Author: Reggie Jackson

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens. Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who...

“The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don’t fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid… We have a system of justice that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.” – Bryan Stevenson People sometimes ask me where the motivations for the articles I write come from. At times there is a conversation that sparks me to look deeper into something. Sometimes the articles come from long simmering thoughts about topics that piqued my interest a while ago. At other times the articles...

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Jr. August 28, 1963 This one sentence from the speech Dr. King gave at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom has been used to claim Dr. King was calling for a colorblind society. My belief, based on a reading of the entire speech, leads me to another conclusion about the use of colorblindness. This takes some unpacking...

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here…Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily…I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is...

U.S. Files Suit on Vote Rights: Tallahatchie County Facing Charges That Negroes Barred From Polls “There are 5,099 whites and 6,483 Negroes of voting age in Tallahatchie County…about 4,300 whites and no Negroes are registered to vote.” – Memphis Commercial Appeal Newspaper, November 21, 1961 Advocates plan to register more voters after latest attempt to suppress Wisconsin elections “A Wisconsin judge ordered on December 13 that the registration of up to 234,000 voters be tossed out because they may have moved, a victory for conservatives that could make it more difficult for people to vote next year in the...

“[A] hard truth is that even when the economy picks up and employers are on a hiring binge, black people have a harder time getting jobs and are paid less than similarly situated white workers. That is exactly what happened from 1996 to 2000, the last genuinely hot job market, and it points clearly to racial discrimination, not just in hiring, but in a range of public policies that disproportionately affect black people. These include the dearth and high cost of child care, which harms single mothers the most; poor public transportation in many rural and suburban areas, which...