Selma, Obama and the Colonization of Black Resistance

I tried! In my capacity as a member of the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Board of Directors (CCR), I traveled to Selma on Friday to attend the induction of Arthur Kinoy and William Kunstler, two of the founding lawyers of CCR, into the Selma National Voting Rights Museum. And even though I knew that I would have to endure Obama’s …

Leid Stories – 03.09.15

In Selma, Obama Builds A Bridge Over Many Troubled Waters Delivering the keynote address Saturday at the 50th-anniversary commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., President Obama talked of the America that was, that is, and that is yet to be. March 7, 1965, when state troopers and local police violently waylaid a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery calling …

From White Sheets to Spreadsheets

I hate to spoil a happy ending. The movie “Selma,”like this week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma, Ala., 50 years ago, celebrates America’s giant leap from apartheid. Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the …

Why We Should (All) Struggle to Make Black Lives Matter

As a social justice activist and conflict resolution scholar-practitioner, I have always been particularly concerned with what motivates people to enter the theater of protest and civil resistance. It is a far more complicated question than what motivates people to start a career or a family because even the largest social movements are made up of a relative few, and …