Chances are you have never heard of someone named Hubert Harrison. Until recently, I know I never had. I’d like to introduce you to a truly remarkable person in our own American history. I came across him in a strange way. Somehow I clicked onto a page on Google that was about a black man […]
Ida B. Wells, African-American journalist and a leader in the early Civil Rights Movement, was widely known for her campaign against the practice of the lynching of African-Americans. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, just a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves was issued by President Abraham Lincoln, she grew […]
The struggles that Fannie Lou Hamer went through as a leader in the civil rights movement during the 1960s and 1970s attest to one woman’s extraordinary courage and dedication in a fight against the overwhelmingly brutal forces of racial discrimination and dehumanization in Mississippi, and, indeed, throughout the South, at that time in our history […]
Richard Wright (1908-1960) was perhaps the most influential African-American writer of the twentieth century. His books helped to change race relations in the United States. I was 16 or 17 when I first read Wright’s novel, “Native Son.” I still remember the impact it had on me. I could only read the novel piecemeal, bits […]
Abby Kelley Foster. Chances are you never heard her name before. She was an early abolitionist and campaigner for full African-American and women’s rights, and one of the great women of our American past. Her life and struggles and experiences are so applicable to our own turbulent times; and her call to “come out!” is […]
Traveling to a New America – People Along the Way Soheila. Came to this country originally from Iran with her family when she was sixteen. ____________________________________ Soheila, what’s your take on America at this time? “I think we are going through really hard times right now. But at the same time, I think this is […]
Nelson Mandela survived twenty-seven years in a jail cell. Have you spent even one day and night in jail? Twenty-seven years was truly an eternity. The incomprehensible thing is how he managed to maintain his humanity amid this desert of timelessness. He wielded a heavy hammer for years in the hot blazing South African sun […]
Last week, New York columnist David Brooks wrote an opinion piece that talked about two differing narratives of our national identity. The first is of a land of opportunity, where immigrants ( overwhelmingly white) established a new country and set out to pursue their dreams. The second begins with travesties committed against Native American Indians […]
This lovely, six-year-old African-American girl – Ruby Bridges by name – was the pivotal person in the dismantling of the age-old white supremacy structure prevalent in American schools in the South during the 1960’s. The innocence of childhood arrayed against a monstrous behemoth of pride and prejudice. In the “Brown v. Board of Education” decision […]