Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
I’m referring, of course, to the famous 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Because, frankly, you could substitute Black for Slave throughout and it would still resonate. Douglass decried the many ways America’s treatment of Black folks made a mockery of its Declaration of Independence and founding… Read more.
No doubt we are all familiar with the dream Martin Luther King Jr had for his four little children. But, in so many ways, that dream has become a nightmare. Nothing betrays this fact quite like his namesake, MLK III, being all over TV last week damning two white Democratic senators to hell for blocking… Read more.
Representative John Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality, and who then carried a mantle of moral authority into Congress, died on Friday. … On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end… Read more.
Juneteenth and reparations for slavery Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. It stems from slaves in Galveston, Texas, not being informed of their emancipation until June 19, 1865. That was two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. What about reparations? The US House of Representatives… Read more.
I have been making this claim for decades. It’s based primarily on the fact that Frederick Douglass personified both the contradictions and promises that define America’s founding documents. And he did so like nobody else has or ever could. Unfortunately, even black historians have been so indoctrinated with white historiography, they invariably try to qualify my… Read more.
Yes, this is cause for celebration. Saudi Arabia was the only country still denying women this basic human right. Granted, women there are still living in a time warp. But they are getting their panoply of civil rights with more “deliberate speed” than women, to say nothing of blacks, in America got theirs. Saudi Arabia has… Read more.
I’ve written many commentaries over the years on the issues the Supreme Court addressed in this case. For the record, here are excerpts from just a few that prove I was right all along. ___________________ From “Same-Sex Marriage Now Legal in New York,” June 27, 2011, with respect to same-sex marriages: I believe it is a… Read more.
The world is reacting with shock (and some derision) today at the sight of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard being dragged to her motorcade by a scrum of bodyguards and riot police who were protecting her from jeering Aborigines. In fact, they whisked her through such a frantic, chaotic, and jostled path to safety that… Read more.
I have always been a bigger fan of the politics The Beatles advocated than of the songs they sang. I especially admired their anti-war views which, to their credit, they actually sang about in songs like Revolution and Give Peace a Chance. But it seems I may have just cause to become an even bigger… Read more.
Taylor Branch is the critically acclaimed biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). At Canaan’s Edge is the third volume of his MLK trilogy. But it’s generating hype for portraying MLK as a womanizer more than a civil rights leader. Jon Meacham is Newsweek’s eminent historian. On Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, he recommended… Read more.
