May 22: The Great Society
President Lyndon Baines Johnson unveiled his plans for “The Great Society” in a speech at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on this date in 1964. (To hear his speech, click here.) The phrase was...
View ArticleSeptember 8: Smoking and Heart Disease
On this date in 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the findings of research by Drs. David M. Spain and Daniel J. Nathan linking heavy smoking to heart disease. In a study...
View ArticleSeptember 13: The Attica Uprising
A prisoner takeover of Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum security penitentiary in western New York, was crushed on this date in 1971 when Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller sent in more than 1,000...
View ArticleDecember 13: Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn
Roland Gittelsohn, a Reform rabbi who was the first Jewish chaplain ever appointed by the U.S Marine Corps and served the invading forces at Iwo Jima, died at 85 on this date in 1995. Gittelsohn was a...
View ArticleJanuary 10: The SCLC
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a key force in the civil rights movement, was launched on this date in 1957, the brainchild of Martin Luther King, Jr., who became the SCLC’s president,...
View ArticleAnti-Semitism and “The New Jim Crow”
By Rabbi Jonathan Kligler Woodstock Jewish Congregation I want to describe two reasons why the New Jim Crow, the system of mass incarceration, is a Jewish issue, and why I wanted our synagogue to host...
View ArticleApril 9: Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial
Denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution the opportunity to sing at their Constitution Hall in segregated Washington, D.C., Marian Anderson gave an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial on...
View ArticleThe Editor’s Diary: Fighting Jim Crow, New & Old
by Lawrence Bush Anti-racist consciousness seems to be stirring anew in our country, reawakened, at least in part, by the best-selling success of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of...
View ArticleCriminal Justice & The New Jim Crow
The War on Drugs as a Means of Racial Control by Cheryl Greenberg Imagine that police routinely set up road blocks and conduct blood-alcohol level tests on nearly every driver. They raid bars to find...
View ArticleMay 17: Esther Brown v. Board of Education
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring the “separate but equal” segregationist policy in American schools to be unconstitutional and ordering their desegregation, was...
View ArticleAugust 6: The 1965 Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on this date in 1965. The bill had been drafted in the conference room of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, under...
View ArticleAugust 25: A. Philip Randolph and Arnie Aronson
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first labor union led by Blacks that was accepted into the AFL-CIO, was formed in New York City on this date in 1925, under the leadership of Asa Philip...
View ArticleAugust 26: Coming Home from Mississippi
Matthew Zwerling, a Jewish volunteer for Mississippi Freedom Summer, wrote to his parents in New York from Clarksdale, Mississippi on this date in 1964 suggesting an “unstrenuous” three-day weekend...
View ArticleTwinkies and Civil Rights
by Harold Ticktin I have never eaten a Twinkie, but I did use one as a valuable weapon for civil rights. It was in Mississippi, the summer of 1965, and I was a volunteer with the Lawyers Constitutional...
View ArticlePushing My Reset Button on Street Crime
New York’s Struggle Over Stop-and Frisk by Lawrence Bush from the Autumn, 2013 issue of Jewish Currents There were 4.4 million stop-and-frisk police actions in New York City between 2002 and 2011:...
View ArticleNovember 11: Fighting for the Colville Indians
Washington became the 41st American state on this date in 1889. Among the Jewish residents of Washington Territory was Joseph Herman Friedlander, a trader who married Sken-What-Ux, a Colville Indian...
View ArticleTeenage Reflections on Civil Rights and Isaiah 58
A Play by Teens from Beth Emet, the Free Synagogue and the Second Baptist Church, Riverside, California This play was presented as a D’var Torah on September 14, 2013 at the Beth Emet Free Synagogue of...
View ArticleDecember 7: The Civil Rights Judge
Louis Pollak, dean of the Yale and University of Pennsylvania law schools who simultaneously served as an advisor to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was born in Manhattan on this date in...
View ArticleJanuary 7: The Civil Rights Attorney
Civil rights attorney Jack Greenberg was one of twenty-eight Americans awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Bill Clinton on this date in 2001. Greenberg succeeded Thurgood Marshall as...
View ArticlePete Seeger’s Project
by Dick Flacks Editor’s note: Pete Seeger died at 94 on January 27th, after a short hospitalization. We’re reposting this fine appreciation by our contributing writer Dick Flacks, originally published...
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