As Republicans celebrate MLK today, let’s review the many reasons GOP members once gave for opposing the King holiday.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) claimed King promoted “division, not love” and represented a "radical political minority that had little to do with racial minorities.” Helms also opposed a King holiday in 1983 because “Doctor King's action-oriented Marxism, about which he was cautioned by the leaders of this country... is not compatible with the concepts of this country.” (citations in alt text)

Wow, so Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was one of the bullies trying to stop his Black classmates from desegregating Central High in Little Rock in 1957. washingtonpost.com/sports/interac… Correction: this was at North Little Rock High School, a few miles from Central High, in the same month as the Little Rock Nine entered school.

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.

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

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.

Going to do a thread on the Black-owned bookstores for #independentbookstoreday.

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/

#IndependentBookstoreDay

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!

$40 million and counting.

That's how much American taxpayers have paid in the last decade for Confederate monuments and other shrines to a racist ideology.

This is all "history" glorified supposedly for the public's good.

po.st/9dflh9 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.

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!