To find a previously undiscovered Underground Railroad site is the holy grail of historic preservation, according to attorney Michael Hiller, representing the Merchant's House Museum.
Developers promise "community investments," downtown revitalization, and a new "AI Center." What they don't say is that this development comes tethered to a massive resource-intensive data center that will cost billions, create pollution, and concentrate profits for the corporations and CEOs at the top-not the surrounding communities. This is not innovation, it's exploitation.
White genocide' Carl is a right-wing firebrand who played a minor role in the first Trump administration and has more recently gained, depending on your vantage, kudos or notoriety for his theory that Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, as his book's subtitle puts it. He believes, for example, that a White genocide is underway and endorses the Great Replacement Theory (according to which elites in America and Europe are intentionally encouraging immigration to replace indigenous whites).
If you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren't given' anything. The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people's past in this country are under attack.
She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers together so that plumes of chalk dust rose above her head. And she remembers being told that she was attending a school that many white parents had taken their children out of just a few years earlier because they didn't want them sitting in class with Negroes.
In another, adapted from Theodore Parker, a 19th-century abolitionist preacher, Dr. King points to another aspect of his dream. King writes, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." The first quote points to individual behavior, the second toward social action. Dr. King didn't emphasize one approach over the other. For him, personal and social morality were of a piece. A good world is one that is both kind and just.
By the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic had completely gripped the nation. Its victims, primarily queer men, were dying by the thousands. Fear and misinformation reigned supreme, and our government refused to respond to the crisis. Reverend Charles Angel, a community leader and activist who was living with HIV himself, recognized that queer men of color faced additional disparities due to cultural norms and societal inequities.
In any liberal morality play, Democrats always get to be the shivering, oppressed black people, while Republicans have to play the part of Bull Connor, Birmingham, AL's racist commissioner of public safety. Except the facts are exactly the opposite. I'm sure you're bored of hearing this, but Connor was a Democrat, as were all the politicians promising "massive resistance" to racial integration. Republicans were the ones forcing Democrats to abide by federal law, along with a few John Fetterman- style Democrats.
The next "Dying to Stay Here" podcast will feature a panel discussing what we call our criminal justice system. The panel reflected on a recent election in California, where voters were asked, in plain language, whether they wanted to remove slavery from our constitution, where it's still allowed "as punishment for a crime," and voted to keep it. As we celebrate another Black History Month, I reflect on the disproportionate number of Black people behind bars.
Despite being on the periphery of the Spanish empire and Mexico before becoming part of the United States, California had an important place in the larger struggle by enslaved people for their freedom. California connects Mexican and U.S. history while also serving as a reminder that there are few corners of the Western Hemisphere that are untouched by the legacy of slavery.
The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the pivotal event in United States history and the largest armed conflict in the Western world following the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and prior to the beginning of the First World War (1914). The central cause of the war was the institution of slavery, which had increasingly caused conflict between Southern states, which relied heavily on slave labor for their agrarian economy, and Northern states, which were heavily industrialized and had far less need for slaves.
On August 7, 1823, 19 enslaved people in Barbados became the property of the British crown after their enslavers died without legal heirs. These individuals had names, families and histories that stretched across years of shared survival under slavery. They included Quow and his son, Caesar; Orange and her son, October; and Abel and Lubbah and their children, Thomas, Kitty and Becky. There were also four sisters-Deborah, Sukey, Betsey and Polly-and their brother, Thomas, along with their children.
King's intuition was that white people with lower incomes would support this type of policy because they could also benefit from it. In 1967, King argued, "It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income . . . which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro's economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation."
If Dr King were alive today, he'd be admonishing us across the nation to stand up and march for Renee Good. If we miss this moment, our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be paying the price in a dying planet, in an authoritarian, tyrannical America where women don't have biological autonomy, and Black and Brown people are in chains, and white women are getting gunned down in the streets. That is not Dr. King's America.
