Beacon Broadside

recent posts

about

Category: Biography and Memoir

  • Reverend William J. Barber Learns the Power of Standing Together

    By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove I learned a great deal in Martinsville about moral leadership—more than I realized at the time. But I did not know what was next for me when our family moved back to North Carolina in 1991. Preaching had helped me find a voice of moral dissent,…

  • Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks on the Dangers They Faced in the Civil Rights Movement

    By Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jeanne Theoharis | This is the second entry of our Montgomery Bus Boycott Turns 60 Series. About two months into the Montgomery Bus Boycott, times start to become dangerous for Martin Luther King, Jr. and his family. Death threats over the phone are coming in daily to King’s home,…

  • Coming of Age Gloriously Funky Through Vinyl and R&B

    A Q&A with Rashod Ollison | Happy Publication Day to pop music critic and culture journalist Rashod Ollison and his memoir Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues & Coming of Age Through Vinyl! In Soul Serenade, Ollison tells his story of growing up gay in central Arkansas, searching for himself and his distant father, and how the…

  • Fourteen Steps Forward Together for America’s Third Reconstruction

    By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove America’s Third Reconstruction depends on a moral movement, deeply rooted in the South, emerging state by state throughout the nation. No single leader or organization can orchestrate such a movement, but we who have seen the power of fusion organizing in North Carolina in 2014…

  • Binge Eating, Sugar Addiction, and Coming Out of the Pantry

    A Q&A with Lisa Kotin When I was in the food, in the sugar, I had little or no self-love/respect. It was a merry-go-round of bingeing, hitting (another) bottom, cleaning up my act, seeking out a man to try to fill me, feeling bad because the romance didn’t turn out to be what I fantasized…

  • Everyday Is Like Christmas in Rawalpindi

    In an odd way, every day is like Christmas around here in Rawalpindi. The lights we put up once a year in the States are part of my everyday landscape in Pakistan. Red, blue, yellow and green lights are festooned outside the enormous wedding halls that dot the landscape of life here. Weddings are very…

  • A Lesson in the Compassion of Islam

    Islamophobia has reared its ugly head again. As author and journalist Linda K. Wertheimer noted in her previous post, education about world religions couldn’t be more important in today’s climate. Education about other religions comes not only from the classroom, but also from the life stories of others. In his book Acts of Faith, interfaith…

  • #PublishUP: Beacon Press in Conversation with Jeanne Theoharis

    Today’s theme for University Press Week is Presses in Conversation with Authors. In our entry in the blog tour, our executive editor Gayatri Patnaik interviews Jeanne Theoharis, author of the 2014 NAACP Image Award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of CUNY and the…

  • Hiding the Truth for Community’s Sake: The Danger of Small Town Dynamics

    From Steubenville to State College to Missoula, small towns often step into the spotlight where sex crimes are concerned. After the stark details get spun through the news cycle, the towns are left to themselves again, usually divided, impenitent, and often unable to determine what role the community itself played in perpetuating the violence or…

  • Freedom Fighters Never Retire

    By Jeanne Theoharis | I wrote The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks to challenge the limited stories and troubled uses of Parks and the movement. There was nothing natural or passive about what Rosa Parks did but rather something fiercely determined. It was not a singular act but part of her larger lifelong history…