Some said their deaths marked the end of an era. Others said it was the beginning of a new one.
“With each passing, the torch is being passed, ’ Dorie Ladner, 78, who helped register Blacks to vote in her native Mississippi, told me recently. “We’re mindful of the fact that there is so much work to do for the next generations to come.”
Thousands of “foot soldiers’’ challenged segregation in the Deep South and across the country during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s.
Over the years, I ve interviewed countless veterans, including some who worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. Some were well-known and have a place in history books. Many weren’t featured in articles or chapters on the Civil Rights Movement. They nonetheless played critical roles, making lunch for activists, housing them and even hiding them. Cameras weren’t there when they refused to get up from all-white lunch counters. Nobody recorde
Opinions | Black Catholic women like Amanda Gorman are forgotten prophets of American democracy Shannen Williams Amanda Gorman, the first national youth poet laureate, speaks during the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris on Jan. 20. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images) On Jan. 6, a mostly White mob attacked the nation’s Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn the election of the nation’s second Catholic president and first female, Black and Asian American vice president. Two weeks later, 22-year-old Amanda Gorman took the stage at the Biden-Harris inauguration in front of the same Capitol, and delivered a sermon on equality and hope in the face of lethal resistance with her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
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Protest expert Aldon Morris explains how social justice movements succeed
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Aldon Morris Aldon Morris is Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University and president of the American Sociological Association. His landmark books include
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Aldon Morris Aldon Morris is Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University and president of the American Sociological Association. His landmark books include Credit: Nick Higgins
One evening nine years ago 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking through a Florida neighborhood with candy and iced tea when a vigilante pursued him and ultimately shot him dead. The killing shocked me back to the summer of 1955, when as a six-year-old boy I heard that a teenager named Emmett Till had been lynched at Money, Miss., less than 30 miles from where I lived with my grandparents. I remember the nightmares, the trying
HOLA! USA will be spotlighting some amazing Afro-Latina’s. First is
Tessa Thompson who was born in the city of stars, on October 3, 1983, and was raised between Los Angeles and Brooklyn.
The actress was born to an Afro-Panamanian father and a mother of Mexican descent who Tessa said helped her take pride in being a Black woman. Her multiracial identity has helped fuel her roles in blockbuster hits like
Dear White People (2104), and her portrayal as civil rights activist “Diane Nash” in
Ava DuVernay’s historical drama
Selma (2014). In addition, she is one of the stars of
Westworld, the popular HBO science fiction Western.