Our estimate is now that there are half a million people on this demonstration—the biggest demonstration ever against the far right. And it gives us all confidence to carry on. Thank you very much.
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.
They offered a rare window into the lives, struggles and aspirations of African Americans, and a way for me to feel connected to a community far beyond my immediate environment. Through Ebony, I was introduced to towering figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Their courage, moral clarity and commitment to justice shaped how I thought leadership and service.
There would be considerable historical irony if the court decides to use the 14th Amendment to provide the legal cover for reversing a generation of Black political progress in the South. Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory " Black Codes" in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation's modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly.
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. took a chance on me as a 19-year-old college student. At that age, as an intern in 2009, I should've been pouring coffee, maybe making copies. Instead, he put me to work on college affordability policy, youth violence prevention, and immigration reform at his Rainbow PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) Coalition on the South Side of Chicago.
All that matters is what you do in between whether you're prepared to do what it takes to make change. There has to be physical and material sacrifice. When all the dust settles and we're getting ready to play down for the ninth inning, the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet.
In his "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination," Robin D.G. Kelley explains that "a map to the new world is in the imagination." There are so many emergencies right now-ICE abductions, decriminalization of anti-Black racism, the political hijack of the struggle against antisemitism and anti-Blackness, unauthorized military aggression abroad, a climate crisis accelerated-that it's hard to know where to direct our resistance.
