The Day Rep. Renitta Shannon Wouldn’t Sit Down for Georgia’s Abortion Ban
by Cynthia R. Greenlee,
Renitta Shannon
First things first: Representative Renitta Shannon, who represents Georgia’s 84th district in the state’s legislature, was raised a PK—a preacher’s kid. In her father’s Primitive Baptist church—one so doggedly literal that it frowned upon 11 a.m. Sunday communion because the practice debuted at the Last Supper, that world-changing evening meal—she absorbed and sometimes questioned the »
In the heat of an Atlanta summer evening, the ALFA Omegas softball team took the field at Iverson Park. As an out-lesbian team organized by the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), they were different from other softball lineups in the City League in 1974. The Omegas brought together ALFA members at varying skill levels—neophytes and »
In February 22, 2018, West Virginia public school teachers and school service employees, most of them women, walked out of their classrooms in what would become a nine-day statewide strike, fighting for a 5% raise and affordable healthcare coverage. But what the teachers’ statements, speeches, and protest signs indicated was that this was not just »
Two weeks ago, President Trump tweeted that a future Democratic president risked impeachment “without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here—a lynching.” Trump’s claims to victimhood are absurd. He is a wealthy white man and President of the United States; lynchings targeted and killed vulnerable »
Mark Twain hated Sir Walter Scott. He blamed Scott for the Civil War, accusing him of infecting the South with the “Sir Walter disease,” brought on by the “sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” Before the war and beyond the South’s defeat into the heyday of the »
Chokwe Antar Lumumba in conversation with Kiese Laymon
by Chokwe Antar Lumumba,
Kiese Laymon
“We have to figure out how we go around [the mountain] or, like Hannibal, how we just run the troops up.” Kiese Laymon: Yo, man. It’s so good to talk to you, fam. I don’t even know how to ask somebody as busy as you how you doing. Are you less busy in the summer, »
AMY WRIGHT: Do you consider yourself a radical, meaning that you favor drastic political, economic, or social reform? JANISSE RAY: There’s no denying that I am a radical and that I favor far-reaching and extreme reform on many levels. We are at a place globally that requires drastic action. We need immediate action to mitigate »
VALERIE BOYD: Everybody I’ve talked with, when I’ve told them that I’m interviewing Stacey Abrams, they’re so excited—and especially Black women. Every time I tell a Black woman I’m interviewing you, they get a dreamy look in their eyes that’s usually reserved for Michelle Obama. Well, maybe Oprah. But now there are three Black women »
REV. DR. WILLIAM J. BARBER II: My father . . . said, “When you feel overwhelmed by your moment, go back and read the moments that people faced that are worse than yours. What courage and hope and truth did they find in that moment?” I go back and I read Henry McNeal Turner and »
It can be an odd undertaking to explore the meaning and mission of an American public university through the lens of history. The concept of a “university of the people”—especially for a southern state university—must begin with a great and unyielding asterisk. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was all male until 1897, »
On August 14, 1970, Richard Nixon treated New Orleans, a city keen on parades, to a campaign-style motorcade. With Nixon standing and waving through the sunroof, his limousine moved slowly down wide Canal Street, then through narrow Chartres Street. Thousands of people lined the sidewalks to cheer and be near the President of the United »
“Fifty air horns could help change the course of an election.” The first time we set off the air horns, several of us got frostbite. We didn’t expect it, because we were standing outside of the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion in short sleeves, already contending with the sticky warmth of springtime. Giddy and naive, we »
Interview
