Gary Tyler, a class-war prisoner from Destrehan, Louisiana, was framed up at the age of 16 for a murder he did not commit and incarcerated for nearly 42 years. He is now an artist and mentor of ex-prisoners.
In this video, Socialist Equality Party Assistant National Secretary Lawrence Porter spoke with Gary Tyler, who spent 42 years in Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary for a crime he didn’t commit.
The 285-day strike by Toledo AP Parts workers was the longest in the history of the city and bears important lessons for autoworkers today.
More than one hundred years after the formation of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Marcus Garvey's legacy remains highly relevant in the struggle to overcome efforts to divide the working class along racial lines.
In August, 2019, the New York Times launched its “1619 Project,” marking the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America.
The Times wrote that its project intended to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” It included not only a special magazine edition that was freely distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies to schools and museums nationally, but a proposed teaching curriculum for teachers to use in their classrooms.
Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. It presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of race and racial conflict.
The World Socialist Web Site published detailed refutations of the numerous falsifications contained in the Times project, and interviewed leading historians of the United States.
This is the introduction by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North to a volume, available for delivery in January 2021, containing the main interviews and essays published by the WSWS exposing the New York Times’ racialist falsification of American history.
The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times, presents racism and racial conflict as the essential feature and driving force of American history.
The Times has abandoned, without any public announcement or explanation, the central thesis that 1619, not 1776, was the “true founding” of the United States.
The disrespect expressed by editor Alex Lichtenstein toward leading historians reveals the extent to which racialist mythology, which has provided the “theoretical” foundation of middle-class identity politics, has been accepted, and even embraced, by a substantial section of the academic community as a legitimate basis for the teaching of American history.
Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein is attempting to palm off a minor semantic change as a cure for a totally false presentation of the American Revolution.
New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, reviving discredited racialist distortions of the American Revolution and Civil War, refuses to correct historical errors in the 1619 Project.
There was not a single statement made by Hannah-Jones at NYU on historical issues that withstands serious examination.
More than one hundred years after the formation of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Marcus Garvey's legacy remains highly relevant in the struggle to overcome efforts to divide the working class along racial lines.
In one of the greatest crimes of American imperialism in the 20th century, US bombers laid waste to the two largest cities in North Vietnam, Hanoi and Haiphong.
King’s conception of a mass democratic movement for civil rights based on the unified action of all the oppressed sections of the population is being replaced with an essentially racialist narrative that presents all of American history in terms of a struggle between whites and blacks.
It may be the case that the American people will never know who killed Kennedy. But the deeper causes of his death can be explained.
The 285-day strike by Toledo AP Parts workers was the longest in the history of the city and bears important lessons for autoworkers today.
With 48,000 GM workers engaged in the longest nationwide auto strike in nearly a half century, it is valuable to study the heroic struggle by GM workers during the 1936-37 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan.
A recent book by historian Bryan Palmer chronicles the role of American Trotskyists in leading one of the most important strikes in US history.
The Great Steel Strike of 1919 and its defeat hold crucial strategic lessons for workers as they enter into struggle.
The foremost black Abolitionist escaped slavery as a young man and went on to advise Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War.
The American Civil War entered its decisive phase 150 years ago, in the summer and fall of 1864.
In recent comments, the president said the Civil War was an avoidable mistake and that Andrew Jackson was angered by it—though Jackson had been dead for 16 years at the war’s outbreak.
The World Socialist Web Site recently interviewed Professor David Williams of Valdosta State University about class conflict during the American Civil War and its relationship to social and political developments after the war.
The American Revolution, the most progressive event in world history in its time, continues to inspire the struggle for equality.
A book that seriously considers the impact the Declaration of Independence is most welcome reading in 2013, a year which has seen an intensifying assault on the most basic principles of America’s founding document.
The social, political and cultural state of present-day America make a mockery of the principles that are recalled and celebrated on July 4.
The following is a lecture given by David North, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on 24 October 1996.
Trump first broached the issue of a patriotic sculpture garden in July 2020, using the attacks on various monuments by participants in demonstrations against police violence as his pretext.
We are reposting an article from April 10, 2015, on 50 years since Viola Liuzzo’s death, written by Helen Halyard.
Lynch attracted so much attention and interest in part because he stood out as an expressive, undoubtedly unusual figure in the generally bleak cultural landscape of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years.
In falsifying history, the oligarchs in charge are attempting to erase any critical thoughts youth may have about American policy in the present, especially the massive growth in economic inequality, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ever-present threat of war against China, Iran and Russia.
Those in attendance agree that black history is really all about personal aggrandizement, not common sacrifice and struggle.
The White House is using widespread animosity toward DEI to arrogate new powers to the executive branch and dismantle democratic rights.
There are striking images and certain convincing performances, but on the whole the filmmakers seem very much out of their depth. The work is starved of genuine historical and social insight.
By taking a subjective, “lyrical” approach, director RaMell Ross has turned a novel about racism into a narrower, murkier movie.
Wald's Dylan Goes Electric is the work on which the recent film about Bob Dylan’s early days in music, A Complete Unknown (James Mangold), is loosely based.
In October 1854, a large crowd in Worcester, Massachusetts took action against the presence of "slave catcher" Asa O. Butman and expelled him from the city.
Stephen Puleo’s biography offers a fresh glimpse into the Radical Republicans’ struggle against slavery and shines a light on a little-known figure in American history.
The Fourteenth Amendment was the product of a democratic revolutionary change that sought to put the Constitution on a genuine egalitarian footing.
The widespread favorable media response to the pardon speaks to the enduring usefulness of Garvey’s brand of identity politics to the powers that be.
As the incoming Trump administration threatens Chinese immigrants with deportation, it is urgent to draw the lessons from the ugly history of Chinese Exclusion in the 19th century. A recent article and podcast by NPR on the Chinese Exclusion era significantly distorts that history.
Gropper at his best mercilessly skewered the charlatanry and fakery of American political life, while capturing the plight of the poor and the destitute.
Robert F Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has promised to end water fluoridation, a program which has been called one of the ten greatest achievements in public health.
This is vital history, from more than six decades ago, that the vast majority of today’s global population knows nothing about.
The disastrous consequences of Trump’s victory can be averted only by “a new birth” of genuinely socialist politics, based on the working class and animated by an international strategy that unites global humanity.
Declaring that her 1619 Project had been “borne out” by US political developments, Hannah-Jones employed its racialist falsifications of history to promote the campaign of Kamala Harris, while seeking to sow divisions on the basis of race within the growing movement of the working class.
The film, buoyed by an excellent cast, including an exceptional performance from Jeremy Strong as right-wing lawyer and Trump mentor Roy Cohn, highlights the continuity between 1950s McCarthyism and today’s emerging fascist movement led by Cohn’s protégé.
