Black people didn’t risk their lives to vote just because they liked voting. Casting a ballot is not an end in itself. They risked their lives to elect leaders who would help them access the well-paid jobs that they had long been denied. The march on Washington in 1963—where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream”

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What the White South confronted in the movement era was a paradigm shift. There was a model for sustaining White supremacy: terrorizing Black folks, the dispassionate acquiescence of the White North and the federal government, economic control, and an ideological hold on its ranks managed by humiliation and cruelty. But a model only holds as long

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For more than three centuries American Negroes have been battered by the iron rod of oppression, frustrated by day and bewildered by night by unbearable injustice, and burdened with the ugly weight of discrimination. Forced to live with these shameful conditions, we are tempted to become bitter and to retaliate with a corresponding hate. But if

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