Person

Adolph Reed Jr.

Bylines

Related Excerpts

Malcolm X

Reflections on Malcom X

What we can learn from him and his legacy.

Coates and West in Jackson

America loves pitting black intellectuals against each other, but today's activists need both Coates and West.
Bayard Rustin speaking at an event.

Eclipsed in His Era, Bayard Rustin Gets to Shine in Ours

The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?

Doing the Work

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness.
Protester holding a sign that states, "To serve and protect who?" at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.

Has Black Lives Matter Changed the World?

A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement—one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines.
Black college students at Morgan State University, 1955.

No, the GI Bill Did Not Make Racial Inequality Worse

Popular narratives say that black veterans got no real benefits from the GI Bill. In truth, the GI Bill provided a rare positive experience with government.
People holding union and BLM signs out of their car windows, taking part in the Workers First Caravan for Racial and Economic Justice, June 17, 2020, with the US capitol in the background.
partner

How Conservatives Drove a Wedge Between Economic and Cultural Liberals

Elites understood that a unified left spelled doom for their economic advantages.
In the preface to a new book version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter and the leading force behind the endeavor, recalls that it began as a “simple pitch.”

The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

The Wages of Whiteness

One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of “white privilege,” a protean concept invoked to explain wealth, political power, and even cognition.
An image of the J. E. B. Stuart statue on Richmond's Monument Avenue being removed, its pedestal covered in graffiti.

All Statues Are Local

The Great Toppling of 2020 and the rebirth of civic imagination.

The Myth of the “Sixties”

When we mythologize the ’60s, we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us.
Hillary Clinton speaking about early childhood development.

The Mismeasure of Minds

25 years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die.

The Big Picture: The Right Type of Citizenship

Citizens pledge their allegiance to a nation that reciprocates with a pledge of allegiance to them. What does that look like?
Louis Farrakhan walking with group

The Charmer

Louis Farrakhan and the Black Lives Matter protests.