civil rights
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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.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
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Tweeting 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.
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Getting 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…
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Speechmaker
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.
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Fantasy Football for Poets: Dispatch #2
“You want your cup to overflow,” he said. “My cup is causing a flood.”
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Martin 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…
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On 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…
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The 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…
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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.
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Revisiting 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…
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“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…