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Martyrs to the Unspeakable: A Luminous Tapestry of Truth
To weave a magnificent tapestry like the one James W. Douglass has created with Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK takes a steady hand, a hopeful heart, and a steadfast dedication to seeking truth and telling it through factually based and interwoven stories. Because of its brilliant complexity and […]
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Kirkwashing: Right Sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s Legacy
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, right-wing politicians, Christian evangelical leaders, podcasters, and conservative media outlets are casting him as a martyr for free speech, for truth, and for Christian values. President Donald Trump called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom,” praising him as someone who “fought for liberty, democracy, justice and the […]
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Black Power Move
In late August 1968, one of the largest military protests in American history took place at Fort Hood in Central Texas. You’ve never heard of it. Why? The year before, on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out for the first time against the Vietnam War. He was assassinated one year to the […]
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Malcolm X: Man of Peace
Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood. — Ossie Davis Treat me like a man, or kill me. — Malcolm X[1] February 21, 2025 marked sixty years since Malcolm X was gunned down in a hail of bullets at the Audobon Ballroom in New York City as he was starting to give a speech. […]
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Whither White Poverty
I joined the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr King’s assassination. Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who Cornell West has described as “the closest thing we have to Dr. King,” envisioned the new PPC as a “re-consecration” of King’s life’s work to “change the coversation about what is possible […]
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Death of a Prophet
April 3, 1968 – Memphis In town to help striking Memphis garbage workers, an exhausted and downcast Dr. King is already in his pajamas when the call comes in from Reverend Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people have braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really […]
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What If Our Society Valued Civics as It Does Entertainment?
A teacher once said to me: “A society pays for what it values.” If so, our society values commercial entertainment, including spectator sports, orders of magnitude more than it values civics defined as the rights and duties exercised by citizens in a democracy. What if we lived in a society that valued both equally? 1. […]
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King and Douglass on What is Needed
A solution of the present crisis will not take place unless men and women work for it. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the […]
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Hideous Times of High Hope
It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today. Let some old folks, the obsessive ones, live in […]
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An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Dear Bobby, As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history and a […]
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