Civil Rights

Summer vacation began this week for millions of kids across the country,. But in many communities, school board members, principals, and administrators are still hard at work. Among their tasks for the summer is designing new ways of fulfilling the promise of equal educational opportunity and preparing students for a diverse, interconnected world. more »

By an overwhelming bipartisan margin, Congress has passed what sponsors are calling the first civil rights act of the 21st century: the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. The Act, which President Bush is expected to sign, prohibits employers and insurance companies from denying people jobs, benefits, or health coverage because of their genetic make-up. more »

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Roger Wilkins — an activist outsider and a White House insider in the 1960s — say that today's progressive movement needs to lay claim to the successes of the 1960s in order to advance its agenda in 2008 and beyond. “The third rail is where the energy is, where the power is, where the fire is,” Jackson said. The focus of this year's Take Back America conference has been the need to build an independent progressive movement ready to hold accountable whoever controls the White House and Congress.

Check the conference home page for more of the action at Take Back America 2008.

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I have spent much of the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in my car, traveling throughout southern and central Colorado to report on a working-class struggle that transcends the partisan divide (more on this in a few weeks). At one point during my journey, I stopped in Ludlow at the tiny memorial (pictured at right) for the massacre that occurred there at the beginning of the 20th century - the massacre when our government sent in troops to kill those striking for their basic rights. more »