60 years ago today, eighteen Freedom Riders left for New Orleans from Washington, D.C. to desegregate the South's Jim Crow interstate buses.
Here are some of those who were arrested.
Hank Thomas, Washington, D.C., 19
John Lewis, Troy, Alabama, 21.
James Farmer, New York City, 41
Thomas, Lewis, and Farmer were part of the original 18 Freedom Riders, which also included James Peck, Ed Blankenheim, Walter Bergman, Benjamin Elton Cox, Charles Person, Frances Bergman, Genevieve Hughes and Jimmy McDonald, and others
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Atlanta, 19
Helen O'Neal McCray, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 20
Margaret Leonard, New Orleans, 19
Hezekiah Watkins, Jackson, Mississippi, 13
Julia Aaron, New Orleans, 20
C.T. Vivian, Nashville, 36
Rita Carter, Berkeley, 18
Peter Stoner, Chicago, 22
Bernard Lafayette, Tampa, 20
Miller Green, Jackson, 18
Kredelle Petway, Montgomery, 20
Carol Silver, New York City, 22
LeRoy Glenn Wright, Nashville, 19
Catherine Burks, Birmingham, 21
Joan Trumpauer, Arlington, Virginia, 19
Stokely Carmichael, The Bronx, 19
Jean Thompson, New Orleans, 19
Dion Diamond, Petersburg, Virginia, 19
Ed Kale, Grangeville, Idaho, 24
Gwendolyn Greene, Washington, DC, 19
James Lawson, Nashville, 32
Gordon Harris, Rochester, 23
Frances Wilson, Nashville, 23
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1 of largest COVID-19 clusters in US is at factory owned by Smithfield Foods, company with long history of labor violations. washingtonpost.com/national/south…
The breakout is likely due to Smithfield giving inadequate protective gear to workers and requiring them to work so closely together that it was impossible to social distance
Here's when a NLRB judge found that Smithfield committed "egregious and pervasive'' labor law violations during two unionizing campaigns. nytimes.com/2001/01/04/us/…
Forty years ago today on November 3, 1979, five anti-racist members of the Communist Workers' Party were murdered by Klan members in Greensboro, North Carolina: César Cauce, Jim Waller, Sandy Smith, Mike Nathan, and Bill Sampson.
This memorial in Greensboro's Maplewood Cemetery for the individuals killed in the Greensboro Massacre is one of the most powerful sites of remembrance by the American Left that I've ever seen.
César Cauce worked at the Duke University Hospital and organized medical workers to form an AFSCME local (a campaign Duke successfully defeated). Only twenty-five years old, Cauce was a Cuban immigrant who had graduated magna cum laude with a history degree from Duke.
The history of Black bookstores are closely connected to radical politics. Abolitionist David Ruggles was the first African American to start a bookstore, in lower Manhattan in the early 1830s. 1/
Here's an announcement for a cooperatively-owned Black bookstore at Howard University from 1930. 2/
We really don't know a lot about African American bookstores in the early 20th century. The best history of that period is Alisha Knight's essay in the Oxford anthology "U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920." /3
Trip to Chapel Hill last week reminded me of the power of the "long civil rights movement" framework. First, we had an outstanding event at the Stone Center on Black bookstores w/ Paul Coates, Michael Simanga, Shirikiana Gerima, Clarence Lusance, Lew Brandon, and Ed Vaughn.
Pretty incredible how the booksellers on our panel represented a movement thread running from CORE + the Greensboro sit-ins, the Black Panthers, the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, and the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania. Shout out to @UNCStoneCenter for organizing this!
Another "long civil rights movement" thought: walked by this memorial of the first Freedom Rides organized by CORE, not in the 1960s, but in 1947! Sixteen protestors including Bayard Rustin were arrested in Chapel Hill and sent on a chain gang for 22 days this.
And it's not just the money. The article documents shameful, intentional acts of pro-Confederate and pro-slavery misinformation carried out by state employees and publicly subsidized private sites in Alabama, Mississippi, my home state of Georgia, and other states.
"“Monuments to the ‘lost cause’ will prove monuments of folly...in the memories of a wicked rebellion which they must necessarily perpetuate...It is a needless record of stupidity and wrong.”
President George Bush wanted to show America what crack cocaine looked like at his first Oval Office address on Sept 5, 1989. He wanted to show you could even buy crack in front of the White House. That’s how bad the crisis had gotten. That’s how Bush announced his War on Drugs.
But there wasn’t much crack sold near the White House. As a U.S. Park Police official explained, "We don't consider that a problem area…There's too much activity going on there for drug dealers."
Easy solution: invite someone to sell crack outside the White House!
The DEA caught wind of Bush’s plan and they set about arranging a deal for Lafayette Square across from the White House. DEA agents planned to lure someone there to sell them a small amount of crack. Later a WH official claimed no one requested the DEA make the purchase.