Category: KOLUMN Magazine

Trump is setting up the commission to teach students ‘the miracle of American history’ – which sounds like a core part of the fascist process of taking power — Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian Gilead here we come Can we use the F word yet? Can we finally admit that America is dipping its feet in […]

— EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On September 19, 1868 as Black politicians and supporters held a peaceful political rally, mobs of white people in Camilla, Georgia, led by the sheriff, opened fire, killing at least seven Black people, including a Black mother and her infant child, in a mass lynching, and assaulting and […]

Sens. Richard Burr and Cory Booker said the Congressional Gold Medal is long overdue for the Till family. — The Associated Press, NBC News WASHINGTON — Congress should give the nation’s highest civilian honor posthumously to Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, a Republican and a Democratic senator said Wednesday. Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., […]

— Ishmael Reed, The Criterion Collection In his novel All the Rest Have Died (1964), about his experience as a young actor in New York, Bill Gunn wrote, “I was always only slightly aware of the injustice the Black artist suffers while trying to create in a white world. But I had been enraged and close to […]

— EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On September 18, 1923, the NAACP and the governor of Pennsylvania publicly denounced remarks by Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Mayor Joseph Cauffiel, threatening Black and Mexican migrants to leave town or risk violence. This was a period of migration within the United States, as many African Americans began to move […]

— EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On September 17, 1630, the Virginia Assembly sentenced Hugh Davis, a white man, to be whipped for having a relationship with a Black woman. According to records, the Assembly asserted that Mr. Davis “abus[ed] himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body […]

Who killed Alberta Jones, Louisville’s first female black prosecutor, in 1965? Prodded by a professor, the police are trying again to find out. — Trip Gabriel, New York Times LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Alberta Jones is the civil rights pioneer almost no one knows. She was Louisville’s first female black prosecutor and negotiated the first fight […]

— Mark F. Gray, AFRO Barely two months into the tenure of the first Black president in the history of the University of Maryland-College Park, the state’s flagship university announced it will rename it’s women’s studies program after the historic figure who is synonymous with the underground railroad.   The University of Maryland’s College of Arts […]

The president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, writes in a new book that his ex-boss said the Nobel Laureate “f—ed the whole country up.” — The Associated Press, NBC News JOHANNESBURG — The report that U.S. President Donald Trump made crude, disparaging remarks about Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning former leader, has drawn an […]

— EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative On September 11, 1895, South Carolina officials met to rewrite the state constitution with the express purpose of disenfranchising the state’s African American voters and restoring white supremacy in all matters political. The convention’s most prominent figure was Benjamin Tillman, a senator and former governor affectionately nicknamed “Pitchfork […]