Unless you were a member of Ashli Babbitt’s family, it is easy to forget about the misguided woman who was shot to death during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Babbitt was shot directly in the left [...] Continue Reading
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Black Women Reds and Black Women on the Liberal Left
As we left February, which was African American History Month—traditionally referred to as Black History Month—we had Women’s History Month in March. Each month’s purpose is to highlight and celebrate [...] Continue Reading
Law and Order
Watching the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the subsequent Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutions and imprisonment or fines of those involved in the criminal activity that left five [...] Continue Reading
A Luta Continua: The Struggle That Must Be
Dr. Claudine Gay was appointed president of Harvard University on Dec. 17, 2022. She became the first Black president in Harvard’s nearly 400 years of existence. Dr. Gay had been serving as the dean [...] Continue Reading
The Rise of Black Studies
Beginning at Merritt College in Oakland in 1961, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton organized the Negro History Fact Group, which was the first Black history course offered in higher education. The course [...] Continue Reading
DeSantis, Anti-Woke and African American History
The great Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker once noted that “history’s potency is mighty. The oppressed need it for identity and inspiration, [and the] oppressor for justification, rationalization [...] Continue Reading
False Narrative of Affirmative Action
While teaching at Binghamton University in New York for a number of years and at Fresno State for more than 30 years, the author served on admissions committees at both institutions and was struck at [...] Continue Reading
Complex Relations Between Browns and Blacks
In October 2022, in a released audio recording, three Hispanic members of the Los Angeles City Council and the president of the L.A. Federation of Labor spewed racist and disparaging comments about a [...] Continue Reading
Wokeness and the Great Fear of History
While teaching American history survey courses at Fresno State, I handed out questionnaires on the first day of class. Three key questions were 1) How do you view historical events (conservatively, [...] Continue Reading
MLK Jr. and the Class Question
As an undergraduate student, at his father’s house in Atlanta, a young inquisitive Martin Luther King Jr. read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and therefore Marx’s critique of capitalist social [...] Continue Reading
Black Wealth Then and Now
On June 1, 2021, President Joe Biden gave a speech commemorating the 1921 Tulsa (Greenwood) Race Massacre. This incident was chronicled by Scott Ellsworth in his 1982 book, Death in a Promised Land, [...] Continue Reading
The Woman King
While I was doing doctoral studies on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its impact on African kingdoms in West Africa, it never crossed my mind that Hollywood would produce a film on this topic. [...] Continue Reading