#jim-crow-era-racism

#jim-crow-era-racism

Tonika Lewis Johnson's Folded Map Project connects residents known as 'map twins' who live on the same street name but miles apart, revealing structural inequality and personal commonality.

On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks' more famous act of defiance, Claudette Colvin, a Black high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger.

Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow-red, yellow, brown, black and white-and we're all precious in God's sight. America is not like a blanket-one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture. The same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.

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.

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.

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.

On Thursday, Mississippi Today reported that several officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said NPS told them to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument and edit out details about Beckwith. Among the details reportedly flagged for removal: that Evers was found lying in a pool of blood after he was shot. The brochures referred to Beckwith as "a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens' Council."

Following presidential custom, Trump issued a National Black History Month proclamation on Feb. 3 that maintained "black history is not distinct from American history - rather, the history of Black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story." Yes, but: Its rhetoric, critics say, stands in tension with the Trump administration's recent actions, raising questions about whether commemoration without context ultimately obscures more than it honors.

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."

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.

John from New Mexico, a self-professed lifelong Republican, called into C-Span's Washington Journal earlier this month with penitence on his mind. I voted for the president and supported him, he began. But I really want to apologize. The caller said he had been staring at an image Americans have seen far too often in recent days: Barack and Michelle Obama, the former president and first lady, with their mouths stretched into grotesque grins and their faces affixed to the bodies of apes.

During the Civil Rights Movement, the Chicago Freedom Movement took place from 1965 to 1967. Dr. King co-led this campaign with local activists to confront racial discrimination, segregation, and housing inequities in one of America's largest cities. Unlike the Jim Crow laws of the South, segregation in Chicago was often enforced through policy, lending practices and real estate discrimination rather than explicit laws.

Laketran and Geauga Transit, both located in northeastern Ohio, will honor the life and legacy of Rosa Parks through a weeklong tribute recognizing her courage and the lasting impact of her actions on civil rights in America. Rosa Parks, born February 4, became a symbol of strength and resistance in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, AL. Her decision helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott and propelled the nation forward in the fight for equality. Today, she is remembered as the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement."