Fifty Years Since MLK

Reviving the Radical King

“Forget the dream, he called for a revolution.” An MLK Day reading list on how his radicalism was erased.

Black History in Three Acts

The story of how Black people confront systems of racial capitalism and plot world liberation. A reading list from Robin D. G. Kelley.

Black History in Three Acts

The story of how black people confront systems of racial capitalism and plot world liberation. A reading list from Robin D. G. Kelley.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

MLK Now

Canonization has prevented a reckoning with the substance of King’s intellectual, ethical, and political commitments.

  • Brandon M. Terry
with responses from
  • Barbara Ransby
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  • Andrew J. Douglas
  • Jeanne Theoharis
  • Elizabeth Hinton
  • Bernard E. Harcourt

Baldwin’s Lonely Country

When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, James Baldwin made a final attempt to reconcile the generational divide between the civil rights movement and Black Power.

  • Ed Pavlić

Brother Martin Was a Blues Man

Cornel West on Martin Luther King, Jr., hope, and the future of activism, in conversation with Brandon M. Terry, Elizabeth Hinton, and Tommie Shelby.

  • Cornel West

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Mark Lilla and the Crisis of Liberalism

The critique of identity politics ignores the role that neoliberalism and neoconservatism have played in creating our present situation.

  • Samuel Moyn

The Almost Inevitable Failure of Justice

The persistence of black poverty has become a permanent feature of U.S. democracy. We need an expanded political imagination to dismantle it.

  • Thad Williamson

Against National Security Citizenship

Support for the U.S. military has long been seen as a crucial way for black Americans and immigrants to show that they “belong.”

  • Aziz Rana

The Cost of Canonizing MLK

In these video interviews, Brandon M. Terry explains how MLK’s canonization has come at the expense of taking him seriously as a political thinker.

  • Brandon M. Terry

Exceptional Victims

The resistance to the Vietnam War was the most diverse and dynamic antiwar movement in U.S. history. We have all but forgotten it today.

  • Christian G. Appy
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