Dear Progressive Reader,

On March 29, President Biden finally signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. It took more than one hundred years, and 200 attempts, to get this piece of legislation enacted. As we wrote in the February/March edition of The Progressive, “Nearly 4,500 Black Americans were killed by lynching between 1877 and 1950. Another 350 or more were lynched between 1950 and 1968. The first federal anti-lynching law was proposed in 1918, but it would be in February 2020, more than one hundred years later, before the U.S. House of Representatives would finally pass a bill calling lynching a ‘hate crime.’ ” At the time of publication, that bill was still stalled in the U.S. Senate. Our “Blast from the Past” segment quotes from a 1918 article in our precursor, La Follette’s Magazine, in which then-Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory had written, “Unless the hysteria which results in the lynching of men is checked, it will create a condition of lawlessness from which we will suffer for a hundred years.”

This past Monday, the Poor People’s Campaign held rallies in Madison, Wisconsin and Raleigh, North Carolina, in the lead-up to the scheduled June 18 march and rally in Washington, D.C. The Poor People’s Campaign was conceived in 1968 by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others as a movement for economic justice. Today it is being spearheaded by the Reverend William J. Barber II and the Reverend Liz Theoharis. Theoharis was in Madison on Monday, as Nora Kathleen Berryhill reports. “We must commit to uniting the ‘nobodies,’ building a moral fusion movement, and organizing and uniting people across all the lines that divide us,” Theoharis told the crowd.

Museums often think about the past, but apparently have not thought well about the future. As Sarah Anderson explains this week, “Prior museum conservators and private collectors routinely applied pesticides to artifacts containing feathers, leather, and other protein sources to deter hungry insects and rodents. This short-term solution to pest damage has created an enduring problem inherited by today’s museums, which now must identify artifacts contaminated with toxic chemicals to ensure the safety of the people who might encounter them.” Also, Mike Ervin looks at a recent study that shows how “Private equity acquisitions let companies make money off of vulnerable groups [particularly people with autism].” And Lee Russ describes a stealth attack from within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that could, if unchecked, result in the privatization of Medicare. 

In international news, Jeff Abbott shows the connections between recent anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-choice legislation in Guatemala and powerful U.S. groups on the religious right and in the Republican party. Lauren Seibert of Human Rights Watch examines how the United States is turning back asylum seekers from Cameroon and returning them to harm. And Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies pens an op-ed on the dangers of calls for a no-fly zone in Ukraine.

Finally, union activist Christy Hoffman writes about the struggle of workers in Alabama for a union in their Amazon facility where the recent vote is still too close to call. Meanwhile, in Staten Island, New York, workers at the largest Amazon warehouse in the region consisting of more than 8300 workers, announced their recognition victory by a wide margin in an independent union drive.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – Please mark your calendars for Thursday April 7, when The Progressive will host a live, online event with renowned author Noam Chomsky and interviewer David Barsamian to discuss their two new books chronicling their thirty-five years of conversations. You can also get one of the books with a donation of $50 or more to The Progressive at this link.

P.P.S. – If you like this weekly newsletter, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you know someone who would like to subscribe to this free weekly email, please share this link: http://tiny.cc/ProgressiveNewsletter.

P.P.P.S. – If you don’t already subscribe to The Progressive in print or digital form, please consider doing so today. Also, if you have a friend or relative who you feel should hear from the many voices for progressive change within our pages, please consider giving a gift subscription.

P.P.P.P.S. – Thank you so much to everyone who donated to our year-end annual fund drive! We need you now more than ever. If you have not done so already, please take a moment to support hard-hitting, independent reporting on issues that matter to you. Your donation today will keep us on solid ground in 2022 and will help us continue to grow in the coming years. You can use the wallet envelope in the current issue of the magazine, or click on the “Donate” button below to join your fellow progressives in sustaining The Progressive as a voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.