Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding athlete and a deeply religious man. The aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical with a long involvement with the civil rights movement.
Our new organization, Third Act, is mobilizing the generation with the most political and economic influence to fight for a working climate and a working democracy.
To celebrate Martin Luther King day we are reposting article first published in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of MLK on the 4th of April 1968. The article re-publishes Dr King’s speech at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964
His sense of purpose and vision for his life is unobscured and unencumbered. This is a man on a mission, the grandest and most noble of missions: to save a country and his countrymen from themselves, to insist that morality ought to dictate policy.
Sybrina Fulton, lost her son Trayvon Martin ten years ago this month, found her painful place in American history. She feels honored when supporters compare her to Till-Mobley. “She’s an icon. She was the example of, you know, a strong Black woman,”
I have worked to expand voting rights since I was a student organizer in college. But I am, at the center of my being, a preacher. And the Scriptures that I have been called to preach remind me that in times like these, we have no right to despair.
The dominant and distorted scholarship framed Reconstruction as an illegitimate enterprise that failed to sustain multiracial democracy. For much of the 20th century, this bogus history was used to justify denying Black people full citizenship.
“The Fifties,” by James R. Gaines, a former managing editor of Time, People and Life, reminds us that a trip in time to much of America then would resemble “The Handmaid’s Tale” more than “Ozzie and Harriet.”
The fact that Black Americans are still fighting the same battles against voter suppression, inequality and the right to have a dream almost 54 years after his death is the most accurate measure of what this nation thinks about Martin Luther King.
King spent his last birthday organizing poor people of all races against immoral spending priorities. We need that revolution today.
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