Malcolm X

Editor’s Note:  Dr. Wilkinson delivered this paper about Haiti to a colloquium commemorating 40 years of study of African literature at the University of Porto.
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When this writer first heard of the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ he winced. Sounded ignominious, humiliating, undignified, embarrassing, pleading, definitely not noble, not appropriate to repeated murdering of innocent folks and children and other inhuman behavior.

Muhammad Ali was a complex and imperfect hero who reflected the turbulence of his time, a reality lost in some eulogies after his death but that playwright Stephen Orlov recalls from a night with Ali 46 years ago. By Stephen…Read more →

Much has been made in the days since the death of Muhammad Ali about the ‘whitewashing’ of his life and legacy. There’s no real question that Ali was, at least at one time, a radical; and that aspect of his story has been largely glossed over in much of the coverage. This has been motivated […]

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

While no one is likely to dispute Muhammad Ali’s claim to the title of Greatest Sports Star of All-Time, it was his potency and relevance as an inimitable cultural and social icon that many more people beyond the realm of sport will always remember him for. There has been no one else in the world […]

Below is a slightly modified talk that I gave at the 2016 Left Forum, Saturday May 21st, 2016 at John Jay College in Manhattan, NY. The Left Forum is a yearly assembly of progressive forces from social democrats to revolutionary Pan-Africanists. Organizers requested insight on current developments of the Black Freedom Struggle. This is my response.

This is an edited version of an older article, exploring the life and legacy of Malcolm X, including in relation to Martin Luther King and the two Kennedy assassinations. It is also about the 1960s as a cultural era, about his adoption of Sunni Islam and later Pan-Africanism, and about the time he almost brought […]

Mass resistance against police brutality in the US resurfaced after 18-year-old Michael Brown was murdered by the police in August of 2014. The sights of tanks and militarized police forces in response to the subsequent rebellions in Ferguson and St. Louis only blew air on the flames of injustice that were ignited when Michael Brown’s killer, officer Darren Wilson, was not indicted by the US judicial system. Since then, hundreds of Black Americans have been killed at the hands of the police.

On 16 July 1964, at the San Francisco Republican Convention—where Ms Clinton began her career of political opportunism—Senator Barry Goldwater accepted his nomination for the presidency by declaring:

I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.1