Breaking News! History in the Making

‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired’

James E. Causey brilliantly examines the plight of Black America and Black Milwaukee specifically. Connecting the turmoil of today to sixty years worth of history.

Workers remove Christopher Columbus statue from Chicago's Grant Park in the early morning hours of July 24, 2020. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Chicago removes Columbus statue

Chicago removed a Christopher Columbus statue from the city’s lakefront Grant Park before dawn Friday, a week after protesters tried to topple it.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – 45 Wisconsin Communities Protest

As video of George Floyd’s death spread across the US, protests followed in major cities — as well as unexpected small cities and tiny virtually all-white towns around Wisconsin.

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How I Became a Police Abolitionist

When people dismiss Blacks who call for police abolition as not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that those same Black citizens ARE those victims, those survivors of violence. This article’s author, who is Black and a human rights lawyer, gives a detailed and nuanced perspective on this dilemma.

Representative John Lewis, D-Ga. January 1999 (Photo by Rebecca Roth/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – How the Black Lives Matter generation remembers John Lewis

Of all the ways that John Lewis influenced American life and politics, his indelible impact on young people may be among the most enduring. From student activist to elder statesman, Lewis continually encouraged the nation’s youth to start “good trouble” — and modeled just how to do that.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Asheville, N.C., Approves Steps Toward Reparations For Black Residents

A passed resolution aims to address recent systemic issues of segregation and exclusion. It says Black people “have been excluded from full participation in the benefits of citizenship that include voting, employment, housing and health care.”

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History

15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks making the recent protests the largest movement in US history.

A Practical Guide to Defunding the Police

Police are supposed to protect and serve communities? For the Black Community and other POC, the police’s job seems to be keeping the community in line.

White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity

White Christians have used the Bible to support racial discrimination in all areas of life and the continuation of White supremacy.

‘The worshipping of whiteness’: why racist symbols persist in America

Symbols drive the stock market and wall street. Businesses and government agencies are rethinking some racial stereotypes and are making changes. Rebranding without policy changes is mere “window dressing.”

Jefferson Davis memorial in Prairie du Chien, WI

Wisconsin still has Confederate monuments and symbols despite its history as a progressive state. Here’s what they are.

Despite Wisconsin’s allegiance to the Union during the Civil War, its loyalties to the Union and the end of slavery were not as clear-cut as Wisconsinites might like to think.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Africa Declares Black Lives Matter

The global uprising against racist police brutality that ignited in the United States has spread to the Blackest continent of all, showing that the aftershocks of class struggle in imperialist countries are often felt in the regions they historically exploit and oppress.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – How Black Lives Matter Protests Have Changed The World

In the month since George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police, the world has witness some of the most engaged, passionate and determined anti-racism protests and calls-to-action in recent memory.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Ghana’s message to African Americans is “Come home”

Ghana’s government is hoping to tap into the current mood of reflection and resistance to strengthen its pitch targeting people of African descent in the diaspora.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Lafayette Square: iconic for Trump presidency

With his triumphal stride through the square to historical St. John’s Episcopal Church, Trump had hoped to appear strong and dominant, and to dispel the narrative of him hiding in the secured White House bunker during evening protests outside. Demanding a show of force, he sought to make the nation’s capital a shining example of how to control the streets amid racial unrest.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Protests push amendment to remove ‘slavery’ from Utah’s constitution

The recent protests against racial inequality could push legislation on policing to passage on Utah’s Capitol Hill, as well as a proposed amendment that officially repeals “slavery” from the state constitution.

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – King Leopold statues removed in Belgium

Introduction To This Series: This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice. Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series…

What each of us can do to end racism

By Diana Diaz-Granados, La Crosse Tribune The recent killings of black Americans that have sparked protests around the country are not anomalies: Before George Floyd was Eric Garner; before Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down by three white men, James Byrd Jr was beaten, chained and dragged behind a pick-up truck by three white men; and…

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Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Houston Bids Goodbye to George Floyd

George Floyd’s funeral and the public viewing that preceded it a day earlier have been a counterpoint to the fury that his death touched off in cities across America.

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Special News Series: Rising Up for Justice! – Know Their Names

This is the first of a series of posts serving as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. Here are four stories of the senseless killings of unarmed African Americans that have brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The day police bombed a city street: can scars of 1985 Move atrocity be healed?

Eleven people, including five children, died and a Philadelphia neighborhood burned down in the airstrike against a black liberation group. Now an effort at reconciliation is under way By Ed Pilkington, the guardian.com Frank Powell, a Philadelphia police officer who in 1985 was chief of the city’s bomb disposal squad, remembers vividly the moment he was given…