The Saturday Free School, a center of community organizing and transformative political thought and study, will celebrate the life of James Baldwin on July 7, 8 and 9, at Philadelphia’s historic Church of the Advocate. The legendary author, essayist and playwright, who died in 1987, “is one of the most important thinkers of our time,” said student and activist Elias Gonzales. His colleague, Kayla Watkins, explained: “We’re connecting Baldwin to Coltrane, we’re connecting Baldwin to Dubois.” Although Black historical movements are often viewed as separate, “in reality, different questions are posed in order to find the same solutions.”
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists.
If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley.
Jackson, Mississippi’s Black mayor is celebrated as a “radical” in some quarters, but his cops kill, maim and abuse Black people just like police forces everywhere in the US.
Inequality: The American Ethos
Medical, economic and political crises have combined to create a “perfect storm for reading, because of the ways that the ideology of whiteness has come to its limits,” said Aparna Mis
