Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Something to Do with Power: Julian Mayfield’s Journey toward A Black Radical Thought, 1948–1984 by David Tyroler Romine The University of North Carolina Press, 2025
[Publication date: June 3, 2025]
Unlike his more well-known contemporaries such as Malcolm X and Maya Angelou, Julian Hudson Mayfield (1928–1984) has remained on the periphery of mainstream historical narratives. Yet his extensive intellectual archive has been a vital resource for historians exploring Black radicalism. By centering Mayfield’s lived experiences across five decades and four continents, this book offers a unique lens into the complex intersections of Black communism, Black nationalism, and Black internationalism during the Cold War era.
Something to Do with Power highlights the importance of Mayfield’s story of mutual interest and solidarity in shaping literary and political activism, offering a fresh examination of the Black left’s role in American culture. His legacy as a writer, propagandist, and artist committed to resisting the domination of white supremacy underscores his significant, though underappreciated, contribution to American history.
REVIEWS:
“By rescuing a dedicated and principled participant in the global Black liberation struggle, Romine’s work offers a welcome contribution to the scholarship on the nexus between Black militancy, literary nationalism, Black arts, and radicalism.”—Christopher M. Tinson, Saint Louis University
“Julian Mayfield has deserved a book-length treatment for some time now, and David Romine has the storytelling and analytical skills to do him justice. This book will change how scholars understand the domestic and international dimensions of Black power.”—Benjamin Talton, Howard University
Book Description:
Unveiling an intellectual journey through art and activism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Romine is lecturer of history at Winston-Salem State University.
Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss From Rain (Writings and Interviews) by Glenn Ligon Hauser and Wirth, 2024
(Edited by James Hoff) [Publication date: August 13, 2024]
An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today
This long-awaited and essential volume collects writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose canonical paintings, neons and installations have been delivering a cutting examination of race, history, sexuality and culture in America since his emergence in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, the artist has routinely utilized writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the art world and culture writ large. Ligon began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili and Lorna Simpson, as well as with artists who came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons and Andy Warhol. Interweaving a singular voice and a magical knack for storytelling with an astute view of art history and broader cultural shifts, this collection cements Ligon’s status as one of the great chroniclers of our time.
REVIEWS:
Glenn Ligon is among the great artists of our time or any time. Words are among the materials he knows how to wield with irony, wit, multivalence, and directness. In this brilliant collection of his essays and interviews, Ligon’s polyphony speaks out with a resonance sharpened by acuity and hilarity, and with an intellectual luminousness that continues to determine how I see the world. -- Wayne Koestenbaum
What a delight―to read the artwork in the world through Glenn Ligon’s brilliant, incisive eye. -- Saidiya Hartman
Ligon gives us much feeling with few words. What else is there to do when you read him but exclaim ‘Boop!’ or audibly exhale? -- Thomas (T.) Jean Lax
'Distinguishing Piss from Rain,' an impressive collection of new and previously published nonfiction writings and interviews by artist Glenn Ligon, delivers the authorial brilliance for which the artist is known. -- Erica N. Cardwell ― The Brooklyn Rail
Together the texts form a hefty tome worthy of a capacious artist. -- Johanna Fateman ― Cultured
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960. He began as an abstract painter but shifted to text-based works which often incorporate quotes from Black authors. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images by Maurice Berger Aperture, 2024
Edited by Marvin Heiferman
[Publication date: December 17, 2024]
The
first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a
collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore
the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and
coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the
series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography,
race, and justice.
Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines
the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and
attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental
in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between
2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens
blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about
race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing
aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid,
and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and
events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–,
Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and
visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of
photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from
snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of
photojournalism.
Race Stories
collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and
brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think
about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the
diverse world around them.
Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Maurice Berger (1956–2020; born in New York) was a cultural historian, curator, and writer, who spent much of his career studying and teaching racial literacy through innovative visual literacy projects. In influential essays, books, and provocative museum exhibitions, Berger gathered and presented compelling photographic images to engage and challenge readers and viewers into reconsidering both cultural and personal assumptions and prejudices. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000) and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010), which was also one of the premier projects mounted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and was nominated for an Emmy Award.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Marvin Heiferman is an independent curator, writer, and organizer for projects about photography and visual culture for institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the New Museum. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Gagosian Gallery, CNN, Artforum, Design Observer, Aperture, and BOMB.
On Harvard and Belief by Eddie June 2, 2025 Substack
Donald Trump’s assault on Harvard and other institutions of higher learning is part of a broad and multifaceted strategy to upend those institutional spaces that are perceived to be strongholds of the American left. For much of the eighties and nineties, I remember hearing conservative cries about the liberal bias of the media and the radical left’s capture of American colleges and universities.
Sesame Street warped the minds of our young, they declared. NPR pushed liberal drivel. And universities no longer taught the classics of Western civilization. Instead, students were indoctrinated by Marxist scholars, content to take classes in “identity studies,” and were lost in a kind of moral relativism promulgated by the skepticism of postmodernism or poststructuralism or post whatever.
All the while, as conservatives claimed the left’s ideological capture of cultural institutions, Reaganism and its twin, Clintonism, shredded the social safety net, destabilized American workers as they transferred wealth to the richest of the rich, and built the largest carceral state of any independent democracy in the world.
In a sense, what Donald Trump is doing is the culmination of a decades-long effort to undo the New Deal and the Great Society. We tend to exceptionalize him as if he is a singular figure. When, in fact, what Trump is doing has deep roots in American political life. Just a quick glance at Joseph Lowndes's From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Joseph Crespino’s In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Counter Revolution, Seth Blumenthal’s Children of the Silent Majority: Young Voters and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1980 or Bruce J. Shulman and Julien E. Zelizer’s edited volume, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s reveals how well sourced the Trump agenda actually is.
One can think of MAGAism as one might think of fashion: the return or recycling of a style with different stitching or detail – a citation of the past (the 1920s and 1950s) that authorizes its power in the present.
This approach keeps us from thinking that the problems we face as a nation rest solely with Trump. That, if only we got rid of him, the country will find its footing once again. Magical thinking. Our problems cut to the marrow of the bone.
The one thing that is clear to me, even as I acknowledge the historical roots of Trump’s agenda, is that not only do these people want to control what we believe (with the ban on books and the like) but how we come to believe (with the assault on colleges and universities as well as scientific knowledge). They are attacking every arena that can cultivate a critical disposition towards authority.
We might see this, and reasonably so, as a reflection of Trump’s desire for absolute power. But that, I believe, is a bit shortsighted. This effort is part of an agenda aimed at making Americans pliant and malleable – willing to concede to the demands of capital without a mumbling word. (Just look at how they are talking about the immediate disruption of AI. How AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. No talk about why this must be inevitable. No serious discussion of the ethics – the human costs – of the choice corporations are making in their manic pursuit of profit. Only the assumption that we will concede to what’s coming.)
As I was thinking about this, and it offers a glimpse into how my mind works, Charles Sanders Pierce’s classic essay, “The Fixation of Belief,” came to mind. I won’t go into the particulars of his argument (and this will be a rather crude rendering of his claims), but he identifies four ways in which we fix believe in the face of doubt: 1) the method of tenacity, 2) the method of authority, 3) the a priori method, and 4) the method of science.
With the method of tenacity, we cling to what we believe. Facts be damn. Our minds are already made up no matter what confronts us. We believe what we believe. The method of authority reflects how we come to accept beliefs by way of our assent to institutions and persons we hold as the authority. We follow the church’s teachings, for example, or some political figure. The a priori method, to put it crudely, involves following what seems reasonable to you or intuitively obvious. “It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion….” And the scientific method, well, is an approach that isn’t reducible to what we cling to, or an authority to which assent, or a matter of taste. As Peirce wrote,
If I adopt the method of tenacity, and shut myself out from all influences, whatever I think necessary to doing this, is necessary according to that method. So with the method of authority: the state may try to put down heresy by means which, from a scientific point of view, seem very ill-calculated to accomplish its purposes; but the only test on that method is what the state thinks; so that it cannot pursue the method wrongly. So with the a priori method. The very essence of it is to think as one is inclined to think…. But with the scientific method the case is different. I may start with known and observed facts to proceed to the unknown; and yet the rules which I follow in doing so may not be such as investigation would approve. The test of whether I am truly following the method is not an immediate appeal to my feelings and purposes, but, on the contrary, itself involves the application of the method.
Hypotheses, experimentation, falsifiability, a community of inquirers all come into view with this particular method. As Peirce put it, “bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.”
No wonder Trump and his minions seem skeptical of such an approach. The science of vaccines doesn’t matter. The research at universities does not matter. Our doubts are best dealt with, on their view, by conceding to authority or clinging to our prejudices. Adam Serwer suggests that such an approach, if successful, along with the assault on the institutions that cultivate critical dispositions will hurl the country into the dark ages. I completely agree.
Our task, among other things, is to insist on a critical disposition towards the world. To ask rude and hard questions. To think historically so that we do not fall for the noise and illusions of carnival barkers. To resist the temptation of tenacity and the ease that comes with handing over our responsibility for critical thinking to those who claim authority as their own.
The assault on our democracy consists of much more than the usurpation of power by an executive gone mad. Forces are trying to capture all of our cultural and political institutions. They are attempting to dictate what we believe and how we come to believe with the aim of snatching our freedoms and making of us what they will.
We must refuse for the sake of our babies, for the future of American democracy itself.
A Stephen Miller Staffer and Tough Talk: Inside Trump’s Latest Attack on Harvard
The
Justice Department opened an investigation into the student-run Harvard
Law Review. The startling accusations show how the Trump administration
is wielding power in pursuit of its political agenda.
The
Trump administration’s campaign against Harvard involves a “cooperating
witness” inside its law school. Credit: Billy Hickey for The New York
Times
[Michael S. Schmidt reported from New York, and Michael C. Bender from Washington.]
The
Justice Department quietly approached Harvard University last month
with startling claims, even by the extraordinary standards of the Trump
administration’s monthslong assault on the elite college.
The
department signaled that it was reviewing claims of discrimination
against white men at The Harvard Law Review, and accused the renowned
publication of destroying evidence in an open investigation. The
administration demanded that Harvard “cease and desist” from
interfering.
In
a series of letters that have not been previously reported, the
government also disclosed that it had a “cooperating witness” inside the
student-run journal. That witness now works in the White House under
Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s domestic policy
agenda, Trump officials confirmed.
The
Law Review is independent of Harvard University. The allegations
nonetheless deepened fears among Harvard officials that the
administration appeared eager to escalate one of its civil
investigations into a criminal inquiry, underscoring how the
university’s problems with President Trump extend far beyond the loss of
billions in federal funding.
But
the aggressive language in the letters from the Justice Department’s
two top civil rights lawyers appeared to have overstated the allegations
in pursuit of an additional way to punish Harvard. In that way, the
episode fits a broader trend in how the administration is wielding
federal investigatory powers to impose its political agenda.
The
investigation of The Harvard Law Review offers a glimpse into the
strategy. The Justice Department’s not-so-subtle threats helped persuade
The Law Review to agree to at least some of the government’s demands,
which were delivered in three letters within 10 days in May.
A
detail not included in the correspondence: The Justice Department’s
“cooperating witness” had taken a job inside the White House.
While
the White House has cast the witness as a whistle-blower, his identity
has been known to many of those involved in the matter. The witness,
Daniel Wasserman, was identified as a government cooperator in two of
the letters to Harvard University from the Justice Department last
month, when he was still an editor at The Harvard Law Review. And other
staff members of The Law Review have also known of his identity.
In
April, he had told classmates and others that he had applied to work
for Mr. Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy. The
White House confirmed that Mr. Wasserman was offered a job on April 25,
the same day that accusations of discrimination at the journal first
surfaced in a conservative media report, and that his first day of work
was May 22.
The
letters were sent by the Justice Department to the university, rather
than to The Law Review, and were dated May 13, May 21 and May 23.
Mr.
Wasserman, who has a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s from
the University of Cambridge, graduated from Harvard Law School on
Wednesday.
A
senior administration official said that Mr. Wasserman’s résumé was on
the White House’s radar long before the Justice Department’s
investigation into The Law Review and that his hiring was not connected
to the government’s inquiry. Mr. Miller was not involved in the hiring
and did not meet Mr. Wasserman until he started working in the White
House, the official said.
On
Friday, Mr. Wasserman picked up the phone assigned to him at the White
House when a reporter for The New York Times called the White House
switchboard and asked to speak with him.
“No comment,” Mr. Wasserman said, and quickly hung up.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Legal
experts said it was highly unusual for an administration to give a
cooperating witness in an ongoing investigation a White House job.
Inside
the administration, some officials said the Justice Department might
have additional evidence beyond what it had disclosed in its letters.
Two administration officials familiar with the investigation said the
department had been pursuing an allegation that law school students
applying for editorial jobs at The Law Review were told directly of
racial and gender hiring preferences.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, praised Mr. Wasserman as a whistle-blower and encouraged more students to speak out.
“Harvard
is violating federal law with its discrimination, and a student was
brave enough to call them out on this,” Mr. Fields said. “Because of his
actions, the Justice Department is investigating clear violations of
the law.”
Jonathan
Swain, a spokesman for Harvard, said the university was committed to
following the law, and emphasized that the school and The Law Review
were two separate entities.
“Harvard
Law School and Harvard University do not control or operate The Harvard
Law Review, including in its membership or article selection
decisions,” Mr. Swain said in an emailed statement.
The Law Review declined to comment.
The
Harvard Law Review is widely considered one of the nation’s most
prestigious and influential legal journals. The Law Review provides a
training ground for future leaders, including former President Barack
Obama, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
and its highly selective articles regularly shape legal arguments and
court decisions.
But
the journal has emerged as a new pressure point in the administration’s
campaign against Harvard, which has so far refused demands to align its
admissions policies, curriculum and hiring practices with Mr. Trump’s
political agenda.
The
first public indication that the Trump administration had zeroed in on
The Law Review came on April 28, when the Departments of Education and
Health and Human Services announced a civil rights investigation, citing
a news article that had appeared in The Washington Free Beacon three
days earlier.
The Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet,
had published multiple private messages and internal documents from The
Law Review that it said showed the journal was discriminating against
white, male authors.
The
Free Beacon story also prompted a different kind of inquiry inside The
Law Review, where editors looked for signs of a leak. Their search
revealed that Mr. Wasserman had downloaded tens of thousands of
documents, said three people familiar with the matter who requested
anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The Law
Review considered the downloads to violate its privacy policy, and Mr.
Wasserman was given a “formal reprimand,” a letter in the student’s Law
Review file that was never to be shared with anyone outside the journal.
The Free Beacon article
described a “pervasive pattern of racial discrimination” in hiring
editors and selecting articles. The accusations were similar to lawsuits
that Mr. Miller’s nonprofit group, America First Legal, had helped
bring against Northwestern University and New York University in the
years before Mr. Trump returned to the White House. The suit against
N.Y.U. was dismissed, while the Northwestern case remains pending.
The
internal messages and documents published by The Free Beacon showed how
race and gender were discussed inside The Law Review, but did not
indicate that race or gender were predominant considerations behind its
final decisions.
The
department first disclosed that Mr. Wasserman was providing information
to the government in the second letter, sent on May 21. The letter
accused The Law Review of retaliating against Mr. Wasserman and
instructing him to destroy evidence.
But
those allegations appeared thin to The Law Review. The journal’s
position is that it had not asked Mr. Wasserman to destroy evidence,
according to the three people familiar with the matter. Instead, The Law
Review had asked him to stop disseminating documents he had taken and
to retrieve or destroy any copies he gave to others, the three people
said. The original documents remain in The Law Review’s possession,
these people said.
Retaliation
also appeared unlikely to have motivated The Law Review to reprimand
Mr. Wasserman. According to the timeline in the Justice Department’s own
letters, Mr. Wasserman had been told by The Law Review that there was a
preliminary finding that he violated its policies before the department
disclosed he had been providing the government with information.
The
Law Review formally issued a letter of reprimand against him before it
had been told by Harvard that he was cooperating with the Justice
Department.
Still, the department was intent on removing the reprimand from Mr. Wasserman’s file inside The Law Review.
“Prior
to Mr. Wasserman’s Harvard Law School graduation, scheduled to take
place on May 29, 2025, H.L.R. must retract the disciplinary action it
instituted against him,” the Justice Department told Harvard in the
third letter, sent on May 23. “Any record of his discipline must be
permanently expunged.” The department also told The Law Review to
“retract any instructions to Mr. Wasserman or others to delete
responsive documents.”
It was an extraordinary effort to use federal power on behalf of a friendly witness.
Fearing
the wrath of the Trump administration, Law Review officials tore up the
reprimand and dropped their demand that Mr. Wasserman stop
disseminating the documents and that others return or delete them.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Michael S. Schmidt
is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His
work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal
investigations.
Michael C. Bender
is a Times political correspondent covering President Trump, the Make
America Great Again movement and other federal and state elections.
“Where the American media and the American political culture wins over the UK and every Western country, every time is the First Amendment — is free speech, is the inability of bad faith actors, billionaires, foreign governments to weaponize libel laws, to shut down new stories they don't like… But Donald Trump has shown and Elon Musk has shown, that you can weaponize libel laws even even if you aren't going to win.”
Former MSNBC hosts Mehdi Hasan and Joy Reid dive into a conversation on media bias, the Trump administration, and how journalists in the US are staying out of trouble by avoiding covering Palestine. The duo also takes questions from the audience, including one on the future of democracy in the US. This interview published on Zeteo.com a week earlier.
War Against Law Firms: A judge struck down an executive order targeting WilmerHale, in the latest victory for the handful of firms that have fought back against a Trump administration crackdown.
Harvard Relents After Protracted Fight Over Slave Photos
A legal battle between Harvard and a woman who says two slave portraits are of her ancestors will end in a settlement, with the photos going to a Black history museum in South Carolina.
A 1850 daguerreotype portrait of Renty, a South Carolina slave, commissioned by the Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz. Credit: Harvard University/The Norwich Bulletin, via Associated Press
[Clyde McGrady covers race from Washington, D.C.] Harvard University will relinquish its ownership of two haunting images of an enslaved father and his daughter after settling a six-year legal battle with a woman who says she is their descendant.
The images, two 175-year-old daguerreotypes that were taken for a Harvard professor and used as evidence for a discredited pseudoscientific theory of Black racial inferiority, will not, however, go to the woman who sued for them, Tamara Lanier. Instead, they are expected to be transferred, along with images of five other enslaved people, to the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., the state where the subjects were enslaved.
The settlement comes as Harvard deals with an onslaught of litigation as it tries to fight off President Trump’s efforts to cripple the university. Ms. Lanier cheered the outcome of her case, which was announced on Wednesday. “I have been at odds with Harvard over the custody and care of my enslaved ancestors, and now I can rest assured that my enslaved ancestors will be traveling to a new home,” Ms. Lanier said in an interview. “They will be returning to their home state where this all began, and they will be placed in an institution that can celebrate their humanity.”
A Harvard spokesman said the university was always eager to place the images in an appropriate public location, and one has not been selected.
“Harvard has been committed to stewarding the daguerreotypes in a responsible manner and finding an institutional home for them where their historical significance is appreciated,” James Chisholm, the spokesman, said in a statement on Wednesday.
“While we are grateful to Ms. Lanier for sparking important conversations about these images,” he continued, “her claim to ownership of the daguerreotypes created a complex situation, especially because Harvard has not been able to confirm that Ms. Lanier is related to the individuals in the daguerreotypes.”
The legal fight over the images of the enslaved man, known as Renty, and his daughter, Delia, took on outsize importance as storied universities such as Harvard and Georgetown grappled with their ties to slavery. In 2016, Harvard Law School abandoned an 80-year-old shield based on the crest of a slaveholding family that helped endow the institution. That same year, Georgetown University decided to offer an advantage in admissions to descendants of enslaved people who were sold to fund the school.
But as museums began to repatriate human remains and sacred objects to Native American tribes, Harvard held on to the images of Renty and Delia. Ms. Lanier said she first reached out to the university about 15 years ago when she learned of the images. Renty resembled an ancestor whose legend had been passed down through family oral history, she said.
But Harvard did not treat her claim the way museums had treated tribal demands for ancestral artifacts until now. “It’s a reckoning for all museums and institutions that currently hold plundered property,” Ms. Lanier said of the settlement.
“I can rest assured that my enslaved ancestors will be traveling to a new home,” Tamara Lanier, who sued Harvard in 2019, said of a settlement that will require that two portraits of slaves she says were her ancestors be sent to a Black history museum in Charleston, S.C. Credit: Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The case attracted the attention of big names in the legal world, such as Benjamin Crump, who represented the families of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager killed in 2012 by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, and George Floyd, a Black man murdered in 2020 by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Another lawyer on the case, Josh Koskoff, reached a landmark $73 million settlement with the gun maker Remington Firearms on behalf of families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012.
“One of the great accomplishments that Ms. Lanier, through her sheer persistence, has won here, is the shedding of light on history, on the true history, not just of her own family, but that of Harvard’s relationship to the truth,” Mr. Koskoff said.
The lawyers hope the settlement will lead to similar reckonings elsewhere.
“This case is so precedent-setting in so many ways,” Mr. Crump said. “It does leave a bright trail for not just us but the next generation of civil rights lawyers to take up the cross and to continue to defend Black humanity on every level.”
The partnership between the two lawyers began in an unlikely place: the set of a legal drama.
Mr. Crump had been filming a brief appearance in the 2017 film “Marshall,” which depicted an early case won by Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer and first Black Supreme Court justice. Mr. Koskoff’s father, a lawyer named Michael Koskoff, was a screenwriter on the film, and Mr. Crump persuaded him to take on Ms. Lanier’s case as co-counsel. Michael Koskoff died in 2019.
“The last day of his professional life was when we filed that lawsuit,” his son said.
The daguerreotypes were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born zoologist and Harvard professor who is sometimes called the father of American natural science. Mr. Agassiz subscribed to polygenesis, the theory that Black and white people had different genetic origins. In 1850, Renty and his daughter Delia were stripped to the waist and photographed in a South Carolina studio; the images were then used as evidence for the professor’s racist theory.
Ms. Lanier sued Harvard in 2019, arguing that the school was profiting from the images. Renty’s image was featured, for instance, in a $40 anthropology book.
In 2021, a Massachusetts judge dismissed the lawsuit, arguing that if the enslaved subjects did not own the photographs, then neither did Ms. Lanier. A year later, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed that the plaintiff had no ownership interest in the daguerreotypes, which is what she wanted. But the high court allowed Ms. Lanier to proceed with her claim that Harvard caused her emotional harm in its interactions with her.
As she pursued her case, Ms. Lanier searched for Mr. Agassiz’s descendants, overcoming some initial reticence. “If I found them, how would they treat me?” she asked. “How would they feel about me?”
After a New York Times story about the case in 2019, she received a message on social media from a descendant of the professor.
The families became so close that Mr. Agassiz’s descendants contacted Harvard on behalf of Ms. Lanier. “I have vacationed with them,” she said. “I have spent time with them. We stay connected.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.
There are films that shout. There are films that listen. And there are those that endure. You may not know the name Michael Roemer. You should.
Mr. Roemer passed away this week at the age of 97, after teaching for fifty years at Yale and making a handful of films. One of those films is transcendent. It is the 1964 film NOTHING BUT A MAN, starring the great Ivan Dixon and the great Abbey Lincoln. Yes, transcendent. One of the most soulful, unvarnished portraits ever committed to American cinema, in my opinion.
Michael Roemer wasn’t born in the South, where the film takes place. He wasn’t even born in the United States. He fled Nazi Germany as a child, was put on a train by his family to escape hate and evil.
Years later, as a grown man, he got on another train. This time heading to Mississippi and Alabama. Riding what he called an “Underground Railroad in reverse.” He moved through Black communities with his writing partner Bob Young, watching, listening, learning, absorbing. What came out of that journey was NOTHING BUT A MAN.
It’s not a protest film on its face. On its face it’s just about… a man. Trying to keep a job. Trying to love a woman. Trying to look her father in the eye. Trying not to break under the weight of poverty and caste.
The main character is Duff Anderson, played by Mr. Dixon. He’s a railroad worker. Josie Dawson, played by Ms. Lincoln, is a teacher and the local preacher’s daughter. Duff and Josie meet at a revival service and there’s a subtle spark. She brings him home. Her father disapproves. They marry anyway. Duff loses jobs for refusing to bow his head. Josie stands by him. There’s a child from his past. A father with a bottle. A broken home. And still… they build something. Not perfect. But theirs.
The film is about a man and a woman choosing each other. A Black love story, yes. And a protest film afterall… gently confronting all that was absent from cinema at the time.
There’s a moment I come back to often: Duff stands outside a gas station, humiliated. You feel the fire in his body. In his silence. In his restraint:
Another moment: Josie, luminous, smiles across the dinner table, saying nothing. But her presence says everything. The love. The risk. The waiting.
Mr. Roemer saw these people. He honored them. Without caricature or pity or polish or pretense. He made them real.
The film struggled to find distribution and was barely seen in its time (although Malcolm X was said to be a fan). Yet, it has quietly endured, becoming one of my most cherished. I return to it often. It reminds me what cinema can do. What it should do.
Michael Roemer didn’t make many films. But he made NOTHING BUT A MAN. And for those who know, it is enough. It is now celebrated in the National Film Registry and in the hearts of film fans like me who continue to learn from it. What honesty looks like. What humility feels like. What independent cinema can dare to do and be.
Roemer’s legacy isn’t measured in volume, but in vibration. And, in what echoes from one film made with everything the filmmaker has to give.
Thank you, Mr. Roemer. For showing us that being “nothing but a man” is not a small thing. It is everything. It endures.
Michael Roemer, Maker of Acclaimed but Little-Seen Films, Dies at 97
His “Nothing but a Man” and “The Plot Against Harry” drew critical praise but never found an audience. He said he took “a certain pride in not having been a success.”
Michael Roemer in 1989. His work was routinely praised by film critics and scholars, but appreciation by a much broader audience eluded him. Credit: Eric Robert/Sygma, via Getty Images
Michael Roemer, an independent filmmaker who earned critical praise for his keen understanding of character and his sensitive exploration of relationships in a slender portfolio that included “Nothing but a Man” and “The Plot Against Harry,” died on Tuesday at his home in Townshend, Vt. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ruth Sanzari.
Mr. Roemer’s interest in moviemaking began at Harvard in the late 1940s. In 1939, when he was 11 and living in Berlin, he and his sister had been among thousands of Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany and sent to England. There he would stay — writing plays to improve his English, he said — until he came to the United States in 1945, at the end of World War II.
His career as a director began when NBC gave him the opportunity to make “Cortile Cascino,” a 46-minute documentary about slum life in Palermo, Sicily, that he made with Robert M. Young. It was also the start of a pattern in which his films would all but disappear for decades at a time.
“Cortile Cascino” depicted a Sicilian life so grim that NBC executives balked at putting it on the air. It did not reappear until it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993.
Long delay also befell “Nothing but a Man,” directed by Mr. Roemer and written by him and Mr. Young, a frequent collaborator. With Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in central roles, it tells the story of a Black railroad worker married to a preacher’s daughter who struggles to maintain his dignity in the segregated Alabama of the early 1960s.
Martin Priest, left, and Ben Lang in “The Plot Against Harry,” Mr. Roemer’s comedy about a small-time numbers racketeer. Made in 1969, it took two decades to find an audience. Credit: King Screen Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock
Mr. Roemer and Mr. Young traveled through the South interviewing dozens of Black people about segregation’s impact. For the actual shooting, however, they used locations in New Jersey, fearing hostility from the Alabama authorities.
The movie had a brief theatrical run when it was released in 1964. Many distributors, Mr. Roemer said in a 2024 interview for this obituary, refused to book it in theaters with principally Black audiences.
Soon enough, “Nothing but a Man” was gone. It wasn’t until 1993 that it was rereleased, this time to wide acclaim. A year later it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in Mr. Roemer’s “Nothing but a Man” (1964). Many distributors, Mr. Roemer said, refused to book it in theaters with principally Black audiences. Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection
In 1969, Mr. Roemer wrote and directed “The Plot Against Harry,” a comedy about a small-time numbers racketeer (played by Martin Priest) who goes to prison and eventually decides to change his ways and become an upstanding fellow. The only problem was that audiences at private screenings did not laugh.
Two decades later, Mr. Roemer decided to make videotape copies of the film for his children. This time, a technician working on the transfer to tape kept laughing as he watched, and the director decided that maybe he had something after all.
“The Plot Against Harry” enjoyed a new life, a theater run and praise. It was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards. Janet Maslin called it “a funny, sharply drawn and appealingly modest film” in a 1990 New York Times review.
The film critic J. Hoberman described Mr. Roemer in a 2024 interview as “an empathetic director of actors and an unsentimental humanist, one of the few American filmmakers who shares those qualities with Jean Renoir.”
Other works by Mr. Roemer included “Faces of Israel,” a short 1967 documentary; “Dying,” a 1976 documentary about people near the end of life; and “Vengeance Is Mine” (1984), a scripted film about mothers and daughters, originally titled “Haunted,” starring Brooke Adams and Trish Van Devere. In 2022, Wesley Morris of The Times called “Vengeance Is Mine” “a masterpiece of direction, nothing too flashy but everything true.”
Brooke Adams and Mark Arnott in Mr. Roemer’s “Vengeance Is Mine” (1984), which never found an audience even though one critic called it “a masterpiece of direction.” Credit: Film Desk
Despite being routinely praised by film critics and scholars, Mr. Roemer was well aware that appreciation by a much broader audience eluded him.
“I spent the last 40 years of my life writing scripts not made into movies,” he said in 2024, with a laugh. “After a while, you kind of take a certain pride in not having been a success. I’m simply not a commercial filmmaker.”
Indeed, he said, his most successful work in terms of dollars was “A Touch of the Times,” an hourlong silent film he made at Harvard. A fantasy about kite-flying, it ran at a movie house in Cambridge, Mass., and earned well more in ticket sales than the $2,300 he had spent making it.
“If I could have made popular films, I would have,” Mr. Roemer told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2023. “But I believe in something. If I betray it, then I destroy myself.”
Michael Roemer was born in Berlin on Jan. 1, 1928, into a family whose shoe business provided a comfortable life. His parents, Gerhardt and Paula (Ettinger) Roemer, divorced when he was an infant, leaving him to be reared mostly by a governess (whom he said he found terrifying). Early on, he said, he came to appreciate life’s “unpredictability.”
After moving to England with his younger sister, Marion, in the rescue effort known in German as the Kindertransport, he attended a school whose students were mainly Jewish refugees like him. Once in the United States, he went to Harvard on a scholarship, graduating in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in English.
Six years after coming to America, he was reunited with his mother, and a few years after that he met his father, who had begun a new life in England.
In 1953, the young filmmaker married Barbara Balzer, a schoolteacher. She died in 2007. He is survived by his children, Dr. David Roemer, Ruth Sanzari and Jonathan Roemer, and two grandsons.
Soon after college, Mr. Roemer began an eight-year turn as a film editor and production manager for various companies. He then wrote and directed dozens of educational films for the Ford Foundation. Starting in 1966 he taught film theory and practice at Yale, a professorship that lasted until he retired in 2017. “I was 89 then,” he said. “I don’t think they realized how old I was.”
In a sense, he said in 2024, “nothing happened in my life the way it was supposed to.” His films, though praised, were not slam-bang successes. But failure, he said, reveals character.
“The truth is, failure can be a very honorable thing,” he told The Washington Post in 1990. “It’s not that you have a failure. It’s what you do with it.”
At a schoolwide ceremony on Thursday at the institute’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., Megha Vemuri commended students who protested on behalf of Palestinians and denounced M.I.T.’s ties with Israel. Credit: Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The 2025 class president of M.I.T. was barred from a graduation ceremony on Friday after delivering a pro-Palestinian speech during a commencement event the day before. The student, Megha Vemuri, is the latest to face discipline after using a graduation as a forum to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.
At a universitywide ceremony on Thursday at M.I.T.’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., Ms. Vemuri commended students who protested on behalf of Palestinians and denounced M.I.T.’s ties with Israel. The Boston Globe reported last year that based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, M.I.T. reported receiving $2.8 million in grants, gifts and contracts from Israeli entities between 2020 and 2024.
School officials confirmed that they later told Ms. Vemuri that she was prohibited from attending the undergraduate ceremony on Friday.
“MIT supports free expression but stands by its decision, which was in response to the individual deliberately and repeatedly misleading Commencement organizers and leading a protest from the stage,” a school spokesperson said in a statement.
The school said that Ms. Vemuri, who grew up in Georgia, will receive her degree. Sarat Vemuri, her father, said that she was a double major, in computation and cognition and linguistics, and was told that she will receive her diploma by mail.
He otherwise referred questions to his daughter, who provided a statement saying that she was not disappointed to miss Friday’s ceremony.
“I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide,” she wrote.
She added that she was “disappointed” in M.I.T.’s response, saying school officials “massively overstepped their roles to punish me without merit or due process.”
College campuses have been contending with protest encampments and accusations of antisemitism since the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza. Those tensions, coupled with the Trump administration’s attacks on universities, have left some school communities wrestling with how to balance civility and safety with open expression and debate.
And at some schools students looking to make a statement have seized on end-of-year ceremonies as a powerful platform, delivering speeches that diverged from the remarks they had told school officials they would make.
At New York University in mid-May, officials withheld a diploma from, a student, Logan Rozos, after he referred to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine” in a commencement speech.
At George Washington University, a graduate named Cecilia Culver used her speech to urge others to not donate to the school and repeated requests for it to divest from companies doing business in Israel. The university barred her from campus and university-sponsored events.
Ms. Vemuri’s speech, read from wrinkled sheets of paper, was about four minutes long and addressed her classmates and some of their efforts to protest Israel.
“You showed the world that M.I.T. wants a free Palestine,” she said, adding, “the M.I.T. community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.”
After Ms. Vemuri left the dais to cheers, Sally Kornbluth, the school president, spoke next. She paused as some in the audience chanted.
“OK, listen folks,” she said. “At M.I.T., we believe in freedom of expression. But today is about the graduates.”
Ms. Kornbluth has found herself on this type of tightrope before. In December 2023, she was one of three university presidents called to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The committee pressed the officials over their responses to campus protests and allegations of antisemitism.
Ms. Kornbluth managed to avoid the level of criticism levied at Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who were soon replaced by their schools.
Throughout most of the 2023-24 school year, pro-Palestinian encampments and tense standoffs played out on many campuses across the country. Last year’s graduation ceremonies were often used as forums for protest, including orchestrated walkouts. Generally, protesters and speakers were not disciplined.
But universities, especially elite ones like M.I.T. and its Cambridge neighbor, Harvard, have been under even more pressure since President Trump took office in January. His administration is yanking federal funding for grants and research, launching investigations into diversity programs and trying to cut international enrollment.
Schools everywhere feel the threat, and hope to avoid the government’s scrutiny.
Ms. Vemuri’s speech prompted criticism from the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, a key ally of President Trump.
“Ignorant. Hateful. Morally bankrupt. Where is the shame—or appropriate response from the institution?” he wrote on X. “Have your children avoid MIT & the Ivy League at all costs.”
Jack Begg contributed research.
John Branch writes feature stories for The Times on a wide swath of topics, including sports, climate and politics. He is based in California.
Macron on Israel: A war of words between France and Israel escalated as President Emmanuel Macron of France, in a speech opening a security forum in Singapore, said the West risked “losing all credibility with the rest of the world” if Israel was allowed “a free pass” in Gaza.
Tensions Over Iran: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wary of a diplomatic solution to curbing Iran’s nuclear program, continues to press for military action that would upend President Trump’s push for a negotiated deal.
That complaint echoed similar comments in his media tour preceding that appearance, as Musk whined about his DOGE stint not turning out quite as triumphantly as he had hoped. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything.” Not only that, “People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
Musk didn’t know how things worked, wasn’t interested in learning and didn’t care how many people he would hurt.
In other words, his noble effort at reform was undone by the deep state, and all he got for it was a heap of criticism and slumping sales for his car company. Won’t somebody pity the billionaire?
Musk has teams of acolytes around him who will no doubt be eager to reassure him that if some people in Washington don’t adore him, that just means they didn’t deserve him in the first place. But in truth, Musk’s feelings are irrelevant; what matters is the chaos he brought to the federal government that serves all of us, and the deaths he is at least partly responsible for around the world. The malignancy that is his Department of Government Efficiency project lives on, not only in the cadre of incompetents he has left behind in Washington, but in the spirit of gleeful destruction ever more firmly incorporated into Republican ideology.
Musk’s time in Washington was characterized by a toxic combination of ignorance, arrogance and malevolence. He didn’t know how things worked, wasn’t interested in learning and didn’t care how many people he would hurt. All of it stemmed from his belief that not only is government incapable of doing anything right, almost everything it tries to do isn’t worth doing anyway. So if he had an impression that an agency was bad — say, the U.S. Agency for International Development — what would be the point of learning its goals and methods? Just shut the whole thing down.
The demise of USAID is one of the most horrific legacies of Musk’s time in Washington. The abrupt cutoff of food aid to vulnerable people around the world “has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest,” according to internal State Department documents obtained by ProPublica. The withdrawal of medical assistance — especially through PEPFAR, the spectacularly successful U.S. program that fights the spread of HIV in Africa — is already leading directly to people’s deaths, almost certainly by the thousands. Some studies have concluded that hundreds of thousands of people either have died or will die because the U.S. government, at Musk’s urging, has all but shut down its foreign humanitarian efforts.
The experience of USAID was repeated in agency after agency, often at Musk’s whims or to serve Musk’s interest. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which used to protect Americans from financial scams, could cause problems for Musk’s plans to add payment services to his social media platform X. But now CFPB staff have been sent home, and the agency has essentially ceased to function.
Even if Musk and some his top lieutenants are gone, their underlings are still in the federal government.
We saw a pattern repeated over and over: Musk’s DOGE staffers would descend on a government office, demand access to critical systems and start destroying programs they didn’t bother to understand. Officials who stood up to them were fired. Contracts were canceled, offices were closed, and people who relied on services were abandoned.
That damage can’t easily be undone, and even if Musk and some his top lieutenants are gone, their underlings are still in the federal government. And while the shock of what DOGE was doing may have been appalling to most of us, to Republicans in both the executive branch and Congress, it was thrilling (though Republicans on Capitol Hill have been less thrilled about formalizing DOGE’s cuts into law). They’ve now assimilated Musk’s ethos as their own: break everything you can see, fire as many committed employees as possible, don’t worry about consequences to people’s lives, and if what you’re doing is illegal, well, maybe the courts will sort that out later.
And no, Musk was never going to cut $2 trillion from the budget; the fact that he thought he could just showed how clueless he was. But his contempt for the government and the public servants who work in it was obvious from the outset. He wanted indiscriminate destruction, and he got it.
So why isn’t Musk happy? The answer isn’t that he didn’t succeed, because in most ways he did. What upsets him is this: He didn’t just want to lay waste to the government and enrich himself. He wanted to do that and then have us thank him for it.
Tell that to a mother watching her child die from malnourishment, or a skilled park ranger who got fired from their dream job, or someone in tornado alley who can’t get updated weather forecasts, or AIDS patients who no longer have lifesaving medication. I’m sure they’ll be very sympathetic.
When the acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, dropped all charges against Ras Baraka, the Democratic mayor of New Jersey’s Newark, it might’ve seemed as if the legal dispute were over. It was not.
On the contrary, a few weeks after the incident that sparked the dropped criminal case, the tables have turned, and Baraka is now suing Habba. The New York Times reported:
[Baraka] filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday against Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, that argues that his arrest was motivated by political malice, not justice. The lawsuit also names Ricky Patel, a supervising agent with Homeland Security Investigations who led the arrest of Mr. Baraka on May 9 outside a 1,000-bed detention center near Newark Liberty International Airport that has become a flashpoint in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Baraka’s civil suit, which accuses federal authorities of false arrest and malicious prosecution, also accuses Habba of defamation.
For those who might benefit from a refresher, it was nearly a month ago when a group of Democratic officials, including three members of Congress, visited Delaney Hall, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in New Jersey. The point, according to the officials, was to conduct oversight, which is a core congressional responsibility.
Things did not go well, however, at Delaney Hall. There was a chaotic scene involving protesters, lawmakers and Trump administration officials, culminating in Ras Baraka, the Democratic mayor of New Jersey’s Newark, getting arrested and being charged with trespassing.
Habba — a former Donald Trump lawyer whom the president tapped to lead a U.S. attorney’s office, despite her lack of qualifications — claimed the mayor “ignored multiple warnings” to “remove himself from the ICE detention center.” Baraka, however, soon after told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, “After they finally told us to leave, and I told them I was leaving, they came outside the gate and arrested me. So it looked like it was targeted.”
Habba announced a few days after the arrest that her office had agreed to drop the charges against the Newark mayor. But before the case was dismissed altogether, the federal judge to whom the case was assigned took the opportunity to scold Habba’s office for its handling of the matter.
Indeed, federal magistrate judge André Espinosa reprimanded the federal prosecutors for several minutes, calling the decision to abandon the charges “embarrassing.”
“The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrying misstep by your office,” Espinosa said. “An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.”
The mayor was soon after overheard saying, in reference to the judicial admonishment, “Jesus, he tore these people a new a--hole. Good grief.”
That was two weeks ago. Now, Baraka is taking the next step, suing the U.S. attorney who oversaw his short-lived and ill-fated prosecution.
Baraka, it’s worth noting for context, is also a Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Primary Day in the Garden State is seven days away.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Welcome to Joy's House, where you'll find the thoughts, notions, recommendations, newsie items, upcoming appearances and projects of political analyst, cable newsie, book author, documentary filmmaker, and nerd about-town Joy-Ann (Joy) Reid. Hang out! Over 152,000 subscribers
A Daily Reid: American gestapo
Regime police arrest an aide to New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, as maga fascism takes yet another dark turn
It started with LaMonica McIver, the Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey, who the regime is attempting to prosecute for an incident in which she and other members congress, who were attempting to conduct oversight over a private migrant prison ICE is utilizing in her state, were shoved by authorities who were in the process of arresting the mayor of Newark for supposedly trespassing on the grounds of a facility in his own city where he was invited to come inside the fence. (Charges against him were quickly dropped, as the congresswoman was charged.)
The idea of arresting members of congress for essentially getting in the way of likely unlawful detention without trial seems insane, at least to me, and I think to most rational people. But facts don’t matter to the regime. No one — official or not — will be permitted to stand in the way of their mania for mass deportation which sure smells like a maga brand of ethnic cleansing, with hints of worse to come, including for nonwhite American citizens.
Federal officers entered Representative Jerry Nadler’s office in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday and handcuffed and briefly detained one of his aides. The confrontation happened shortly after the aide observed federal agents detaining migrants in a public hallway outside an immigration courtroom in the same building as the congressman’s office. [Emphasis added]
I pause here to emphasize the point that regime police are now hunting brown migrants inside immigration courtrooms located adjacent to the offices of elected members of Congress. They WANT these confrontations. They want to provoke elected officials, presumably so that they can arrest them, too.
More from the Times:
The episode was recorded by someone who was sitting in Mr. Nadler’s office. In the video, an officer with the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security, is shown demanding access to a private area inside the office. The video was obtained by Gothamist, which earlier reported the confrontation.
“You’re harboring rioters in the office,” the federal agent, whose name tag and officer number are not visible in the video, says to a member of Mr. Nadler’s staff.
Let’s pause again on the term “rioters.” This is pure Trumpism. He inspired a violent riot at the Capitol, and now his regime police are labeling even the mildest resistance to mass ethnic deportation as “riot” or akin to that actual violent insurrection. The Department of Homeland Security (a name I’ve never liked because it sounds too much like 1930s Germany) under cartoon villain Kristi Nome, clearly is taking its marching orders from the top.
Back to the story.
There were no riots reported on Wednesday at the federal building on Varick Street, though protesters and immigrant rights advocates gathered inside and outside the building earlier in the day. The immigration court is on the fifth floor and Mr. Nadler’s office is on the sixth. [Emphasis added.]
The agents entered Mr. Nadler’s office because they had been told that protesters were there and were concerned for the safety of his staff members, according to a statement on Saturday from the Department of Homeland Security.
When they arrived, “one individual became verbally confrontational and physically blocked access to the office,” the statement said. That person, an aide to the congressman, was detained so the officers could complete their safety check, according to the statement.
In the video, a second aide standing at a door in the office asks one of the agents to show her a warrant. The agent says the officers do not need a warrant and walks past her.
Robert Gottheim, Mr. Nadler’s chief of staff, strongly disputed the Homeland Security Department’s description of events. Instead, he said, it appeared the agents were angry because members of the congressman’s staff had seen the officers detaining migrants in the building, and because advocates who had also witnessed the detentions outside the courtroom had been invited by the staff members to Mr. Nadler’s office.
“The Trump administration is trying to intimidate members of Congress,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview on Saturday. “They’re behaving like fascists.”
Facts.
A handful of people gathered around 1 p.m. on Wednesday in the hallway near the immigration courtroom to advise migrants of their right to stay silent as they were taken into custody, according to an immigrant rights advocate in attendance who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns of reprisal from federal law enforcement.
Separately, a group of demonstrators had gathered outside of the building, Mr. Gottheim said. They were there to protest an initiative by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain people as they leave immigration courts, the latest escalation by the Trump administration in its effort to ramp up deportations.
In the hallway outside the courtroom, federal agents questioned the observers about their presence there, and threatened to arrest them for loitering, the advocate said. As tensions flared, a member of Mr. Nadler’s staff invited the advocates upstairs to de-escalate the situation, Mr. Gottheim said.
Under the Trump administration, the Homeland Security Department has increased its use of expedited removals. Officers have gathered outside immigration courtrooms across the United States and have immediately arrested migrants who have been ordered to be deported or whose cases have been dismissed.
Last week, federal agents detained a 20-year-old man from Venezuela at an immigration courthouse in New York City. It was the first reported instance of a public school student in the city being apprehended by federal officials, and it represented a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to find, detain and deport migrants.
Those efforts have required close coordination between government lawyers and ICE officers waiting to make the arrests, according to immigration lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.
In previous political eras, the detainment of a congressman’s aide by federal law enforcement agents and the search of his office without presenting a judicial warrant might have prompted an outcry, Mr. Nadler said on Saturday. But the current Republican majority in Congress staunchly supports Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, Mr. Nadler said, and has remained mostly silent as the president pushes the boundaries of executive power.
That leaves even a member of Congress with little recourse, he said.
“The Trump administration is really using totalitarian or even authoritarian practices,” Mr. Nadler said. “We have to fight them. We don’t want to be a fascist country.”
Here’s the video:
Federal Dept. of Homeland Security police handcuff Democratic Rep. Nadler's congressional staffer:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The regime knows that it cannot radically shift the racial makeup and trajectory of the country, but they all but promised the base that they would do so by expelling millions of nonwhite migrants. And so they are going for dramatic takedowns, of dishwashers, farm hands, construction workers and cooks, and people leaving their immigration hearings, and for the really big, juicy numbers, once favored Venezuelans, Cubans and Chinese students.
And if they can arrest a congressman or two, or one of their aides, to ramp up the fear and make people feel like they’re living in Nazi Germany? All the better for men like this:
Tom Homan Asked: 'What's The Reason Why ICE Is Apparently Targeting Martha's Vineyard & Nantucket?':
Have you subscribed to The Joy Reid Show YouTube channel? If not, why not? Subscribe now at this link so you never miss an episode when the show starts on June 9, and catch all the content that’s coming in between. Also stay tuned for announcement about show extras and exclusive content for the show, that are coming right here to Joy’s House. Thanks for reading, and see you on the pod!
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
