| Black Agenda Report

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Kizito Mihigo and the Struggle for Rwandan Truth and Reconciliation
17 Feb 2021
Rwandans around the world celebrate the life of the nation’s most popular singer, apparently killed for opposing Paul Kagame’s ethnic and military dictatorship, writes Ann Garrison. “The US is the Rwandan government’s top bilateral donor.”
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
What did low Barr know?
17 Feb 2021
Liars, liars your loaded dice/tilted table theater’s on fire— But prosecutors and gas-lighting lawyers concur on Empire… Questions are swirling in your gaseous Van Gough sky senatorial cesspool, home of the bribe, land of the lie: What did low Barr know and when did he know it? who does…
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
MANIFESTO: Ten Commandments of Democracy in Haiti, September 25, 1991
17 Feb 2021
Almost 20 years ago, the president elected by Haiti’s poor majority gave the United Nations a lesson in the meaning of democracy for historically oppressed peoples. “Everyone must work to achieve a laboring civilization in which the roots of hunger will be eradicated.”
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
What isn’t in Judas and The Black Messiah is Just as Important as What is
17 Feb 2021
Hollywood is big, mostly white, capitalist business, so it’s no surprise that its new film on Fred Hampton provides little information on Black Panther politics and history. “The only police patrol featured in the film involved a Panther killing police.” These are amended remarks from a …
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Impeachment Theater
17 Feb 2021
Democracy is hanging on by a thread -- not due to marauding Trumpsters – but because of bipartisan support for neoliberal policies. “The Republicans are a convenient foil who can be blamed whenever the Democrats decide to take a dive.”
Jemima Pierre
Haiti: Black Despots and White Rulers
17 Feb 2021
The horror story in Haiti since 2004 is not really about despotic Black government, but is the consequence and crime of global white rule. “Moïse is the product of a broader system blocking Haiti’s democratic path and sovereignty, a system that is built and maintained by the white rulers of the…
Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, Brian Wakamo
Black Families Have a Major Stake in the Future of the Postal Service
24 Feb 2021
If there is any source of mass employment that has provided Black workers with decent wages and upward mobility, it is the US Postal Service, the target of corporatist assault. “Postal workers have the highest average annual wage and the highest median hourly wage among the 10 occupations with the…
David Marcus Rutherford
Sumo Wrestlers & Supermodels: Reimagining the Education of Black Children
24 Feb 2021
How do we define success for Black students and the adults that they become? “Black children are too often robbed of the innocence provided to youth of other backgrounds.” Sumo Wrestlers & Supermodels is the title of Joel Plummer’s most recent book. What 20 years of…
Geoffrey Jacques
A New Civil Rights Movement, a New Journal
24 Feb 2021
By the end of its run, Freedomways had become something close to a journal of record of the mid-to-late 20th Century African American freedom movement. “Within the context of the domestic Cold War, the African American community was one of the few places where the organized left still…
Dante James
Judas and the Black Messiah, A Missed Opportunity
24 Feb 2021
The film framed Hampton as a victim instead of a pro-active freedom fighter and revolutionary. “There is a brief reference to the BPP ten-point program, no mention of the BPP newspaper or the BPP service to the community beyond comments on the breakfast program.”