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Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a moment vividly encapsulated by the frenzied scene of South Vietnamese desperately trying to reach the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy. April was also the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee capitulated to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War to an end.The two episodes seemingly have little to do with each other. But each, in its way, illustrates one of the bleakly recurring themes of US military history: When America's armed forces prematurely abandon the...

Ben Affleck persuaded the producers of Finding Your Roots to edit out details of how his ancestors were slave owners even though it was a breach of PBS editorial rules. The new Batman star, who supports a number of liberal causes, objected to the ancestry TV show airing how his distant relations were racist, leaked Sony emails reveal. Instead viewers were shown heartwarming stories of how his third grandfather was a mystic in the Civil War and how his sixth grandfather was a patriot who fought in the American Revolution. Daily Mail Online has reviewed a transcript of the show...

‘I could have handled that better.” I don’t know if the captain of the Titanic ever said that. But Mike Pence did on Tuesday. The Indiana governor has managed to step on an impressive number of parts of his own anatomy recently and in the process gravely injured what was already a long-shot ambition to run for president in 2016. Earlier this month he signed the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act in a private ceremony. In attendance were prominent opponents of gay marriage. In response, great algae plumes of righteous outrage erupted across the Internet. Gay-rights groups, the Democratic party,...

Last week The Ryersonian reported on an incident that involved two first-year journalism students who were turned away from an event organized by Racialized Students' Collective because they are white. Since then there has been a lot of commentary on the piece and a lot of debate -- a lot of the criticism is valid. There are two sides to the story: 1) the media has a right to attend public events and report on matters that are in the public interest. The student media needs to cover initiatives that are happening on campus so that we draw attention to...

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well. ~snip~ “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Do not accept the Ferguson police officer’s retirement. Just keep talking about his phantasmagorical fear of the black body – or else.It would be easy enough to call Darren Wilson a liar, as so many pundits have done, after reading the now-former Ferguson police officer’s testimony in the case of the killing of the 18-year-old Michael Brown. We could imagine this paragon of whiteness, soft-spoken and soft around the middle, as a rational actor, spending months after the shooting to carefully prepare for his grand-jury testimony, to repeat his performance in front of George Stephanopoulos for a television interview. Calling...

Progressive critics of electoral activism—those who question the ultimate significance of lamestream bourgeois politics—would do well to remember the 2010 midterms, a Republican victory that solidified the power of the Tea Party within the GOP and heralded a right-wing takeover of state governments that has immiserated millions of Americans. A war is being waged on democracy in America. Brazenly, with a smiling face, the Right is working to shore up the accumulated wealth and power of the 1% against any incursion by the voting hordes. With the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, the Right—that convergence of billionaire activists, corporations,...

This final installment exposes the hatred Democrats have for all minorities and for conservatives. It wraps up the argument for never letting these people be in charge of our lives. Jim Crow Laws When the Democrats were forced at gun point to free their slaves they passed new laws called Jim Crow laws which added subtlety to their oppression. The result of these laws brought about de facto rather than de jure slavery. From 1876 through 1965 the Democrats did whatever they could to destroy the hopes and dreams of African Americans living in the old Confederacy. They made racial...

The spate of campaign fliers that use images of lynchings, Jim Crow laws and the recent racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, to urge blacks to vote in next week’s election somehow failed to grab the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.The NAACP headquarters in Washington wasn’t prepared to answer questions about the fliers and mailers circulated in black communities in Georgia, Maryland and North Carolina, despite widespread news coverage of it for the past week.“Can you send the photos of the literature and tell me the exact states they have been distributed in so that...

A string of leaks to the media protecting Darren Wilson are part of a very big problem. Here's the sordid history. On those rare occasions when it makes a real effort to grapple with the raw brutality of Jim Crow, the American mainstream media usually returns to a particular set of images that, by their very nature, are jarring and extraordinary: the burning cross, the hangman’s knot, the Klansman on horseback. This isn’t a bad thing; you can’t understand Jim Crow without understanding the significance of the Klan, for example. But it’s not an entirely good one, either. The problem...

If liberals truly cared about the plight of today’s black community, they wouldn’t be “standing in solidarity” with a bunch of outraged looters in Ferguson, Missouri… They would be denouncing the party of the KKK, Jim Crow, and segregation. They would be burning the homes of gang members. They would be fighting for the single black mother who is facing up to three years in prison for deciding to defend her life with a firearm. In short… They would be rampaging against the morally bankrupt hustlers of victimhood and dependency. Or, to put it another way, they would be voting...

You know you’ve hit a sore spot when the left starts screeching. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s producer, Steve Benen, just took a whack at the American Civil Rights Union’s new booklet, “The Truth About Jim Crow,” (TTAJC) which National Review writer John Fund wrote about in a recent column. Benen cites a critique from the Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger Jay Bookman: “Jay Bookman took a closer look at the pamphlet Fund’s piece was promoting, highlighting some of its more glaring errors of fact and judgment.” And what errors of fact would those be, Steve? Bookman did not point out a...

Editor's Note: Mr. Blackwell is a member of the Policy Board of the American Civil Rights Union.You know you’ve hit a sore spot when the Left starts screeching.MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s producer, Steve Benen, just took a whack at the American Civil Rights Union’s new booklet, “The Truth About Jim Crow,” (TTAJC) which National Review Online writer John Fund wrote about in a recent column. Benen cites a critique from the Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger Jay Bookman: “Jay Bookman took a closer look at the pamphlet Fund’s piece was promoting, highlighting some of its more glaring errors of fact and...

There's a weekly trial on the Internet about who may be stealing culture from whom. Earlier this week, the defendants were Iggy Azalea and white gay men. A while back, it was Macklemore and the Harlem Shakers. Now, we have come across a story from the Jim Crow era about cultural mimicry between people of color.In mid-20th century America, the turban was a tool that people of color used for "confounding the color lines," writes Manan Desai, board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive.At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In...

North Carolina’s voter identification law, which has been described as the most sweeping attack on African American electoral rights since the Jim Crow era, is being challenged in a legal hearing that opens on Monday. Civil rights lawyers and activists are gathering in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the start of the legal challenge that is expected to last all week. They will be seeking to persuade a federal district judge to impose a preliminary injunction against key aspects of HB 589, the voting law enacted by state Republicans last August. Lawyers for the North Carolina branch of the NAACP and...

Throughout my life, I have been impacted by the work of Martin Luther King and others as they worked to bring equality to people of my race. It is interesting, however, the way in which people interpret the events that have brought us to this point. Most importantly, as the nation marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there is much about this historic piece of legislation that has been forgotten or deliberately misrepresented. Few contemporary American students may remember that its supposed champion, President Lyndon B. Johnson, left office under the cloud of the increasingly unpopular...

Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to those who have long been urging the Republican Party to reach out to black voters. Not only is that long overdue, what is also long overdue is putting some time — and, above all, some serious thought — into how to go about doing it. Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to "reach out" is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black "leaders" like Jesse...

I guess this should be filed in the "Washington Politics" thread ... I'm an African American registered Democrat. I don't mind giving conservative Republicans hell when they deserve it. But unlike many conservative, I don't mind speaking out against my Party when I think they are wrong and encouraging them to do the right thing. Anyway, white liberals are having fits about the article posted below, which was written by me and published on my blog, in Black newspapers across the country, and at the liberal Daily Kos blog. I'm posting the article here because I'd like to have some...

In the debate over Arizona's S.B. 1062, a bill that would have modified the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, some opponents of the bill characterized the bill and others like it as "Jim Crow for gays." Those who used this analogy, though, either do not understand RFRA, do not understand Jim Crow, or both. The opponents claimed it would have allowed business owners to deny gays access to public accommodations. A Christian Post analysis of the bill concluded that was not true. In a letter sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) before she vetoed the bill, 11 law professors,...

Back when gay rights advocates were first pushing for gay marriage, they claimed that they only wanted equality and that no one would be compelled to participate in gay marriage events.They lied.As soon as gay marriage went on the books, and in some states where it wasn’t even on the books, religious bakeries and photographers were assaulted with demands that they participate in gay ceremonies, sued if they didn’t and ordered to take part in gay ceremonies or face fines… and even jail time.States have responded by trying to pass measures that will protect religious freedom and freedom of...