A panel of academics and activists marked the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected prime minister, by agents of the US and Belgium. Texas A&M professor Ira Dworkin, author of “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State,” pointed out that it was Black women, led by singer Abbey Lincoln, who petitioned for Lumumba’s release from arrest, and later organized against US policy in Congo. These protests “did create a shift” in Black American politics towards confrontation with US policies in Africa and the world, Dworkin told the online seminar.
The US attacks other nations with bombs, coups, sanctions, and also by corrupting the law around the world.
The chief of the Memphis, Tennessee police department took part in trainings in Israel. These exchanges with an apartheid state are a training ground for brutality.
This week we learn about the destruction of a Black community in Portland, Oregon and the legal efforts at restitution, and the struggle to fight for reform of the cash bail system in Minnesota. But…
Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
We now turn to a discussion of Albina, a Black community in Portland, Oregon which was devastated by so-called urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. The final blow came in the early 1970s, when an…
