Portside

I don’t believe that we have confronted the legacy of our history in a meaningful way…Our interest is really in forcing the country to talk differently about this history,” -- Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative,

Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of just two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off.

Reader Comments - Black Future Month, Vanishing Black Professors, Black-Brown Unity, Lynching; Selma, Civil Rights, LBJ; Vietnam War; Immigration: ISIS, Charlie Hebdo; Labor's Bigger Tent, Adjunct Profs and Right-to-Work (for less); Science; Greece, Spain and the EU; Educational Testing; South African women against big coal; movie feedback; Announcements - Malcolm X; Spain; Cuba Embargo; Labor and the Police; Black Men Speak; Debra E. Bernhardt Labor Journalism Prize

A new report argues persuasively that the history of 'racial terror lynching' needs to be properly commemorated and more widely discussed before the United States can fully understand the causes and origins of the racial injustice that hobbles the country to this day.

I couldn't sleep the night we heard the news of the Jordanian pilot’s horrendous end, burned alive in an iron cage. ISIS be damned! I thought. But then I was haunted by the story of our own barbarians, of decades of lynchings. By insiders. Our neighbors, friends, and kin.

Reader Comments-Colbert Nation; Is It Band Enough Yet; Southern Jim Crow Murder; Cuba; How America's Relationship With Cuba Will Change; We express our condolences - Millions March NYC and Center for Constitutional Rights; Angela Davis on police violence; Youth Shall Lead in struggle against police violence; Political Athletes; "Negro-Jewish Unity" and IWO; torture; FBI; Panama invasion; New resources: On Torture; Staughton Lynd book; Stevie Wonder; theater review

Reader Comments - Philippine Recovery and Climate Change; Human Origins; "Strange Fruit;" North Carolina; Delbert Tibbs; Adjunct Unions; Corporate Profits-great infographic; South Africa - COSATU-ANC-SACP Alliance; Education; Healthcare; ALEC; Occupy; Steve Kindred; Race and Cuba; Announcements - The Invention of the White Race; Celebrating the Life of Father Paul Mayer; Pete Seeger's new book

Although the great red scare of the 1950s almost erased the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit from the public arena, the strange fruit allusion - lynched bodies hanging from trees – was one of genius. It had gotten under our culture’s skin, and as time went on, it seeped out of its pores.