Karen Kruse Thomas of Johns Hopkins University gives her talk, “Deluxe Jim Crow Health Policy: The Bridge between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement,” at The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, a conference hosted by the Southern Oral History Program, April 2-4, 2009. For more video, visit the LCRM Common Room.
The country’s largest African-American and Latino organizations are joining forces with other major national civil rights and grassroots organizations to mobilize the nation’s 100 million people of color for a final push in support of universal health care reform. Leaders of the organizations are coming together to make certain that the voices of people of color are heard — and heeded — as the health care reform debate enters its final, critical days. The groups will release television and print ads in English and Spanish that will run in four states with sizable African-American and Latino populations, part of a grassroots effort to ensure that members of Congress appreciate the importance of reform to the people of color they represent.
Here’s the video (apparently the one running in Arkansas, given the reference to Sen. Lincoln):
Peter Funt of the Boston Globe complains that profiling isn’t just racial, and while he makes some points that diminish the fact that the racial profiling of African Americans is bound up in a long history that begins with kidnap and enslavement (”I know a successful golf pro who insists he can profile a player’s handicap index within three points, just by watching him take his clubs from his car and walk to the driving range.”), his column highlights the fact that in our ever-diversifying nation, tolerance does not always advance hand in hand with diversity.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has hired Matt Nosanchuk to act as liaison to the gay community. Nosanchuk will handle a portfolio of cases and spend “the remainder of his time reaching out to … the LGBT community.”
The first stop of the Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail has opened. Also in Birmingham, the mayor has pardoned those arrested and convicted during the civil rights protests of the 1960s. The move has wide support, but some worry that accepting a pardon means accepting that they committed a crime …