CLINTON, Miss. – Reading bookends my days. I start the morning with newspapers, including this one (News Journal), and turn in for the night with a book.
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I first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock’s rousing song, Fannie Lou Hamer, on a car radio a summer day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela addressed the United Nations General Assembly. The song and the moment were very powerful, but not as strong as Hamer’s own voice, raised in song or to protest conditions for Black Mississippians in the 1960s and 1970s.
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If you don’t know much about Black history, or not as much as you’d like, all you have to do is watch two documentaries in February, Black History Month. Women with distinguished civil rights forebears made these both documentaries, and both films use innovative techniques.
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For the last MCIR LIVE event of 2021, MCIR founder and host Jerry Mitchell talked to three guests who have made exploring experiences of hate in the Deep South the centerpiece of their work in new and surprising ways.
The Justice Department has closed the books on the lynching of Emmett Till, whose face — young and unblemished, then swollen and monstrous — has come to symbolize the unpunished killings of Black Americans.
Whatever hope there was for justice was dashed this week when the department pinned the blame on its inability to confirm a book’s explosive 2017 claim that the White woman at the center of the case recanted her story about Till’s actions that fateful day in Money, Mississippi.
Some historians of the civil rights movement think Bob Moses, who died in July 2021, was as influential as Martin Luther King Jr., if not more so.
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Four people who contributed to a major chapter in civil rights history joined MCIR founder Jerry Mitchell last week to talk about justice achieved after almost 40 years.
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In New York City, Jelani Cobb and Calvin Trillin had talked to each other at a dinner party given by The New Yorker’s current editor.
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