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Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey by Dan Berger

A History of Black Power We Need and Deserve

This article will be released in full online November 18, 2023.

Say Burgin reviews Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey, an account of the fight for Black Power as told through the Simmons family, and particularly, Michael and Zoharah Simmons, from their first meeting during SNCC’s Atlanta Project to their later painful struggles as a family. The story that shines through, Burgin writes, is a story of Black Power that is deeply personal, often messy, and, above all, a refreshing challenge to popular narratives that serve to demonize the history of Black Power and the radicals who devoted their lives to the struggle. | more…

Logo used by Parti Africain de l'Indépendance

The Actuality of Red Africa

What is “Red Africa”? Through an extended treatment of Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (Verso, 2023), Vijay Prashad and Mikaela Nhondo Erskog illuminate the potential for a reinvigorated socialist politics in Africa. In turning away from Afropessimism and Decolonial Studies, the authors catalog the on-the-ground realities at play in pan-African and Marxist social movements today. | more…

The Myth of Black Capitalism, New Edition

Is Black Capitalism Still a Myth?

The Myth of Black Capitalism, Earl Ofari Hutchinson reflects on the relevance of his work more than fifty years after its initial publication. Even despite the promotion of wealthy Black individuals as model capitalists and COVID recovery schemes purported to help Black entrepreneurs, “Little had changed except the desperation of countless numbers of near penniless, distressed Black small business owners.” | more…

October Revolution in Jazz 1964 poster

Do It Yourself, Brother: Cultural Autonomy and the New Thing

Christian Noakes tells the story of the struggle to liberate jazz from the exploitative, white-controlled music industry in 1950s and beyond. Recounting the seminal events of the movement and backlash from white civil society, Noakes reveals a legacy of Black cultural autonomy and resistance led by such jazz legends as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, Bill Dixon, and others. | more…

The Myth of Black Capitalism, New Edition

The Myth of Black Capitalism: New Edition

Deciphers the history of “Black capitalist” rhetoric— and how it serves to enrich a minuscule few at the expense of the many

In his 1970 book The Myth of Black Capitalism, Earl Ofari Hutchinson laid out a rigorous challenge to the presumption that capitalism, in any shape or form, has the potential to rectify the stark injustices endured by Black people in America. Ofari engaged in a diligent historical review of the participation of African Americans in commercial activity in this capitalist country, demonstrating conclusively that the creation of a class of Black capitalists failed to ameliorate the extreme inequity faced by African Americans. Even “Buy Black”

NATO und Totenkopf [NATO and Skull]

NATO and the Long War on the Third World

The global balance of power shifting. The resistance to NATO’s push for a New Cold War is growing, particularly among the Third World countries that have historically borne the brunt of the West’s imperial projects. It is the role of socialists living in the imperial core, Paweł Wargan writes, to support the peoples of the Third World as they rise up in the new era. | more…

Brigadistas!

!Brigadistas! An American Anti-Fascist in the Spanish Civil War

In this exhilarating graphic novel about the Spanish Civil War, three American friends set off from Brooklyn to join in the fightdetermined to make Spain “the tomb of fascism” for the sake of us all. Together they defy the U.S. government and join the legendary Abraham Lincoln Brigade, throw themselves into battle, and conduct sabotage missions behind enemy lines. As Spain is shattered by the savagery of combat during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), readers see the darkening clouds of the World War to come. | more…

Photograph of journal bindings in an anthropology library, showing the transition where Eugenics Quarterly was renamed to Social Biology in 1969

Intelligence Under Racial Capitalism: From Eugenics to Standardized Testing and Online Learning

From the era of overt eugenic research to the present-day education system, the attempts to categorize and rank individuals’ “intelligence” through testing and statistics reflects and reinforces the power of racist, capitalist, and imperialist institutions. | more…

Anne Braden Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1947-1999

Finally, and for the first time, we have full access to a representative collection of Anne Braden’s writings, speeches, and letters, and the full spectrum of their subject matter: from the relationship between race and capitalism, to the role of the South in American society, to the function of anti-communism. | more…

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