Author: Common Dreams

April 4 marked the 53d anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Over half a century. Has America come any closer to his dream? He would be pleased at some of our progress. Segregation is no longer the law of the land. The Voting Rights Act helped open doors. Dr. King would be pleased that a majority of Americans joined to elect and re-elect an African American president. Georgians just elected a black minister from Dr. King’s own historic church to the U.S. Senate. There are now 60 African American members of Congress, 54 Latino members, 20 Asian American...

As Republicans predictably cried foul over Major League Baseball’s April 2 decision to relocate the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Georgia’s restrictive new voting law, prominent Democrats blamed the GOP for the economic toll the move will take on the Peach State. Voting rights campaigner and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams—a Democrat whose loss some prominent observers have blamed on voter suppression—weighed in on MLB’s decision to deprive their state of an event that generates anywhere from tens of millions of dollars to over $100 million in revenue. Abrams said in a statement that the...

“The United States of America has open wounds.” – Deborah Scott Ever since its founding, the United States has been attempting to build a society around those wounds, on the belief that hyped-up language, “all men are created equal,” can paper over deep wrongs. If you put the ideal in writing, you can ignore its absence in real life. Writing for a publication of St. Joseph’s Parish in Wilmington, Deborah Scott noted that, except for Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, “the United States reigns supreme when it comes to legislation and traditions that have undergirded systemic and racially...