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The Unfinished Revolution of Black History

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Cornel West, and more

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Two years ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made national headlines for rejecting the College Board’s curriculum for AP African American Studies. This year, Black History Month again arrives at a moment of state backlash—this time as Donald Trump intensifies the right’s anti-“woke” assault and looks to expand civil rights rollbacks.

As novelist Tananarive Due noted in the wake of the 2016 election, “the past is not as far past as we believed.” The pieces in this week’s reading list examine the history that the right so vigorously tries to repress—and imagine, as Farah Jasmine Griffin writes, what justice looks like in light of it.

Fundamental change has eluded movements that flourished in Ferguson. But their promise is still unfolding.

Blake Strode

A tragedy in Birmingham and the making of a radical.

Ed Pavlić

Jeanne Theoharis speaks with Margaret Burnham on her work reconstructing Jim Crow terror, within and outside the law.

Margaret A. Burnham, Jeanne Theoharis

When Desmond Tutu reconciled African theology and Black theology.

Panashe Chigumadzi, Cornel West

Historian Gerald Horne has developed a grand theory of U.S. history as a series of devastating backlashes to progress—right down to the present day.

David Waldstreicher

The reparative work of Toni Morrison’s novels.

Farah Jasmine Griffin

The highly orchestrated right-wing attacks cast a body of scholarship about race in the law as a great threat to American society.

David Theo Goldberg

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Rev. William J. Barber II on civil disobedience, the failures of electoral campaigns, and why the South is key to a political transformation of the country.

Toussaint Losier, William J. Barber II

Michelle Obama’s memoir reduces racial inequality to a matter of psychological impairment.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Unpublished material from his autobiography has come to light, deepening our understanding of his life and thought.

Garrett Felber

America loves pitting Black intellectuals against each other, but today’s activists need both Coates and West.

Robin D. G. Kelley

A conversation with novelist Tananarive Due on writing the past—and a way out of it.

Tananarive Due

She saw economic precarity not just as a side effect of racial subjugation, but central to its functioning.

David Stein

At the very height of the McCarthy era, he tried to keep alive a free and open debate about American military, economic, and foreign policy.

Andrew Lanham

To be useful, it has to help us think about who we should become as a nation.

Melvin Rogers

Recent histories of slavery and capitalism ignore radical black scholarship.

Peter James Hudson

Crusading for black rights, women's equality, and gender non-conformity.

Kenneth W. Mack

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