Category: Represent Our Resistance

-James Baldwin. The day before I observed this young man, I spoke to Prof. Michelle Alexander by phone (see “Interview: Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Black Commentator, May 13, 2010). One statement stood out: Black Americans have been stigmatized! Black Americans in the U.S. are…

“Drug laws are officially colorblind, so it’s easy for folks to say the laws are race neutral. It can’t be the laws, we think. But during Jim Crow, some of the laws were race neutral on their face. Yet, literacy tests and poll taxes were enforced in a racially discriminatory manner. Similarly, drug laws are…

-Malcolm X Jamie Scott suffers from kidney disease. She receives inadequate medical care, but the Jackson County Branch of the NAACP in Mississippi last month (April) held a banquet, “NAACP: One Nation, One Dream,” to honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding service to the community. Christopher Epps, commissioner for the Mississippi Department of Corrections…

Share or Print this Page of BC | Jamie (38) lives in Mississippi, in what many call the post-racial era. Jim Crow legislation is over, some say. A “Black” man is Head of State. But Jamie lies on her bed, tired and weak. She needs adequate kidney dialysis treatment because she suffers from kidney failure.…

Share or Print this Page of BC | They’re the defeated. You’ll notice you don’t see them in such large numbers rising anymore. So few are on the stage these days, and most are not sure if they’re coming or going. And strange things happen as a result. One bites an ear of his opponent…

Share or Print this Page of BC | In recent months, I have taught remedial sessions for high school graduates of our public schools. These sessions focus on basic writing skills, grammar and syntax. Students are taught the basic 5-paragraph essay in order to re-take the two-year college entrance exam. As a teacher of these…

Share or Print this Page of BC | Emmett Till, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and others who organized, marched, and sacrificed their time and their lives forced Johnson to pick up his pen and sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and…

Share or Print this Page of BC | Barbara Christian [1] called our attention to the unknown Black women thinkers and doers whose desk were a kitchen table and whose podiums were a kitchen chair. Black women, young and old, daughters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, earned their credentials at these tables. Then, the flow of…

Share or Print this Page of BC | I managed to convince the moving company to cart me from Chicago to Wisconsin where I was to begin a 2-year Visiting Assistant Professorship in the English department at a predominantly white state institution. Tenure-track was possible. I settled in. I still needed to commute by train…

A young Black American man, 30-something at the time, told me something about himself and, most importantly, about the conditioning of Black Americans, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Both of us (along with a few others) had recently arrived in Ethiopia in 2002 as part of a teacher’s organization, and both of…