"That Is After All the Literal Definition"

"To be clear, the diehard racist whites of 1970 are or would be the diehards of today and the most determined anti-racist whites of 1970 would likely be the same today too. But there’s a vast, fluid and ambiguous middle group. Our definitions of race in America remain fluid. But at least as we define it today, whites will no longer be a majority at all in the relatively near future. Certainly, they won't be the overwhelming majority able to define and dictate cultural, economic and political power more or less as they choose. That scares a lot of white people. And it can scare people who might have non-white friends and not have any overt antipathy toward non-whites. The changing demography post-1970 has brought the issue of white supremacy far more acutely and unavoidably to the fore than it was in the past. That is a big, big part of what Trumpism is all about."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo responds to Jonathan Chait's New York essay on white supremacy.

The Whole World Is Watching

"Republicans brayed that Democrats, who were happy to align themselves with the forces of social change in 1960 and 1964, had by 1968 been subsumed by them. The low-tax, anti-government rhetoric that defines modern Republicanism has its roots in the simmering white resentments that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, animated by the belief that the federal government had become a tool for redistribution of white wealth into the hands of undeserving black and brown communities. Donald Trump represents the full expression of that belief."

Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker connects the 2016 presidential campaign to 1968.

As does Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

As does Rick Perlstein at In These Times.

"One of the Most Pivotal Figures in 20th Century African-American Civil Rights History"

"In 1944, she graduated as the valedictorian of her Howard University law class, producing a senior thesis titled 'Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy Be Overruled?' Trained by William Howard Hastie and Leon Ransom at Howard, Pauli Murray had been witness to their early legal strategy of combating separate but equal doctrine by forcing states to either make black institutions equal to their white counterparts or integrate white institutions, if they failed to do so. However, she argued that Plessy v. Ferguson was inherently immoral and discriminatory and should be overturned. When she brought up this argument to her classmates, she noted that her suggestion was received with 'hoots of derisive laughter.' Murray coined the term 'Jane Crow' to name the forms of sexist derision she frequently encountered during her time at Howard. It was the piece she co-authored in 1965 called 'Jane Crow and the Law' that Ginsburg cites as so influential in her thinking about legal remedies for sex discrimination. Nearly 10 years later, in 1953, Spottswood Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and others pulled out a copy of her senior paper and used it as a guide to strategize how they would argue the Brown v. Board case. They didn't bother to mention this until about 10 years later, when she ran into Robinson at Howard Law School."


Brittney Cooper in Salon praises lawyer Pauli Murray.

"The Indispensable Man"?

"Mostly, the Ungers' vision of Marshall is persuasive. Praise for the general has soared so high over the years that the reality is bound to lie closer to the ground. The book also offers a useful reminder that glorification of the World War II era may tell us more about the disappointments of our own times than about an increasingly remote past when—no ­surprise—American leaders stumbled and were sometimes saved from their errors by the scale of the American war machine and the endurance of their ­allies."


Mark Atwood Lawrence in The New York Times reviews George Marshall: A Biography, by Debi and Irwin Unger with Stanley Hirshson.

"The Radical Ideas of One Generation Are Often the Common Sense of the Next"

"Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks or even on the History Channel. Indeed, our history is under siege."

Peter Dreier in The Nation presents a list of "The Fifty Most Influential [Activist] Progressives of the Twentieth Century."

Premature Anti-Fascists

"With this Nazi/Jim Crow link as a backdrop, Gilmore writes, 'racism had become un-American' by the mid-1940s, as World War II came to an end. Albert Einstein, deploring the second-class citizenship of black Americans, warned that 'the fall of Berlin does not mean the end of fascism . . . yes, there are fascists in America, too.' Around the same time, such American icons as Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra began to publicly caution against 'race prejudice,' which they said was better left to Hitler and his ilk. This high-profile talk of tolerance helped lay the foundation for Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as we came to know it during the 1950s and '60s.
"How that foundation was laid decades earlier is the central concern of Gilmore's narrative. Rejecting the notion that 'middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation,' she writes: 'By giving the movement a 1950s start, we discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle-class, and male roots.'"

Valerie Boyd reviews Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 in the Los Angeles Times.

Kenneth Clark, 1914-2005

The New York Times runs an obituary of Kenneth Clark, whose psychological research influenced Brown v. Board of Education.