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- Tonie Marie Gordon, “Shades of Inequity: Why It’s Crucial to Diversify Medical Illustrations,” Nonprofit Quarterly (September 30, 2024): LINK. Studies have shown that there’s a massive lack of diversity in medical illustrations, often leaving healthcare providers with a skewed understanding of “typical” or representative patients.
- Quintessa Williams, “Can Freedom Schools Fill Educational Gaps for Black Students?” Word in Black (October 2, 2024): LINK. In Florida, where legislation has restricted the teaching of Black history in public schools, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) fights to keep this history alive through Freedom Schools — a callback to Mississippi in 1964, when Freedom Schools were introduced in response to that state’s segregated and woefully under-funded school system.
- Keisha N. Blain, “Fannie Lou Hamer and the Fight for Voting Rights,” Smithsonian Magazine (October 3, 2024): LINK. Mississippian Fannie Lou Hamer’s vision for a more inclusive political future laid the groundwork for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She persisted, despite political and physical attacks.
- Keidrick Roy, “Up from Feudalism: The Black American Liberal Tradition,” Princeton University Press (October 3, 2024): LINK. The author of a new book writes that “[c]ontrary to Black abolitionists’ damning critiques of feudalism and its associated concepts during the first half of the nineteenth century, many proslavery thinkers from that period celebrated what historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois assailed as ‘American feudalism.’ … Against these forces of racial feudalism, many Black Americans worked to renovate and expand the foundation of liberal ideas in the United States.”
- Sean Reilly, “Rematch looms in landmark ‘Cancer Alley’ civil rights case,” E&E News (October 3, 2024): LINK. “In a novel lawsuit brought early last year, a trio of Louisiana challengers laid out a sweeping narrative that traced a direct line between the oppressive legacy of slavery and allegedly discriminatory air pollution exposure.” The case was thrown out by a U.S. District Court, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court will hear oral arguments on appeal today (October 7).
- “Africatown’s historic legacy of resilience and revival,” Southern Environmental Law Center (October 4, 2024): LINK. A small Alabama community was established in the 1860s by survivors of the last slave ship, the infamous Clotilda. Today, Africatown residents are “facing a modern day battle to preserve their incredible history and the basic right to clean air and clean water as paper mills, factories, chemical plants, rail lines, and interstates have encroached on the once vibrant community.”
- Gil Weimar, “Diving with a Purpose: Finding Slave Ships and Much More,” In Depth Magazine (October 2, 2024): LINK. Diving With A Purpose (DWP), founded by a Black scuba diver, has helped locate and document the wrecks of 18 slave ships in six countries — including the Clotilda. DWP trains Black scuba divers, conservationists, and future maritime archeologists.
- Daniel Perez, “Voter suppression makes the racist and anti-worker Southern model possible,” Economic Policy Institute (October 1, 2024): LINK. “From the abolition of slavery until now, Southern white elites have used a slew of tactics to suppress Black political power and secure their economic interests — including violence, voter suppression, gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, and local preemption laws.”
- Marlee S. Bunch, “Mrs. Barbara Ross and the Fight for Educational Equity,” Black Perspectives (October 1, 2024): LINK. At age 98, Barbara Ross is the oldest Black educator who taught in the Topeka, Kansas, public schools before and after the 1954 Brown decision. Looking back on the landmark case, she says: “It was time for integration and should have happened sooner.”