News of the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s health struggles has stirred many. It has me praying. And it has me remembering the hard lessons he taught, shaped in the trenches of our people’s ongoing fight for freedom.
Browsing: Opinions
America just celebrated Thanksgiving, so family and friends gathered around the table to give thanks and to have some food.
When Dr. Martin Luther King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for protesting racial segregation in that city, he declared that such protests were needed to create a “constructive nonviolent tension” that would lift individuals out of the “dark depths of prejudice and racism.” As he explained, “the purpose of the direct action was to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”
Although President Donald Trump has claimed that “every policy” of his administration was “designed to lift up the American worker,” he has acted consistently, since returning to office in January 2025, to undermine workers’ chosen representatives, America’s labor unions.
Harry Truman, Hiroshima and the Necessity Defense
The official US line on how the peace plan to end the Ukraine war emerged has Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner developing it, Marco Rubio endorsing it, and then Russia assenting to it. But that story does not hold up.
Our global security system, based in who has the most and the most modern weapons to enforce deterrence, is gradually becoming irrelevant, undermined by the ever-intensifying climate emergency. If any given nation is experiencing droughts, floods, and unbearable, even life-threatening heat, what difference does it make if its government possesses more nuclear weapons than its adversaries?
Racism is not merely prejudice or bias; it is a systemic serial killer that stalks Black lives across generations. It weaponizes institutions, social policies, and cultural norms to inflict harm, shorten lifespans, and deny dignity. Unlike a lone assailant acting in the shadows, racism is a coordinated structure—visible, persistent, and lethal.
The last time my beloved alma mater, Johnson C. Smith University won a CIAA Football Championship was 1969. That’s a long time ago by any barometer that you use. I live in another time zone, yet my clock is always on JCSU time.
The awkward canonization of Dick Cheney