There was nothing J. Edgar Hoover feared more than a charismatic black radical who could inspire the oppressed to fight back. And that’s why, according to a compelling new series, the FBI had its fingerprints all over Malcolm X’s murder.
Rosa Parks may be lionized for her defiance on the bus, but that episode doesn’t do justice to her career as an organizer.
The US nuclear arsenal gobbles up massive resources for death that should be used for human life. For decades, Catholic activists have put their bodies on the line to insist we dismantle that arsenal.
For years, capitalists and their journalistic mouthpieces blamed joblessness on a "skills gap." But there wasn’t a skills gap. There was a gap between what society owes people and what it’s willing to offer them at the expense of corporate profits.
How liberals brought an anticommunist slur from America’s past back to life.
With the death of John Lewis, we’ve lost another giant of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s up to us to carry on the struggle for the “beautiful community” he spent his whole life fighting for.
Until his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr led an unheralded struggle for economic justice.
In 1950s America, the Cold War was raging, but socialists were playing key roles in the early civil rights movement. We can’t afford to let that radical history be sanitized.
W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America thrust African Americans into the role of historical actors and showed that the black freedom struggle has always been one for radical democracy.
Capitalism has ushered in a new era of racial segregation in the Bay Area. To change course, we need to fight the economic exploitation that’s driving it.
Yes, you should absolutely call your mom today. But you should also know that Mother’s Day isn’t just a holiday for greeting card and chocolate companies to make a buck, but of radical antiwar and feminist organizers.
The story of the Congressional Black Caucus reflects the class contradictions of black politics in the post–civil rights era.
Liberals who generally support Israel, but find themselves cringing when Israeli politicians make racist remarks, have seized on bus segregation because it packages occupation in digestible terms.
How one of the greatest American socialists ended up on the wrong side of history.
The Black Lives Matter movement doesn't just need allies who condemn the murder of George Floyd — it needs comrades in the fight against racial injustice. Trade unionists have to join that fight.
Donald Trump’s first executive orders should dispel any fantasy of him as either a noninterventionist or an economic populist.
If poverty and racism persist, it won’t be long before there’s another Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or Trayvon Martin.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr delivered a lecture calling on the “dispossessed of this nation” to revolt in nonviolent struggle. We reprint it here in full.
How Ramparts went from Catholic literary magazine to the vanguard of the New Left.
