Tag Archives: naacp

Recy Taylor’s 67 Year Quest for Justice

My latest is out on Colorlines. Here’s an excerpt: At 91, Recy Taylor May Finally See Alabama Acknowledge Her 1944 Rape Recy Taylor was abducted and raped at gunpoint by seven white men in Abbeville, Ala., on Sept. 3, 1944. Her attack, one of uncounted numbers on black women throughout the Jim Crow era in [...]

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Haley Barbour’s Raid on Historical Memory

(An update follows this post.) Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is at it again. Seems like every time Barbour pops up in the news these days he’s busy whitewashing Mississippi’s racist past. The latest came my way yesterday via Digby and Joan McCarter at Kos. In an interview with the Weekly Standard, Barbour had the audacity [...]

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The FBI’s Slow Race Against Time

As far as I knew, none of the children of Clifton Walker had ever been contacted by FBI agents  regarding the February 28, 1964 racial killing of their father, near Woodville, MS. Still, I thought I should confirm this,  so a few nights ago I gave a call to Walker’s second daughter Catherine and asked [...]

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Shock Treatment, Suspicious Blacks and Oscar Grant

I have been trying to wrap my mind around BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s defense in the shooting death of 22-year-old black man Oscar Grant. Mehserle’s supposed weapon confusion is at the heart of why he was not convicted of voluntary manslaughter, let alone of second degree murder. The underlying logic of the defense seems to [...]

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July 4, 1964

July 4, 1964 was the last time Julia Dobbins saw her brother, JoEd Edwards. Eight days later, he went missing. Rumors were that the Klan took away the 21-year-old Black man and murdered him. His mother died in 1990 never having learned what truly happened to her son. July 4, 1964 was the thirteenth day [...]

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John Hope Franklin, Groundbreaking African Amerian Historian, Has Died

With so many great African American figures dying too young, it is wonderful to celebrate John Hope Franklin’s 94 years of life, filled with so many accomplishments. His book From Slavery to Freedom is an essential reference on my shelf of books on African American history. Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma [...]

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Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones

By John Dorsey Due, Jr. November 18, 2008 The nation will pause and reflect on the massive “Revolutionary Kool Aid Suicide” of almost a 1000 Americans in their Jonestown refuge in Guyana and the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan, thirty years ago, on November 18, 1978. This could be my final ten year acknowledgment of [...]

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The Legacy of a Murder (full text)

I’ve uploaded to scribd.com the complete PDF version my article in the March/April issue of ColorLines Magazine, “The Legacy of a Murder,” about the 1959 murder of Samuel O’Quinn in Centreville, MS. You can read it in the handy viewer, embedded in this post, or you can go to the article’s page on Scribd and [...]

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Lieutenant Uhura and Doctor King

(h/t Ampersand.)

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