| Black Agenda Report

Alice Speri
Police killings of Black Americans amount to crimes against humanity, international inquiry finds
28 Apr 2021
The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted under international law, an inquiry into US police brutality by leading human rights lawyers from around the globe has found.
Cornel West and Jeremy Tate
Howard University’s Removal of Classics is a Spiritual Catastrophe
28 Apr 2021
Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind.
Brian Shuffler
Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly
28 Apr 2021
The struggle for workers’ rights in this country has been an ongoing battle for hundreds of years. At the turn of the 20thcentury, the city of Philadelphia was experiencing an influx of migrant African American workers from the Southern states, fleeing varying forms of persecution and exploitation…
Steven Hahn
Slave Rebellions and Mutinies Shaped the Age of Revolution
28 Apr 2021
The Age of Revolution (1770–1850), bookended by the American and French Revolutions on the one side and the Revolutions of 1848 on the other, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the modern Euro-Atlantic world. Its intellectual energy fused the liberal and republican ideas of John Locke with the…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Davarian Baldwin’s “In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower”
29 Apr 2021
Universities have become today’s companies and our cities their company towns. ‘We are witnessing higher education’s growing control over the economic development and political governance of urban life.”
Gwendolyn Wallace and Roberto Sirvent
“Anti-Blackness, Bioethics, and Public Health: 200 Introductory Resources for Community Study”
29 Apr 2021
Writers, artists, community organizers and scholars have all contributed their analysis of the resource documents listed, below, and how they might be useful in assessing anti-Black structures around the world. “We hope the list helps communities explore questions that are not traditionally…
Scott McLernee
Notes From the Underground
29 Apr 2021
Richard Wright’s 1942 novel was testing the limits of what the white novel-reading public would have found imaginable. “Only now, with the novel in its restored form, do you see how they got inside Fred Daniels’ head -- and all the violence that put them there.”
Ibram X. Kendi
Compliance Will Not Save Me
29 Apr 2021
American policing is defended as good despite its unmatched amounts of lethal violence. “Within their cloud of fear, they have come to believe that police violence is caused by a lack of compliance, rather than seeing it as the violent son of American slavery.” Chicago Police Officer Eric E.…
Semassa Boko and Jeanette Charles
Reflections on Cuba’s Black Radical History, Revolutionary Health, and Grassroots Media
29 Apr 2021
It is vitally necessary to bridge the gap in knowledge and dismantle US misinformation campaigns against Cuba’s realities for international English-speaking audiences. “We wanted to reach a young audience in the United States that is not typically exposed to engaging and in-depth stories about…
Erica Caines
The Class Collaboration of “Justice”
29 Apr 2021
After the guilty verdict, the clarity that was collectively growing became squandered with the words “it’s not justice, it’s accountability.” “The Black petty-bourgeoisie have established enclaves around themselves using one another’s platforms to avoid directly addressing the Black masses they…