Center for Constitutional Rights

To honor black history is to celebrate black futures. In our weekly call to action, we will highlight different partners and organizations who are doing movement work today to create a better tomorrow. This week, the last one of Black History Month, our call to action is focused on beginning to learn, understand, and celebrate the importance of the protest songs of the 1960’s and 1970’s. We invite you all to continue to educate yourselves around the issues confronting Black c...ommunities and to contribute to the leaders who are working to create solutions. The Civil Rights Movement had a soundtrack. Fifty years later, the tracks are familiar to us all. It wasn’t just movie stars and other entertainers embedded in the marches and funerals who sang and contributed songs. Regular folks, the activists, the students, the preachers, and all the other protestors used music to raise their collective voice against white supremacy and the racial injustice that was keeping the United States stalled in the Jim Crow era. When the freedom riders locked up in Parchman got the news that more riders were on the buses coming south, they started singing, ‘Buses are a'comin, oh yeah,’ recalls Bernice Johnson Reagon. In one situation, Bernard LaFayette recalled that the prison guards tried to stop the singing. They said to the singing freedom riders, ‘if you don't shut up, we'll take your mattress,’ the protesters would sing, ‘You can take my mattress, you can take my mattress, oh yeah, you can take my mattress you can take my mattress, I'll keep my freedom, oh yeah,’ she remembers. We were young people and it was important to us to have songs that named what we saw in our world, and what we wanted to happen with what we saw. MORE at https://ccrjustice.org//creating-black-futures-week-4-impo

Black Liberation Archives, week four: Art as a tool for Liberation. Throughout the Black Freedom struggle, art has been a tool to both contest injustice and envision liberatory futures. In the Civil Rights era, this was the contribution of the Black Arts Movement, a project from the 1960s and ‘70s that was born in response to systemic racial inequality. According to poet Larry Neal, the Black Arts Movement was the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. W...ith its genesis in the Cultural Nationalists and the Nation of Islam, and in the aftermath of the assassinations of Black leaders like Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Arts enabled self-determination for Black people by developing spaces for cultural creation on their own terms. The Black Arts Movement had its symbolic beginnings when poet LeRoi Jones, later known as Imamu Amiri Baraka, founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, which housed workshops, poetry, playwriting, music, and painting. Politically motivated artists, including poets, musicians, and writers, were calling for the creation of art that would reflect pride in Black history and elevate the beauty of Black identity. The Black Arts Movement stands as the single most controversial moment in the history of African American literature, read a Time Magazine editorial decades later. MORE at bit.ly/bhm-archives-week4

As we approach 500,000 COVID deaths, the Trump administration’s discriminatory and unlawful public charge rule continues to create fear and deter people from seeking health care and food assistance, inflicting great damage in a time of health crisis. The Biden administration must rescind the rule immediately and should withdraw all pending government appeals defending the rule, including its appeals to the Supreme Court; every day that passes causes more harm to immigrant communities and impedes efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus, particularly among low-income communities of color. This must be a priority. The rule’s racist history and its imposition of a wealth test on immigrants make it one of the Trump administration’s most lethal policies.

THIS WEEK in our Black History Month programming, we are featuring a series of amazing Black artists in 'Art for Black Liberation,' an Instagram live takeover taking place on Wed, Feb 24, and Thu, Feb 25, between 3 and 6 pm EST. Join us for this two-day-long celebration as we elevate the powerful history of agendas for Black liberation within the U.S. and globally, through art, dialogue, and uplifting our movement partners. Get more info and check out the full lineup at bit.ly/art-black-liberation

Join us for a virtual panel conversation with organizers and cultural workers on the impact of Black Liberation-oriented political agendas and policy platforms on the global Black Freedom Struggle throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Speakers include: Monifa Bandele, she/her, M4BL Policy Table & TIME’S UP Chief Operating Officer Brian Kamanzi, he/him, Renewable Energy Engineer & Independent Researcher for the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research Amir Khadar, they/...them, Multidisciplinary Artist Moderator: maya finoh, CCR Advocacy Associate, they/them