SOCIAL JUSTICE

How Black Lives Matter Changed the U.S. In the decade since it began, #BlackLivesMatter has shifted the nation's collective consciousness, whether we wanted it shifted or not. Every generation of Americans lives through a moment that captures history in hindsight, a moment so indelible—the JFK assassination, 9/11—people can describe exactly where they were and what they were doing when it happened. For 50-year-old Melina Abdullah, that moment came in 2013. “I remember where I was when George Zimmerman [tried for fatally shooting Trayvon Martin] was acquitted and he was given his gun back,” says Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State, Los Angeles and director of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter Grassroots. “For me and other Black people, this is more impactf...

International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., pays new respect to the enslaved Africans who landed on its docks. Before Congress ended the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the Port of Charleston was the nation’s epicenter of human trafficking. Almost half of the estimated 400,000 African people imported into what became the United States were brought to that Southern city, and a substantial number took their first steps on American soil at Gadsden’s Wharf on the Cooper River. That location of once utter degradation is now the hallowed site of the International African American Museum. Pronounced “I Am” and opened in June 2023, the US$120 million project financed by state and local funds and private donations was 25 years in the making and is a memorial to not only those en...

Affirmative action lasted over 50 years: 3 essential reads explaining how it ended. Ever since U.S. President Lyndon Johnson enacted affirmative action in 1965, white conservatives have challenged the use of race in college admissions. Their arguments against such policies are typically based on the use of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which prohibits discrimination against American citizens on the basis of their race, religion or sexuality. According to this conservative thinking, race-based solutions are discriminatory by their very definition and, as such, are unconstitutional. The question, then, is how does an institution try to offer a modern-day remedy to atone for long-standing patterns of racial discrimination? Over the years, The Conve...

How Black Americans combated racism from beyond the grave. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently published a story about a Black cemetery in Buckhead, a prosperous Atlanta community. The cemetery broke ground almost two centuries ago, in 1826, as the graveyard of Piney Grove Baptist Church. The church has been gone for decades; the cemetery now sits on the property of a townhouse development. It is overgrown, with most of its 300-plus graves unmarked. The article describes how some of the buried’s descendants and family members are trying to get the property owner to clean up and take care of the cemetery. Audrey Collins is one of those descendants. Her grandmother, Lenora Powell Thomas, is buried there, and a photograph of her grandmother’s headstone accompanied the article. The h...

People of color get so used to discrimination in stores they don’t always notice bad customer service. People from underrepresented ethnic and racial groups tend to rate poor customer service less negatively than white people do, according to new peer-reviewed research we co-authored. Many companies in the service sector, such as banks and airlines, use customer satisfaction surveys so they can figure out how to improve their operations. There’s an implicit assumption that the feedback given will accurately reflect the actual quality of the service provided. Companies may also assume that customers, regardless of their socioeconomic background, will give similar evaluations for good service – and that people will recognize poor or discriminatory service when they experience it. Our rese...

The law often shields police officers from accountability – and reinforces policing that harms Black people, homeless people and the mentally ill. Seeking accountability in the brutal police beating death of her son, the mother of Tyre Nichols has filed a US$55 million federal lawsuit against the individual officers, the Memphis Police Department and the city of Memphis, Tennessee. There’s no way to predict the outcome of this lawsuit. But civil suits are by now a familiar tool of grieving families on a familiar quest. Recent multimillion-dollar settlements by the city of Minneapolis over police use of excessive force and a Justice Department finding that police in Louisville, Kentucky, routinely violate the constitutional rights of Black people confirm what many have long complained abo...

The White woman at the center of the Emmett Till saga, Carolyn Bryant Donham, has died. Megan LeBoeuf, chief investigator for the Calcasieu Parish coroner’s office, confirmed Donham’s death. The 88-year-old was suffering from cancer and was receiving end-of-life hospice care. Devery Anderson, the author of “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” said Donham’s death marks the end of a chapter. Some people “have been clinging to hope that she could be prosecuted. She was the last remaining person who had any involvement,” he said. “Now that can’t happen.” For many, “it’s going to be a wound, because justice was never done,” he said. “Some others were clinging to hope she might still talk or tell the truth. … Now it’s over.” Till’s cous...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas moves to reverse the legacy of his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall. As public attention focuses on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ close personal and financial relationship with a politically active conservative billionaire, the scrutiny is overlooking a key role Thomas has played for nearly three decades on the nation’s highest court. Thurgood Marshall, left, had a very different view of the purpose of the Supreme Court than his successor, Clarence Thomas. U.S. Supreme Court via Wikimedia Commons Thomas’ predecessor on the court, Thurgood Marshall, was a civil rights lawyer before becoming a justice. In 1991, in his final opinion before retiring after a quarter century on the court, Marshall warned that his fellow justices’ growing appetite to r...