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Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam - Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddam On the 55th aniversary of the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer, we share an excerpt from our article on the wonderful film, Freedom on my Mind. One year after the assassination of Medgar Evers, on June 21 of 1964, word started to spread that three Mississippi civil rights workers - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - were missing. First the burned-out car appeared, then the bodies were found on August 12. What many suspected was later revealed: the cops and Klan worked hand-in-hand to murder the three Freedom Summer men. Normal Rockwell, Murder in Mississippi (1965)

Bobby Hutton Rests . Henry Taylor, 2008 Bobby Hutton, the first recruit of the Black Panther Party (then the Black Panther Part for Self Defense), was killed by Oakland police on this day in 1968. He was days away from his 18th birthday. Hutton's murder galvanized the black power movement and threw the Black Panthers into the national spotlight. Hutton was born in Jeferson Country, Arkansa, and moved to Oakland with his family under threat from the Ku Klux Klan . He joined the Panthers at 16 after meeting Bobby Seale and Huey Newton at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center . Hutton was one of several Panthers to march on the state capital building to protest the Mulford Act .

Excerpt from The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning , by Claudia Rankine. From Rebellious Mournings , edited by Cindy Mustein (2018). Dylann Storm Roof's unmediated hatred of black people; Black Lives Matter; citizens' videotapping the killing of blacks; the Ferguson Police Department leaving Brown's body in the street - all these actions support Mamie Till Mobley's belief that we need to see or hear the truth. We need the truth of how the bodies died to interupt the course of normal life. But if keeping the dead at the forefront of our conciousness is cricual for our body politics, what of the families of the dead? How must it feel to a family member of the deceased to be more important as evidence than as an individual to be buried and laid to rest? Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, was kept away from her son's body because it was evidence. She was denied the rights of a mother, a sad fact reminiscent of pre-Civil War times, w...

George Jackson was murdered by prison guards on August 21, 1971. Half a century later, his story deserves to be known by a new generation of activists. Jackson was born on September 23, 1941, in Chicago. He was raised by a loving mother and father, and given particular attention by his grandfather, George “Papa” Davis. But at age 15, Jackson was imprisoned at a youth facility in California after several juvenile convictions. “Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life,” Jackson later wrote in his book Soledad Brother . “When told to do something, I simply played the idiot and spent my time reading. The absentminded bookworm, I was in full revolt by the time seven months were up.” At age 18, Jackson was convicted on dubious evidence of a gas station robbery of $70. “I was captured and brought to prison when I was 18 years old because I couldn’t adjust,” he would later write. ...

Every so often, the national spotlight turns to Oakland, California, a city of about half the population of its better-known neighbor San Francisco. For the past three years, that spotlight has come courtesy of the NBA Finals, where the Golden State Warriors, led by the god-fearing "baby-faced assassin" Stephen Curry and an all-star crew, have met the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James. Along with the Finals come a slew of celebrities and other sports personalities, plus the teams' billionaire owners: Joe Lacob of the Warriors, with a $1.5 billion fortune accumulated as a venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; and Dan Gilbert of the Cavaliers, who wrangled his $5.9 billion as founder of the notoriously criminal Quicken Loans Inc . These two men--not to mention Warriors minority owner Peter Guber at a mere $800 million--are well within the super-rich 1 Percent. As the league's PR slogan goes : The NBA Cares--about the ...