Author: Reggie Jackson

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” – James Baldwin My journey of learning about America has taken me in many different directions. As a young boy I was always inquisitive. My favorite books were encyclopedias. I loved reading about everything. I loved to learn new things. History was always one of my favorite topics. History allowed me to see everything. I could study the history of anything. I can recall while in fourth or maybe fifth grade learning about the races of humans. The memory...

“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...