SOCIAL JUSTICE

Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule Residents of Evanston, Illinois, filed into the Evanston Township High School Auditorium for the reparations committee’s regular meeting on Jan. 11, 2024. People braved the cold winter weather to wait patiently through the meeting’s public comments, musical performances, and education sessions for the announcement of the order in which the next set of residents would receive their reparations funds. “This information will be available starting Tuesday or Wednesday of next week on the web page and also at 311,” announced Robin Rue Simmons, chair of the Evanston Reparations Committee. “So city staff will be available outside to tell you what your selection number is if you can’t see them on the screen.” An Excel spreadsheet with unique identifiers for the 454 dir...

The women who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained a movement for social change. Historian Vicki Crawford was one of the first scholars to focus on women’s roles in the civil rights movement. Her 1993 book, “Trailblazers and Torchbearers,” dives into the stories of female leaders whose legacies have often been overshadowed. Today she is the director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, where she oversees the archive of his sermons, speeches, writings and other materials. Here, she explains the contributions of women who influenced King and helped to fuel some of the most significant campaigns of the civil rights era, but whose contributions are not nearly as well known. An activist in her own right Coretta Scott King is often remembered as a devoted wif...

Black communities are using mapping to document and restore a sense of place. When historian Carter Woodson created “Negro History Week” in 1926, which became “Black History Month” in 1976, he sought not to just celebrate prominent Black historical figures but to transform how white America saw and valued all African Americans. However, many issues in the history of Black Americans can get lost in a focus on well-known historical figures or other important events. These highways displaced many Black communities. Some Black activists are using mapping to do the opposite: highlight hidden parts of history. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division Our research looks at how African American communities struggling for freedom have long used maps to protest and survive racism while affir...

The diversity within Black Canada should be recognized and amplified. It seems trite, in 2024, to suggest that the Black population in Canada is diverse. On the surface, this is a relatively uncontroversial point to make and one that most people would agree with. However, are we curious enough about what this diversity actually looks like? Further, what are the implications of reckoning with these nuances as we support and shape Black-focused policies, programs, studies, and spaces? These questions lead us into less certain terrain. Global music star Abel Tesfaye, formerly known as The Weeknd, is arguably one of the most recognizable contemporary Black Canadian figures. Piecing together some of the public details about his background and activities paints a picture that helps us apprecia...

Book explores how colleges seek to increase racial diversity without relying on race in college admissions. When the Supreme Court outlawed the use of race in college admissions in June 2023, it forced colleges and universities to rethink how to maintain and increase diversity in their student bodies. It’s a topic that political science professor Lauren Foley had been exploring in her new book, “On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies.” Below, Foley expounds on what she sees as the future of diversity in higher education now that college admission officials can no longer consider race. Is racial diversity in higher education about to suffer? Yes, the likelihood of admission for racial minority students will suffer as a result of the nationwide ...

American Carnage: To Be Black in Trump’s America As a law student in 2004, I studied the anatomy of one of America’s most brutal inventions: the lynching. I also studied the Black people who led the fight against this form of racial terrorism, specifically Black women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell. By doing so, I felt intimately connected to my ancestors—these impressive social justice crusaders, as well as the men in my family. In 1933, my father was a nine-year-old boy when Marylander George Armwood was brutally tortured and executed before crowds of people. It is a story I belatedly learned from him because it had been buried so deep in his psyche. In more recent years, thanks largely to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, l...

Ta’Kiya Young's shooting highlights sobering reality for Black pregnant women in America. Nadine Young left her home in Ohio under the crushing weight of grief. By the end of 1989, the young mother of four had lost both of her parents, a stillborn baby girl and her sister. She packed up and moved to Mississippi for nearly a decade, where she gave birth to a fifth son. She taught her boys to be respectable and to always do what police asked. “I had major, major talks with them, so if they had any encounters they complied and did whatever they needed to do so they wouldn't lose their life,” Young told The 19th. “We knew how prejudiced it was [in Mississippi] ... But when we moved back up here, we never expected this kind of mess.” Decades after she returned home to Ohio, the kind of inju...

When Confederate-glorifying monuments went up in the South, voting in Black areas went down. Confederate monuments burst into public consciousness in 2015 when a shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, instigated the first broad calls for their removal. The shooter intended to start a race war and had posed with Confederate imagery in photos posted online. Monument removal efforts grew in 2017 after a counterprotester was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist groups defended the preservation of Confederate monuments. Removal movements saw widespread success in 2020 following George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police. These events linked Confederate monuments to modern racist beliefs and acts. But whe...

Justice Department launches civil rights investigation of Memphis police – 4 essential reads about holding police accountable. Seven months after the horrific beating death by police of Memphis, Tennessee, motorist Tyre Nichols, the Justice Department, on July 27, 2023, launched a civil rights investigation into allegations the Memphis Police Department routinely used excessive force and, on a systemic basis, discriminated against Black residents. Although Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said during a press conference that the investigation of the department and city of Memphis is “not based on a single incident or event,” she also said, “In January of this year, the nation witnessed the tragic death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police.” The Justice Department, Clark...