Right after women got the vote, the measure of their social progress can be seen in an advice column written by Dorthy Dix that appeared in newspapers all over the country. The woman should not merely...
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, became legendary as organizer and speaker. She sang hymns; she walked picket lines with her familiar limp (as a child she contracted po...
Lying there, interrogated by the governor of Virginia, Brown said: You had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. . . . You may dispose of me very eas...
In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the p...
If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with...
Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoi...
Before this, the Cherokees had, like Indian tribes in general, done without formal government. As Van Every puts it: The foundation principle of Indian government had always been the rejection of gove...
And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty...
The prosecuting attorney, in his plea to the jury, accused me of saying on a public platform at a public meeting, To hell with the courts, we know what justice is. He told a great truth when he lied,...
That April, the Senate had adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, declaring an end to slavery, and in January 1865, the House of Representatives followed.
So, Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother . . . take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there. . . . But remember always, Da...
Shortly after Bush took office, a government scientist prepared testimony for a Congressional committee on the dangerous effects of industrial uses of coal and other fossil fuels in contributing to gl...
I think of Charles Sherrod. He was a SNCC field secretary and one of those young people who went into the toughest towns in the deep South to set up Freedom Houses and help local folk organize to chan...
I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent e...
Combien de gens exercent-ils le travail de leur choix ? Certains scientifiques, artistes, quelques travailleurs très qualifiés ou certaines professions libérales ont peut-être cette satisfaction, mais...
In telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.
After the war, historian Marilyn Young warned: The U.S. can destroy Iraq’s highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of America...
Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over inferior races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed...