Author: Reporter

The March on Washington of 1963 is remembered most for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and thus as a crowning moment for the long-term civil rights activism of what is sometimes referred to as the “Black Church.” At the march, King indeed represented numerous other Black clergy who were his colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But the march was the product of sustained activism by a broader coalition. Black and white labor leaders, as well as white clergy, played pivotal roles over many months ahead of the event. Moreover, the Black...

Sixty years ago, Andrew Young and his staff had just emerged from an exhausting campaign against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. But they didn’t feel no ways tired, as the Black spiritual says. The foot soldiers were on a “freedom high,” Young recalls. “They wanted to keep on marching, they wanted to march from Birmingham to Washington,” he said. And march they did, in the nation’s capital. Just four months later, they massed for what is still considered one of the greatest and most consequential racial justice demonstrations in U.S. history. The nonviolent protest, which attracted as many as...

When Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his armed rebellion that challenged the Kremlin, Western officials predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin would seek vengeance against the mercenary leader. Two months to the day after the action that Putin labeled a “stab in the back” and “treason,” those forecasts seem to have come true, in ruthless and menacing fashion. Although authorities have not yet confirmed the deaths of Prigozhin and his top lieutenants from the Wagner private military contractor in the August 23 plane crash northwest of Moscow, it sent an immediate chill through Russian official circles. Even amid the uncertainty, the message...

NATO allies located along the alliance’s eastern front are growing increasingly worried about the presence of Russia-linked Wagner group mercenaries in Belarus, where some have been deployed since a short-lived mutiny in Russia in June. Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia — members of NATO and the European Union which border Belarus — had already been on alert since large numbers of migrants and refugees began arriving at their borders from Belarus two years ago. They have accused Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Russia, of opening the migration route in an act of “hybrid warfare” aimed at creating instability...

A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it. When the camera shutter blinked inside a jail in downtown Atlanta on August 24, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life. Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunken drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second. Left behind: an enduring image...