Edmund Pettus bridge, a swarm of state troopers,...
More to Medgar Evers Than His Murder February 05, 2021
Medgar Wiley Evers was born in 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi, to James and Jessie Evers. During his childhood in Decatur, Eversencountered overt racism on a daily basis. When he was twelve years old, a family friend was lynched, and the man’s bloody c...
Arthur Ashe Was Truly the Definition of Good February 05, 2021
In 1973, after years of trying, Arthur Ashe wrangled an invitation to play in the South African Open tennis tournament. He wanted to see for himself how the world might help press South Africa to ease its system of racial oppression, its apartheid. I...
Progress Since MLK's Death? Not So Much January 18, 2021
On Apr. 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while assisting striking sanitation workers.Back then, over a half century ago, the wholesale racial integration required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act was just beginn...
Worst Decision Ever Made by Supreme Court January 06, 2021
As a young man, Roger Taney gave no sign of becoming the most notorious defender of slavery in the history of American jurisprudence. Indeed, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Taney practiced law in Frederick, Maryland, just below the M...
Ku Klux Klan Didn't Plan to Be Violent December 24, 2020
What began on Christmas Eve 1865 as a social group, grew to a terror organisation that by the 1920s reached peak membership of up to six million people across the United States.From its humble beginnings, the Ku Klux Klan heralded an horrific chapter...
1776: Freedom of Speech vs. Identity Politics December 02, 2020
Much evidence suggests that freedom of speech may be banned in the coming years under the guise of regulating “hate speech.” Many on the left who demand and welcome this development do not foresee the broad consequences of their actions. Nor do many ...
Rosa Parks: A Defiant, Reluctant Pioneer December 01, 2020
Most historians date the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the United States to December 1, 1955. That was the day when an unknown seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This brave woman...
Rosa Parks Didn't Go It Alone in Bus Boycott December 01, 2020
“People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. — and they should. And they know that it was the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement,” says Ula Taylor, a professor in the Depart...
Did Branch Rickey Sell Out Jackie Robinson? October 29, 2020
As the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs faced off in the World Series, photographer Maurice Terrell arrived at an almost deserted minor-league park in San Diego, California, to carry out a top-secret assignment: to surreptitiously photograph three bla...
1776: Stop Looking to SCOTUS for Pollicy October 29, 2020
Last June, the Supreme Court made its ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, a case that asked whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employers from discriminating against gay or transgender people. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, S...
Harding Takes on Southern Racism October 21, 2020
On this day in 1921, President Warren Harding delivered the first speech by a president condemning the lynching of blacks by Southerners. Harding spoke out against these illegal hangings â?? committed primarily by white supremacists â?? in Birmingham...
Grant: From Civil War to Civil Rights October 15, 2020
In Hopes of Genuine Brotherhood October 14, 2020
I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is movi...
James Burnham’s Analysis of Leftist Revolutionaries Speaks to Today’s Crisis October 02, 2020
The rioting, looting, and violence in the streets of some of our major cities have not stopped. The Leftist, anarchist, revolutionary movements continue their self-proclaimed program to eradicate “systemic racism” by attempting to erase history, sile...
Why Carter Kept His Civil Rights' Stance Secret September 22, 2020
As he nears his 96th birthday, Jimmy Carter is revered by many as a moral exemplar—the rare political figure who, whatever his shortcomings, lives his values. But that wasn’t always so.In the 1960s, as a state senator from southwest Georgia, Mr. Cart...
Fritz Pollard: A Pro Football Pioneer September 17, 2020
When I started research for this story, I had assumed that Fritz Pollard was a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I knew he had been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame some 50 years before, and had made a bigger mark in the profess...
MLK Jr. Died, But This Rally Went On August 27, 2020
IN MAY 1968, JUST A month after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, around 3,000 protesters converged in Washington, D.C., to stage a campaign that the civil rights leader had been planning. Known as the Poor People’s Campaign, or PPC, it repres...
America's Latest Suicide Attempt August 19, 2020
In 1983, British historian Paul Johnson wrote "Modern Times," perhaps the most insightful analysis of world history from the First World War to the 1980s. One of the chapters in that book is titled “America’s Suicide Attempt,” and therein Johnson exa...
Lincoln Thought He'd Lose Civil-War Election August 14, 2020
The outlook was not promising in 1864 for President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection.Hundreds of thousands of Americans had been killed, wounded or displaced in a civil war with no end in sight. Lincoln was unpopular. Radical Republicans in his own party...
Black Celebration in Public Spaces Nothing New August 13, 2020
From Richmond to New York City to Seattle, anti-racist activists are getting results as Confederate monuments are coming down by the dozens.In Richmond, Virginia, protesters have changed the story of Lee Circle, home to a 130-year-old monument to Con...
Mississippi Civil Rights Horror: Arrests to Murders to Trial August 04, 2020
The KKK was in a murderous mood. It was June 1964—the start of “Freedom Summer,” a massive three-month initiative to register southern blacks to vote and a direct response to the Klan’s own campaign of fear and intimidation.The Klan in Mississippi, i...
Meet Bill Scott, Man Who Started Detroit Riots July 23, 2020
As much of the city slept, 19-year-old William Walter Scott III stood at the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount, watching as police escorted scores of black patrons out of a blind pig on Detroit’s west side.Bill Scott (courtesy photo) Bill Scott (c...
Don't Blame Riot for Detroit's Demise July 22, 2020
Some year, July 23 will pass in metro Detroit without reexaminations of the 1967 riot/rebellion/insurrection/civil disturbance. Some year, the scratchy images of Motown's version of the Summer of Love — burning buildings, looted stores, sniper fire, ...
What Lewis Did for Democracy July 20, 2020
By the time John Lewis made his exit from this realm, on Friday, his life had been bound so tightly and for so long to the mythos of the movement for democracy in America that it was difficult to separate him from it. For this reason, a friend who te...
Remembering Lewis and the Freedom Riders July 20, 2020
Representative John Lewis, who died on Friday at 80, was an imposing figure in American politics and the civil rights movement. But his legacy of confronting racism directly, while never swaying from his commitment to nonviolence, started long before...
History of Colored Troops in Civil War July 17, 2020
Approximately 180,000 African-Americans comprising 163 units served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and many more African-Americans served in the Union Navy. Both free Africans-Americans and runaway slaves joined the fight. On July 17, 1862, ...
Is Atticus Finch Still a Hero? July 10, 2020
Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictio...
Kerner Reports Contemplates Philanthropy July 09, 2020
After rioting had erupted in several American cities beginning in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed the 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967. Chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, the group became known as the...
Mississippi Flag on the Outs? June 29, 2020
JACKSON, Miss. — A flag stamped with a defiant tribute to Mississippi’s Confederate past has been raised on the grounds of the State Capitol for well over a century.It flew when the Civil War was not yet distant history and when segregation was fierc...
Survivor of Last Transatlantic Slave Ship Identified June 26, 2020
A woman called Matilda McCrear has been identified as the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade.Dr Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University discovered Matilda to be the latest survivor of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the...
How James Baldwin Us to See America June 23, 2020
In March 16, 1968, James Baldwin walked to the podium at a fund-raiser, at Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel, to introduce Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin had recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York, after Columbia Pictures had bought the rights t...
West Virginia Struggles With Its Identity June 22, 2020
As statues of Confederate generals have been toppled or ordered down across the American South, all still stand in West Virginia, the only state born out of the American Civil War.One hundred fifty-seven years ago Saturday, West Virginia seceded from...
The Trial of 'Mississippi Burning' June 22, 2020
It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. All three shot in...
Link Between Camera, Civil Rights June 19, 2020
Shocking Lynching Stains Minnesota June 15, 2020
On June 15, 1920, police arrest several young black men accused of raping a white woman. That evening, three of them – Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob and lynched.The Circus Comes to Town It was the John ...
How Great Society Harmed America's Blacks May 20, 2020
In 1964, Republicans – led by Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. – were responsible for the Civil Rights Act, which overturned 80 years of Democratic opposition to ending race-based and gender-based inequality. It was intended to provide all peoples, regar...
Did Andrew Johnson Buy Vote for Acquittal? May 15, 2020
In May, 1868, the Senate came within a single vote of taking the unprecedented step of removing a president from office. Although the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson was ostensibly about a violation of the Tenure of Office Act, it was about muc...
Bull Connor: Racist Till Death May 01, 2020
"Negroes and whites will not segregate together as long as I am Commissioner." If the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's had a defining conflict, it was epitomized by the clash of two strong personalities, each convinced that he was in the right of...
Untold Story of L.A. Riots April 27, 2020
Well before he heard the first siren, Rodney King knew he never should have slipped that key into the ignition. They had been having so much fun, he and his buddies Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, just kicking back, sipping some inexpensive 40-ounce ...
Hofstadter Was Wrong About Conservatism April 22, 2020
In another journalistic life, I worked at an estimable Beltway publication covering the daily business of Congress. One of the early directives I encountered there concerned the use of the word “reform” in connection with any pending legislation. The...
Robinson's First 10 Days in MLB Were No Cakewalk April 15, 2020
The front page of the morning’s New York Times contained stories on U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall’s plan to keep Germany disarmed, Soviet Prime minister Joseph Stalin’s conversation with presidential candidate Harold Stassen, talks to end a...
Trash, a Dinner Invitation and Killing of MLK Jr. April 03, 2020
Over a half-century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis to support and bring attention to a strike by more than 1,300 city sanitation workers, but the journey to Tennessee would cost him his life.Fifty-one years have passed since one of t...
How Spilled Molasses Resulted in a Massacre March 17, 2020
(1886) In February of 1886, Ed and Charley Brown, who were both part Indian and part African-American, were delivering molasses when they ran into James Liddell, a white man, spilling molasses on Liddell. A fight ensued in which Lidell and Ed Brown e...
Anschluss and Fate of Austrian Jews March 10, 2020
Ancient Menorah from the time of the Roman Empire Evidence found in the form of ancient artifacts demonstrates the presence of a Jewish community in Austria as early as the time of the Roman empire and corroborates the previous assumption that Jew...
Look at Laws That Stripped Jews of Rights, 1933-39 March 09, 2020
Antisemitism and the persecution of Jews were central tenets of Nazi ideology.In their 25-point party program published in 1920, Nazi Party members publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from “Aryan” society and to abrogate their politic...
Mistake Let First Black Man Vote in S.C. March 02, 2020
A rusting chain-link fence represents a “color line” for the dead in Columbia, South Carolina. In Randolph Cemetery, separated by the barrier from the well-manicured lawn of the neighboring white graveyard, lies the remains of George A. Elmore.A blac...
Burgers, Nostalgia: Last Woolworth's Lunch Counter February 24, 2020
When we think of the battlefields in America’s long fight for civil rights, we tend to think of a few specific places: the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the front seats of city buses, the Lorraine Motel, for instance. But segregation was rampant in ...
Malcolm X Death: Theories and Facts February 21, 2020
Over the decades since that fateful February afternoon in 1965, questions surrounding the death of this provocative and intrepid man still plague us. The Smoking Gun: The Malcolm X Files, reveals that an FBI report, dated February 22, 1965, states M...
Evers Killer Unrepentant to the Grave February 06, 2020
Byron De La Beckwith, whose 1994 conviction in the murder of a civil rights leader three decades earlier symbolized a transformation in Mississippi, died on Sunday night in Jackson, Miss. He was 80. Mr. Beckwith died at the University of Mississippi ...
Destroying Evidence Nothing New for FBI February 05, 2020
Congressional investigators were rocked this weekend when the FBI notified them that five months of text messages from a top FBI investigator into the Trump campaign's Russian connections had mysteriously vanished.The FBI-issued cell phone of Peter S...
KKK's Bloody, Violent History December 24, 2019
At the end of the American Civil War radical members of Congress attempted to destroy the white power structure of the Rebel states. The Freeman's Bureau was established by Congress on 3rd March, 1865. The bureau was designed to protect the interest...
What Black Panthers Were Really All About October 14, 2019
Former Black Panther Party members plan to reflect on the black power movement, their experiences and their work in the black community when they celebrate the 40th anniversary of the controversial organization's founding Friday through Sunday in Oak...
Ole Miss' Ghosts: Football and Race September 19, 2019
hen I was 5 or 6, because of my dad's political activism in the Mississippi Delta, local white supremacists burned a cross in our front yard. My parents had a decision to make: Wake me up or let me sleep. They chose sleep. On that night, hate and fea...
Strom Thurmond's Record-Setting Filibuster August 28, 2019
Fortified with a good rest, a steam bath and a sirloin steak, Sen. Strom Thurmond (search) talked against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes — longer than anyone has ever talked about anything in Congress.The South Carolina (search)...
Did NAACP Comments Turn Till Trial Into a Cause? August 28, 2019
When, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to obey an order to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, an action that led to a boycott of the Montgomery bus system, she had in mind a murder trial that happened two months earlier in...
From Speech to Sermon -- MLK's Improvisation August 28, 2019
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued at the midpoint of the American Civil War, and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a moment that marked the spiritual summit of the civil...
How 1 Man Made FBI Find Slain Civil Rights Workers August 05, 2019
My father knew James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were dead as soon as he got the call that they were missing. Their bodies weren't found until 44 days later.What happened between that phone call and the discovery of their bodies is a ...
1967 Detroit Riots in 24 Intense Photos July 22, 2019
It's since become known as the "Long Hot Summer." Throughout the middle months of 1967, the United States experienced more than 150 race riots in cities across the country.And perhaps the worst rioting of the entire summer erupted in Detroit between ...
The Race Riot That Sealed Detroit's Fate July 22, 2019
Despite a century of progressive innovation in Detroit, it is a sad reality that the events of July 23-27, 1967 are among the city's defining moments. The five-day period of civil unrest and extreme chaos caused physical damage to the city and emotio...
Real Story Behind 'Mississippi Burning' June 21, 2019
It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. All three shot in t...
Detroit's Racial Tensions Bubble to Surface June 20, 2019
As the nation's most important production center during the Second World War, the city of Detroit was popularly known as the "arsenal of democracy." The city's overwhelmingly industrial landscape had been rapidly expanding since the manufacturing boo...
Did Brown v. Board Ever Really Matter? May 16, 2019
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Court ruled unanimously, declaring that they violated the equal-protection clause of t...
The Bitter Fruits of Forced Desegregation Busing May 16, 2019
It's the story South Boston schoolboys love to hear. On March 4, 1776, under cover of darkness, General George Washington ordered his men to position dozens of captured British cannon atop Dorchester Heights. The code word that night was "Boston" and...
Brutal Bull Connor Only Helped Speed Civil Rights May 03, 2019
https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america-1945-to-1968/bull-connor/Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor is most associated with the civil rights demonstrations in Birminghamwhere to many the very public role of Connor and ...
Jackie Robinson's Life Wasn't All Baseball April 16, 2019
By now you all know April 15 isn’t just tax day, it’s also “Jackie Robinson Day.”Since 2004, all Major League Baseball players have worn Robinson’s number (42) on that day in honor of his courage in becoming the first black baseball player in the Maj...
MLK Murder Killed Civil Rights Movement, Too April 04, 2019
oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus's rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the nationa...
Truth Buried With James Earl Ray's Death April 03, 2019
James Earl Ray, the petty criminal who confessed to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr., then recanted and spent decades seeking a trial, died April 23, 1998, of liver failure. He was 70. Ray was pronounced dead at 11:36 a.m. EDT at Columbia Nashvil...
Witness to MLK Assassination April 01, 2019
A "Today" show interview with a witness to Martin Luther King's assassination. ...
Marlon Brando Said No to the Oscar March 27, 2019
To this day, Marlon Brando remains one of the most interesting characters in movie history. His tumultuous personality has turned into a “Brando-archetype”. He was one of the most difficult people to work with for everyone else in the movie industry,...
Sioux, AIM Take South Dakota Town Hostage February 27, 2019
On February 27, 1973, a team of 200 Oglala Lakota (Sioux) activists and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized control of a tiny town with a loaded history -- Wounded Knee, South Dakota. They arrived in town at night, in a caravan of ca...
MLB's 1st Star Black Pitcher Newcombe, 92, Dies February 20, 2019
Don Newcombe, the major leagues' first outstanding black pitcher and a star for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their glory years, the 1950s, died on Tuesday. He was 92.The Dodgers announced his death but did not say where he died.An imposing right-hander, a...
From Marine to Murderer: Byron De La Beckwith February 05, 2019
Born in California in 1920, Byron De La Beckwith grew up in Mississippi. A segregationist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, he shot and killed NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. Though he was arrested for the crime, two all-white juri...
Till's Killers Confession in 'Look' Magazine January 24, 2019
Editors Note: In the long history of man's inhumanity to man, racial conflict has produced some of the most horrible examples of brutality. The recent slaying of Emmett Till in Mississippi is a case in point. The editors of Look are convinced that th...
King Wasn't Sole Voice of Civil Rights January 15, 2019
The words and deeds of Dr. Martin Luther King have inspired many peoples and nations, for his hopes for a world of equality, respect, and human rights are their dreams too.In foreign capitals on the holiday honoring Dr. King's birthday, Ambassadors w...
Cassius Clay: The Greatest (20th-Century) American? January 15, 2019
On Jan. 17, 1942, Cassius Clay was born in Louisville, Ken. Clay would go on to have an incredible career in the brutal sport of boxing, but his position as one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century extends far beyond his 56-5 record in the r...
KKK's Bloody, Violent History December 24, 2018
At the end of the American Civil War radical members of Congress attempted to destroy the white power structure of the Rebel states. The Freeman's Bureau was established by Congress on 3rd March, 1865. The bureau was designed to protect the interest...
Sharpton Still Won't Admit Brawley Case a Hoax November 27, 2018
Don't you hate it when a lie comes back to haunt you 20 years after the fact? Man, I'd hate to be in the Rev. Al Sharpton's shoes this morning. A mess he helped stir up back in 1987, when he was more agent provocateur than "The O'Reilly Factor" media...
This Isn't Rosa Parks' Bus Anymore November 27, 2018
I hate flying. It’s not a phobia, but flying is still a terrible experience for me. I don’t know why this is. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to hate it. I get myself all worked up. I also tell myself that flying is a lot safer than driving. I...
Elijah Lovejoy and the Pro-Slavery Mobs of the North November 05, 2018
On Nov. 7, 1837, a pro-slavery mob in the northern state of Illinois descended on the headquarters of an abolitionist newspaper and murdered the editor, Elijah Lovejoy. The attack on an abolitionist publication so far north sent shockwaves throughout...
History of Blackface Not What You Think October 30, 2018
Megyn Kelly has been universally condemned for claiming that in certain contexts it is acceptable to use blackface for Halloween costumes. These critics referenced the history of blackface presentations of demeaning negative stereotypes. While this ...
Grant Did Some Things Right October 17, 2018
Ulysses S. Grant's rank among American heroes rivaled Lincoln's while he lived, but after the Civil War general and 18th president died in 1885 his reputation declined.Grant had experienced great adversity during his life, much of it spent as a faile...
'Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Ain't Gonna Integrate' September 24, 2018
Sixty years ago, a group of nine students walked into a school and changed America...
Ike Enforces Desegregation With National Guard September 24, 2018
Washington, Sept. 24--President Eisenhower sent Federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., today to open the way for the admission of nine Negro pupils to Central High School.Earlier, the President federalized the Arkansas National Guard and authorized cal...
U.S. Muzzles Singer By Revoking Passport August 16, 2018
He was the man the US government tried to erase from history. From the 1920s through the early 1960s legendary bass-baritone Paul Robeson was a musical giant on the world stage but from the late 1940s he was almost unknown within his own country. Par...
Horrifying Account of True 'BlacKkKlansman' Lynching August 14, 2018
The Waco HorrorAn account of the recent burning of a human being at Waco, Tex., as reported by a special agent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York City.1. The City.The city of Waco, Tex., is th...
Emmett Till, A New Investigation, and Vindication of T.R.M. Howard August 09, 2018
Recent news that the Justice Department will reopen the Emmett Till murder case represents a belated vindication of a (now forgotten) civil rights legend: Dr. T.R.M. Howard (1908-76). After an all-white jury acquitted Till’s killers (who later admit...
Lynching in U.S.: Worse Than First Thought August 07, 2018
His name was Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old black youth who was born in rural Texas in 1897. He worked on a farm outside Waco which belonged to George and Lucy Fryer. In May, 1916, Washington was convicted in City Court of murdering Lucy Fryer. Duri...
Legacy of 3 Plain, Honest Men August 06, 2018
On Aug. 4, 1964, the bodies of three missing civil rights activists were found buried underneath an earthen dam outside of Philadelphia, Miss. Two of the young men, white New Yorkers, had been shot in the heart, and the third victim, a local black ma...
