Civil Rights Movement Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Rolling Out

Edit: James Benton

Earlier this week, UMass basketball player Derrick Gordon reignited the national conversation about gays in sports when he came out to his team and the world as a gay man. Since then, athletes across the board have been talking about the growing number of openly gay athletes. Recently, NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell commented…

Martin Luther King Jr. not only received a Nobel Peace Prize in addition to numerous other awards his life matched his message of nonviolence. His message is still one that every day we have to fight to pass on to our youth. In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day listed below are 10 very…

Stax Records was more than a music machine releasing hits by the likes of Otis Redding and The Staple Singers. According to author and music historian Robert Gordon it was also an example of unity in 1960s segregated South Memphis. In his new book, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion Gordon uses the…

President Barack Obama addressed the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 43rd annual legislative conference at the Phoenix Awards Gala last night in Washington, D.C. Days after mass shootings in both of his hometowns, President Obama urged his supporters last night “to get back up and go back at it” and help push stalled legislation out of…

Yesterday, President Obama commemorated the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and the historic 1963 March on Washington with a historic speech of his own on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And although his words spoke to the crucial fight for racial equality that began more than five…

The similarities in the murders of Trayvon Martin and Emmitt Till are stark and eerie: Two young black teenagers, some sixty years apart, made innocent trips to small town stores in the Deep South — and were never seen by their parents again. Both boys were both devoured by cowards. The verdict in the George…

Rosa Parks was the right woman, for the right time, in the right place. Fifty-eight years after the quiet, unassuming seamstress refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, Parks was posthumously honored by President Obama with the first-ever full-length statue for a black woman inside the…

“After freedom you know colored people didn’t have nothing.”— 101 year-old former slave Fountain Hughes

Lil Wayne’s degrading Emmett Till analogy is regrettable and outrageous. His response to Till’s family is even worse.

As of last year, the United States Congress had an approval rating of around 11 percent. The current Congress will probably go down in history as one of the most dysfunctional and ineffective groups in American history. In 2012, Congress only passed 61 bills out of 3,914 bills that had been introduced by lawmakers, or…

It’s here. Today, Jan. 21, 2013 marks the 57th presidential inauguration, and the second in which our first black president, Barack Obama, will be sworn into the Oval Office. It is also an especially significant day because this year marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Washington where he delivered…

Residential Segregation by Income On the Rise Again in America The word “segregation” is used in describing changes of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement in America. Still, it continues to characterize the current living conditions of many minorities in America, inclusive of perpetuating poverty, lack of affordable housing and racially segregated housing via ignorant stereotypes…

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is hosting its 55th annual conference in Lake Mary and Sanford, Fla., the region near Orlando where George Zimmerman confessed to killing Trayvon Martin. Highlighting the annual convention will be a rally and march on Saturday, July 21 at 10 a.m. from a local church to the old Sanford courthouse where…

May 5, 1862 is the date that the underdog Puebla, Mexico outnumbered by the oppressor, France, kicked France out of their territory. What is often overlooked, however, is the connection that Cinco de Mayo shared with the profileration of the Civil Rights movement for blacks in America. Many Chicanos were involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and applied the revolutionary spirit of Cinco de…

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared the system of legal segregation unconstitutional, thereby calling for the end of segregation with all deliberate speed. That Supreme Court decision accelerated the quest for social justice in public education and paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement. Progress has been made and positive changes have…

NEW YORK – A former Black Panther Party leader who warred against the police and the establishment in the 1970s put Jay-Z, Diddy, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and other elite rappers on blast for being apolitical, high-priced slaves to capitalism and for blatantly flaunting their conspicuous consumption in people’s faces. Richie Williams finds it deplorable…

“The Lord knew I live in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”