| Black Agenda Report

Bill Quigley
Katrina, War, Impeachment and the Black Gulag
22 Aug 2007
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford It is way past time that long-held assumptions of how African Americans will forge a path to social justice and political self-determination be re-examined. Two-plus generations of reflexive fealty to the Democratic Party has resulted in Democrats behaving more…
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Slavery Haunts America’s Plantation Prisons
03 Sep 2008
by Maya Schenwar Angola Prison isn't "even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what's going on." The plantation prisons of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas are the closest approximation to America's peculiar institution - places where involuntary servitude is legal under the 13th…
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Brutal Reprisals Against Peaceful GA Inmate Strikers Confirmed. Was One Victim Hidden For Weeks By Prison Authorities?
01 Jan 2011
By BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon Why was Macon State Prison inmate Terrance Deane brutally beaten by prison authorities, and his condition and whereabouts concealed from his family and the public for almost two weeks? How many other inmates have been savagely attacked by correctional…
Bill Quigley
“Felony is the New ‘N-Word”: Michelle Alexander on Mass Incarceration as “The New Jim Crow” in the Age of Obama
09 Jun 2010
by Paul Street The author – himself a renowned Left, anti-racist scholar and activist – calls Alexander’s work “as close to being a perfect book as you are going to see.” While established Black leadership spent most of its political capital defending affirmative action programs that never…
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Freedom Rider: Prison Rape, America’s Torture
01 Sep 2010
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley Americans look with horror at places like Congo where rape is a tool of warfare, yet are apt to make light of appalling levels of sexual abuse in U.S. prisons and jails. “In 2008 and 2009, 88,500 adults held in jails and prisons reported being…
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Freedom Rider: Parents in Jail
27 Oct 2010
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley Some Black folks seem to just beg for punishment – or for the right to inflict it on fellow African Americans. In Detroit, public officials are demanding punishments, including jail time, for parents that don’t participate in school…
Hugh Esco
Atlanta Journal-Constitution and New York Times Twist GA Prison Strike into a Scare Headline & Profit Opportunity
05 Jan 2011
Where most of us saw poor people reaching across lines that divided them to take a courageous stand against long odds, corporate media see something else....
Michelle Alexander
Obama’s America and the New Jim Crow
17 Mar 2010
by Michelle Alexander The color of the chief executive officer of the United States masks the little-changing realities of mass Black life in America, and the rise of a new system of Black suppression and control. “In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to…
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The Obama/GOP Consensus
26 Jan 2011
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford As far as President Obama is concerned, the state of the Union is now in harmony, with the merging of Republican politics and his own. The new consensus is an austere one for most Americans, as Obama joins the GOP “to prevent the domestic arms of government…
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“State of the Dream” Report Fails to Describe the Real Nightmare
19 Jan 2011
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford This year’s “State of the Dream” report is wholly inadequate to the task of resisting the Right’s attacks under the umbrella of “austerity.” The report’s authors appear to believe that only Republicans are out to gut the government. “By largely leaving the…