The Thread: Ways of Being Seen
Can you see it now? Is the image different in your mind yet? A thing you can’t unsee.
...more
Posts Tagged: civil rights
Your Patriotism Isn’t Love, It’s Blindness
Love of country, some argue. With their boots firmly planted in my chest as I struggle to protest. No, that is not love, but blindness.
...more
There Is Simply No Time for This: Whose Streets? and Civil Rights Cinema
It is unlikely I will see the US justice system evolve toward an egalitarian ideal in my lifetime. But Whose Streets? does offer a clearly visible North Star.
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 15): “Southern History”
We can’t hide from our history and we can’t pass it on to future generations.
...moreThis Week in Essays
For Huffington Post’s Highline magazine, Jason Fagone profiles a trauma surgeon working to make a small dent in our country’s problem with gun violence. At Catapult, Abbey Fenbert writes a funny, heartfelt essay about trying to ban books in the seventh grade.
...more
The Rumpus Saturday Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 3
To deny violence is to do it. Our surprise at Sandy Hook and Cold Springs and Columbine is a form of violence in its own right.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 1
The violence came in and we were not just in danger of being victims of it. We were in danger of being violent ourselves.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Joe Okonkwo
Joe Okonkwo discusses his debut novel Jazz Moon, the quest for self-discovery, creative inspiration, and what it means to build a family when home is so very far away.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Walk On
As writers, we must write it out. Tear off the veils and air the rotting fruits.
...moreThe Night Wash Jones Won
Eighty years ago, Wash Jones appeared as a minor character in William Faulkner’s masterpiece on American identity and self-invention, Absalom, Absalom! From a craft perspective Jones was put in for a purpose: to demonstrate the role that white working-class men played in maintaining white supremacy among the wealthiest people in America before the Civil War, […]
...more
Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Kathryn Stripling Byer
I reached out to her, and she reached back. A hug I’ll never forget.
...more
The Rumpus Review of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation
Parker set out to bring a different kind of “slavery movie” to audiences. And it is different.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
What is lost still has substance, is malleable, can take on new impressions, and be molded again to our experience, often resulting in the most lasting force that determines how we see the world.
...more
The Conversation: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib and Paul Tran
The sitting down to write, convincing myself that my voice matters, even though there are so many telling me that it doesn’t.
...moreCharles Bradley’s “Change for the World”
The Screaming Eagle of Soul has released a psychedelic video to accompany the single “Change for the World” that dropped last month. The song’s video matches its political message with imagery from protests of the Civil Rights Era alongside the artist as he challenges us to “change the false pretense,” “change the hate,” and “change our […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Ravi Howard
Amina Gautier interviews novelist Ravi Howard, author of Like Trees, Walking and Driving the King.
...moreThis Week In Posivibes: Killer Mike at FSU
While it isn’t unusual to find Killer Mike speaking about race and politics (see his past lecture at MIT on Pitchfork), Render appeared at Florida State University last week to lecture again on racism and civil rights. “Step out of your comfort zone and engage another human being as a fair and honest equal,” he […]
...more
Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #9: We Shall Overcome?
Last year on our way to and from getting married in New Orleans, my now husband and I went on a civil rights pilgrimage. We went to Montgomery and Birmingham; we went to Selma. We drove the Pettus Bridge there in Selma a dozen times, imagining, feeling a weighty sadness all over. I want to […]
...more
I’ll Fly Away: Notes on Economy Class Citizenship
I want to break from a continued and systematic white supremacy so pervasive it is entrenched in the vernacular I use to express myself.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
...moreTweeting Me Softly
Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson, the authors of America’s first full scale 21st century civil rights movement, get the full profile treatment at the New York Times Magazine.
...moreGetting It Right
People have been writing about civil rights for years, but it’s taken Hollywood until now to warm up to the subject (of course, not enough). Bill Morris traces the history of the movement’s cinematic representations leading up to Ava DuVernay’s recent triumph: Movies about the civil rights movement — the successful ones– have tended to […]
...moreSpeechmaker
Over at the NYRB, Darryl Pinckney deconstructs Ava DuVernay’s Selma, starting from seat of a laymen cinema-goer, and then tying it all back to what actually happened.
...more
Fantasy Football for Poets: Dispatch #2
“You want your cup to overflow,” he said. “My cup is causing a flood.”
...moreMartin Luther King, Jr. Day
Today we honor the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His impact on the world is sort of impossible to overstate. As one African-American man who grew up before the Civil Rights movement put it, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the South.” Here’s an illustration by Jason Novak to mark the occasion:
...moreOn Not “Getting Over It”
I am well aware, for example, that voter suppression is a serious problem. If we’re going to consider degrees of magnitude, which is a masturbatory exercise at best, voter suppression is the more serious problem. Or is it? For Salon, our essays editor Roxane Gay discusses the racism that permeates American culture in forms big and […]
...moreThe Sonic Wonder of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech
Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, the massive civil rights protest at which Martin Luther King, Jr., famously delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. That speech’s stirring vision of political and social equality for blacks is now legendary, but its dexterous musicality is often overlooked. The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog takes […]
...more
The Rumpus Review of Punishment Park
In America, good dinner etiquette entails avoiding certain contentious topics, particularly politics. Whether it has more to do with possible digestive disorders developing from unpleasant –isms or a predilection towards harmonious dining, I do not know.
...moreRevisiting Rosa Parks
Today is the anniversary of Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat, resulting arrest and Montgomery boycott. The Grio discusses Park’s life and legacy, calling out her mischaracterization as “a simple woman who chose not to stand because she had tired feet,” and recognizing her for who she was: “a tireless advocate for […]
...more“The Great Schism”
This Ta-Nehesi Coates Atlantic piece takes a closer look at what caused the rift between abolitionists and suffragists, despite their many shared values. “I think one way of looking at this — among many others — is to not look at the movement post-1865, but post-1835, when abolitionist women, like Anthony and Stanton, were subject to unbridled […]
...more