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
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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
Streets of Laredo versus Today’s Streets of Outlaw Culture
It’s strange that Gunsmoke’s U.S. Marshall Matt Dillon did not require all the rough-and-tumble cowboys arriving in town from cattle herding to turn in their guns at Dillon’s office before going to [...] Continue Reading
What Is the Liberal Agenda?
When asked why the only Black conservative U.S senator voted not to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court, Senator Tim Scott (R–S.C.) said, “because she [...] Continue Reading
NFL, Jon Gruden and Social Justice: It Was All an Illusion
The most famous director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, touring and evaluating southern policing in the 1940s, observed, “There are some trigger-happy policemen down here.” We know now that Hoover’s [...] Continue Reading
Robert E. Lee Statue: Art or Propaganda?
By Malik Simba In an ironic twist, on Sept. 8, 2021, a Black construction company dismantled the enormous statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., the capital of the Old [...] Continue Reading