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  • In the Shadow of #JeSuisCharlie

    By Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski

     

    A bullet hole is pictured in the window of a prayer room at a mosque in the Sablons neighborhood of Le Mans, western France, on January 8, 2015, after shots were fired and three blank grenades were thrown at the mosque shortly after midnight, leaving no casualties.

    “Definitions of hate are never constant; they shift, focus, and refocus in relationship to events. During war, racial hatred looks like patriotism.”
    —Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness and Justice in American Culture and Politics

    The outpouring of outrage and concern following the lethal shooting of twelve people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine is understandable.

    Many people want to express their shock and grief. They want to stand against the censoring, repressive, and violent impulses represented—symbolically and actually—by the gunmen.

    There is no ethical justification for the killings. None. No one “deserved to die.”

    Yet the reaction to these tragic killings seamlessly moves forward within an easily manipulated narrative. This story is compellingly shaped by the twin themes of terrorism and destruction of freedom of speech. Because this narrative is framed by the politics of fear, resentment, and vengeance, it has become as volatile and potentially incendiary as the actions that produced it.

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  • From Freedom Summer to Ferguson: Teaching Martin Luther King, Jr. in 21st Century Classrooms

    KING-ATimetoBreakSilence

    “[Students] are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream. . . . One day historians will record this student movement as one of the most significant epics of our heritage.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Time for Freedom Has Come”, September 10, 1961

    During the civil rights movement of the 20th century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood up against the injustices of the time to make America a better place for all people. More than 45 years after his assassination, his message is still relevant as we continue to struggle with issues like unjust laws, racism, poverty, and war.

    We believe that talking with young people about his vision and its continued relevance will better enable them to build the America Dr. King envisioned. Educators, however, were lacking a good resource for teaching King in their classrooms, often resorting to using photocopied pages from various websites, while also lamenting about the mass amounts of incorrect information and untrusted resources online. As a result of discussions with educators about the importance of teaching King and the lack of available resources, A Time to Break Silence: The Essential Works of Martin Luther King, Jr., for Students was conceived. The writings and speeches in the collection were selected by teachers across a variety of disciplines and speak to the issues young people face today.

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  • We Are Charlie

     

    All of us at Beacon Press join our colleagues in the international publishing community in condemning the terrorist attacks on the offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and reaffirming the vital importance of a free press to people everywhere.

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  • Blood of the Tiger: 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Endangered Tigers

    By J. A. Mills

    Farm tigers in cage

    In 1991, while investigating the industrial farming of bears in China, I visited a fur farm in the country’s remote Northeast corner. I saw mink and other common furbearers along with a handful of tigers who turned out to be the founding breeders in what was the country’s first effort to farm tigers for their bones—for use in medicine.

    By 1992, tiger experts declared China’s demand for tiger bone the main driver of tiger poaching, which was skyrocketing throughout the big cat’s Asian range. Then in May 1993, China announced a ban on trade in tiger bone. Conservationists celebrated China’s bold move as the death knell for the demand that was causing wild tiger populations to plummet. They assumed this also meant an end to tiger farming. They were wrong.

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  • Why the Preoccupation with LBJ’s Role in ‘Selma’ Misses the Point

    By Mary Frances Berry

     

    Ana DuVernay’s movie Selma tells the inspirational story of a coalition of activists, young and old, students and ministers, local and national, radicals and respectables who, despite their differences came together three times in the spring of 1965 to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and confront state police intent on enforcing racial segregation. Viewers and reviewers want to know more about all the people surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr.: Dr. King’s right hand in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Ralph Abernathy and SNCC’s John Lewis. They want to know about the shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper as he was defending his mother from a police beating. People want to know about women in the movement, about Selma community organizer Amelia Boynton and the young girls who also took part.

    So the recent flap over the role of President Lyndon Baines Johnson during this pivotal point of the civil rights movement distracts us not only from the historical truth, but does the further disservice by (once again) trying to make white people the center of the black freedom struggle. Joseph A. Califano, Jr. goes so far as to suggest that LBJ should be remembered as the “white savior” who suggested the march, rather than as a president who tried to stop it as the film portrays. (That dubious honor goes to John F. Kennedy who tried to shut down the 1963 March on Washington.)

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  • Four Books to Read in January

    January Titles

    January is a time of new beginnings, fresh starts, ambitious goals. At Beacon, we publish some of our most exciting titles in January, books we think will have a long shelf-life. This January, we explore a geopolitical conservation effort, redefine the cause of hate and hate-driven violence, return Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to his radical roots, and expose the hypocrisy of “merit-based” admissions practices. These are books you will be thinking about and discussing for the rest of the year.

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  • Beacon Broadside: A Year in Review

     

    As the year comes to a close, we’re looking back to some of our most popular posts of 2014, as well as some gems you might have overlooked. Consider it a countdown of a different sort, a look back at a year that was both volatile and filled with possibility, with posts that reflected both the intensity and diversity of our readers. And consider it a promise, as well, that our 2015 posts will be filled with the same inquisitive spirit and intellectual curiosity. Happy New Year!

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  • An Interrupted Dialogue with Cuban Writers and Readers

    By Tom Hallock

     

    The open air book market in Plaza de Armas in Old Havana (La Habana Vieja).

    President Obama’s decision to re-establish commercial and diplomatic ties with Cuba caused me to think about what it might mean for publishers, writers, and readers, and to reawaken hopes I had when I visited Cuba almost twenty years ago.

    In February of 1995, I traveled to Havana with a delegation of US publishers, writers, and journalists organized by Association of American Publishers’ International Freedom to Publish Committee, a 40-year-old group that has defended freedom of expression around the world through its missions, exhibits, and lobbying activities. Sixty-three publishers joined in creating a Libros USA exhibit of 6,000 books, all of which were donated to Cuban libraries afterwards. (Or most were: an FSG title I’d sent by dissident writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, never appeared in the display.)

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  • 10 Years Later, Sri Lanka Still Shows Scars from the Wrath of Tsunami

    By Adele Barker

     

    Note: This post originally appeared in the Global Post.

    Last year, I watched children running in and out of the waves on Sri Lanka’s southern shore. Life felt almost normal, almost as if the tsunami that claimed some 230,000 lives from Thailand to Madagascar 10 years ago had never happened.

    On the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, I had watched from my living room in Tucson, Ariz., as film footage showed places my family and I knew and loved disappearing into the Indian Ocean.

    The island had been our home in 2001-2002 when I taught at Peradeniya University in the central hills. I had been back several times, but the trip six months after the tsunami would be a very different one. I returned to an island where 35,000 had died within the space of half an hour. The coastal area lay in ruins, lives were shattered and bodies lost to the sea.

    I frequently pause and revisit that day when, as the Sri Lankans say, “the sea came to the land.”

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  • 150 Years since Sand Creek: The Limitations of Apology

    By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    A depiction of one scene at Sand Creek by witness Howling Wolf

    A depiction of one scene at Sand Creek by witness Howling Wolf

    Stuck them
    on their hats to dry. 

    Their fingers greasy and slick.

               —Simon Ortiz, from Sand Creek

    A part of US Civil War history largely ignored, the Sand Creek Massacre, received national attention on its 150th anniversary when Colorado governor John Hickenlooper apologized for the atrocity that occurred on November 29, 1864.

    On that date, John Chivington, an ambitious politician known as the “Fighting Parson,” led 700 members of the Third Colorado Volunteers in the grisly deed, attacking Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians who were restricted to a refugee camp near the military post of Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. Without provocation or warning, the Union army authorized militia attacked, leaving dead 105 women and children and 28 men. In its 1865 investigation, the Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War recorded testimonies and published a report that documented the aftermath of the killings, when Chivington and his volunteers burned tepees and stole horses. After the smoke had cleared, they had returned and finished off the few surviving casualties while scalping and mutilating the corpses—women and men, young and old, children, babies. Then they decorated their weapons and caps with body parts—fetuses, penises, breasts, and vulvas—and back in Denver they displayed these trophies to the adoring public in Denver’s Apollo Theater and in saloons. Yet, despite the detailed report of the deeds, neither Chivington nor any of his men were reprimanded or prosecuted, signaling a free field for killing.

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