Author: TheConversation

By Peter Cole, Professor of History, Western Illinois University If Martin Luther King Jr. still lived, he would probably tell people to join unions. King understood racial equality was inextricably linked to economics. He asked, “What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?” Those disadvantages have persisted. Today, for instance, the wealth of the average white family is more than 20 times that of a black one. King’s solution was unionism. Convergence of needs In 1961, King spoke before the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest and most powerful...

By Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Professor of Homiletics, Howard University The name Martin Luther King Jr. is iconic in the United States. President Barack Obama mentioned King in both his Democratic National Convention nomination acceptance and victory speeches in 2008, when he said, “[King] brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial…to speak of his dream.” Indeed, much of King’s legacy lives on in such arresting oral performances. They made him a global figure. King’s preaching used the power of language to interpret the gospel in the context of...

By Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, Assistant Professor of Secondary Social Studies, West Virginia University I will never forget a student’s response when I asked during a middle school social studies class what they knew about black history: “Martin Luther King freed the slaves.” Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929, more than six decades after the time of enslavement. To me, this comment underscored how closely Americans associate black history with slavery. While shocked, I knew this mistaken belief reflected the lack of time, depth and breadth schools devote to black history. Most students get limited information and context...

By Jay L. Zagorsky, Senior Lecturer, Questrom School of Business, Boston University On January 17, 1920, one hundred years ago, America officially went dry. Prohibition, embodied in the U.S Constitution’s 18th amendment, banned the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol. Yet it remained legal to drink, and alcohol was widely available throughout Prohibition, which ended in 1933. I am reminded of how easy it was to drink during Prohibition every time I go to the hotel in New Hampshire that hosted the Bretton Woods Conference, which created the modern international monetary system after World War II. The hotel, now...

By Derek W. Black, Professor of Law, University of South Carolina Public school funding has shrunk over the past decade. School discipline rates reached historic highs. Large achievement gaps persist. And the overall performance of our nation’s students falls well below our international peers. These bleak numbers beg the question: Don’t students have a constitutional right to something better? Many Americans assume that federal law protects the right to education. All 50 state constitutions provide for education. The same is true in 170 other countries. Yet, the word “education” does not appear in the United States Constitution, and federal...

By Kishwar Rizvi, Professor in the History of Art Islamic Art and Architecture, Yale University President Donald Trump warned the Islamic Republic of Iran in a tweet on January 4 that the U.S. would target Iranian cultural sites, if provoked. His threat followed the United States’ killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, the foreign branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which set off fears of retaliation. The Iranian government vowed to avenge his death, followed by missile strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq on Jan. 7. Trump’s angry tweet, which was immediately condemned...