Dear Progressive Reader,

On Friday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. Following contentious and often mean-spirited confirmation hearings, she marked the significance of the event saying, “In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

On March 25, 1965, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr addressed a crowd in Montgomery, Alabama. “I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take? . . . How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding?,’ ” King asked the audience. “How long?,” he continued, “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This past week, two more steps along that arc were completed: the confirmation of the first Black woman to the highest court in the land, and on Tuesday, March 29, the signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act after more than one hundred years, and 200 efforts at passage.

Tomorrow is an anniversary of another step along that arc toward justice. On April 10, 1947, Jackie Robinson joined Major League baseball, playing his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15. Robinson had successfully shattered sixty years of segregation in “America’s National Pastime.” At a ceremony in 1962, Reverend King said of Robinson that he “challenged the dark skies of intolerance and frustration.” This week, as a new baseball season begins, Kevin Powell shares his thoughts in a poem on the sport, its history, and Robinson, “Bug-spraying [his] eyes against slavery and segregation . . . retracing and reclaiming . . . one basepath at a time.”

In an op-ed this week, Linda Wiggins-Chavis writes about the importance not only of the signing of the anti-lynching law, but of addressing the stains of racism on our society. “While this act imposes criminal penalties on civilians, it does nothing to safeguard the Black community against police officers who kill unarmed victims with impunity and avoid accountability due to the protection provided by qualified immunity,” she points out. “Alongside the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, additional legislation must be passed to fully protect Black lives. . . . . The passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act is tainted,” she says, “by the stains of U.S. history.”

The release, last Monday, of the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered warnings and some hope. The report addressed, for the first time, the importance of human actions in creating and addressing the crisis (for instance, for the first time, it laid a portion of the blame for rising global temperatures on the legacy of colonialism). The take-home message of this nearly-3000-page document is that, yes, there is still time to address the crisis, but we (the world) must act quickly. This message is also reflected in the newest issue of The Progressive magazine, arriving on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes this week. The issue is packed with stories of grassroots actions to address climate change being undertaken in numerous communities. It also contains my reviews of two important new books, just published this week, that give clear, easy-to-read histories and analyses of the issues and the possibilities of change that are available to us, if we act now.

Elsewhere on our website this week, Fiona Skeggs tells the story of environmental restoration on the Elwha River. Mike Kuhlenbeck describes the victory of tulip workers in Washington State for better labor conditions. James Goodman chronicles efforts in Mexico to undo the damage of NAFTA and to create independent labor unions. And Jeff Abbott reports on the rising tide of authoritarianism in many countries in Central America.

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. – If you were unable to attend our live event with renowned author Noam Chomsky and interviewer David Barsamian discussing their two new books chronicling their thirty-five years of conversations, it is available to view on our YouTube channel. You can also get one of the books with a donation of $50 or more to The Progressive at this link.

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