1/6 Hey y'all, we're going on tour! Catch The Overeer Class & friends in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore and DC! @amistadbooks.bsky.social @harpercollins.bsky.social Tickets at steventhrasher.com/overseertour/

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

We’re on strike today! Support our fight for a fair contract by NOT visiting the @propublica.org website or engaging with ProPublica stories today. Tell ProPublica’s management you won’t cross the picket line: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

Highly recommended reading 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

such an important thread on MLK but the heart of it is about the role of the media in shaping public perception and manipulating the truth

Excellent thread & worth mentioning that King of the North (her book) is one of the clearest, most straightforward case studies in the way that racism operates in the US.

Excellent 🧵

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Read all of it!🧵👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

“It is easier to think that King was naive or didn’t have clear targets, that Northern young people refused organized nonviolent movements, or that Northern racism was more complicated—than it is to reckon with the extent many Americans went to protect and preserve American apartheid.”

This thread is 🔥.

Great thread and equally great point that citing boundaries of what is newsworthy to make editorial decisions is itself what constitutes said boundaries

Fantastic thread

Truth.

I love these historical journalism posts! I'd love to work with @al.com on doing this with our Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville papers. Not enough time at the moment. Acknowledging media's problematic history is so important!

Please read this thread to see how the news media slandered people like Martin Luther King Jr. for acting, boycotting, organizing, and protesting. It’s important to remember that this is not new and reform to the status quo has long been derided, even if we retrospectively remember King as obvious.

A powerful thread reminding us that the mainstream press is only ever on the side of justice once it is safely settled in the past.

alt text: A massive funeral procession on a sunny day, seen from above and ahead of the procession, with people as far as the eye can see. In the foreground is a smaller group accompanying a casket on a horse-drawn cart. Many of the people in the crowd are Black, and are wearing suits or dresses.

Call me a bizarre anthropomorphic rabbit, because I’ve got so many Easter Eggs in my 270th #ScholarSunday thread of public scholarly writing, podcasts, new & forthcoming books from the past week. Add more below, share widely, & enjoy the hunt, all! 🗃️ + blackwhiteandread.com/scholarsunda...

Thank you for this thread. Those are powerful and insightful words by Belafonte. It helps make the case that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” … and for generations the NYT leadership preserves the status quo and undermines those doing the bending.

That the NYT was wholly unwilling to own this, even today, says quite a lot about how it feels about this (namely, that they don't care and aren't ashamed of it, or that they don't see the problem).

Great thread; very worthwhile read.

Because, to much of America, the only appropriate place to hold a protest is in the past.

Great thread, and a reminder that those cast as heroes today were once cast as troublemakers.

Fascinating, informative, and insightful thread that deserves article space tbqh

Excellent 🧵especially but not only today, April 4th. Well worth reading thenewpress.org/books/king-o... today or any day, too.

Thread over here. the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr & Northern media by @jeannetheoharis.bsky.social

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis, PhD. As I sit here in south Alabama I'm sure I'm a good ol' boy who benefited from everything Mrs. Parks accomplished during a long and change-making life.

Great thread

thread

Important and still relevant analysis of Legacy news orgs’ ongoing Failure to prioritize culturally competent, accurate coverage of Black and other marginalized communities in the U.S. See this detailed 🧵from @jeannetheoharis.bsky.social 👇🏾#MLKJr

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While today, the legacy media celebrates Dr. King and contrasts today's protesters against him, that same media actually stood in the way of King and the civil rights movement at the time. The tendency to treat protesters (even Dr. King) as unreasonable, dangerous, and unnecessary has long roots.

The Chicago Tribune mocked the claims that the city was segregated & the police brutal. Black Chicagoans “don’t need the help of the Rev. Mr. King...we don’t need any agitators from the south.” King himself observed, “I have seen nothing worse in [the South] than the Chicago Tribune editorials.”

In 1963, 99% percent of US daily newspapers employed no Black reporters.The LA Times didn’t have a single one. After the Watts uprising, the paper supported Gov Brown’s claim that “California was a state without racial discrimination” & praised the police who “are doing their job & doing it well.”

Dr. King observed in 1965, “As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied.” Journalists covered southern struggles seriously “as long as I was safe from [them] down in the South.”

Taking on the critics in his Amsterdam News column, Dr. King wrote the school boycott “proved very effective in uncovering the injustice & indignity that school children in the Negro–Puerto Rican minority community face. . . . punctur[ing] the thin veneer of the North’s racial self righteousness.”

While the @nytimes.com occasionally covered NYC's many civil rights protests, the paper didn't see a systemic problem in NYC. 10 yrs after Brown, Black activists called for a city-wide school boycott February 3, 1964. The NYT editorial board lambasted it as “violent” “unreasonable and unjustified.”

In 1963, MLK joined the call by NY radicals for a nationwide Christmas shopping boycott to highlight the national racial climate that produced the Birmingham church bombing. A NYT editorial called the boycott "dangerous" "self-defeating" & “singularly inappropriate ...for promoting civil rights.”

Dr. King wrote in 1963, “Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information—the press, the platform and in many instances the pulpit—do not give us objective and un-biased truth. … Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices and false facts.”

While the news media did shine a light on parts of the Southern struggle, they protected segregation closer to home, questioning whether it even existed. Outlets that cast Southern activists as valiant often portrayed King as an "outside agitator" when he joined movements outside the South.

At Dr. King's funeral, Harry Belafonte lost his cool with a NYT reporter: “this grievous moment was in part the result of a climate of hate & distortion that the New York Times & other papers had helped create.”It wasn’t just Southerners who laid the ground for King’s death—Northern papers had too.

On the 58th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, it's time to reckon with the media's troubling role in the civil rights struggle. (I pitched this to @nytimes.com who found it "fascinating..[but] the news is making deeper & certainly more historical pieces very hard." But they're the news.) A 🧵

On the 58th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, it's time to reckon with the media's troubling role in the civil rights struggle. (I pitched this to @nytimes.com who found it "fascinating..[but] the news is making deeper & certainly more historical pieces very hard." But they're the news.) A 🧵

"In many ways, 'southernizing' King is comfortable . . . Yet King understood that racism, segregation, & police brutality were a national condition, not a regional issue." Ten key facets of King's life & politics by @jeannetheoharis.bsky.social in @teenvogue.com ⬇️ www.teenvogue.com/story/mlk-in...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical critiques of Northern racism have largely been erased, allowing his legacy to be weaponized against movements today. Read and share @jeannetheoharis.bsky.social's book, "King of the North" via @thenewpress.bsky.social. www.zinnedproject.org/materials/ki...

@kairoscenter.org’s @liztheoharis.kairoscenter.org blesses the crowd and calls out the sin of how we treat the migrant and the refugee (as Jesus’ family was) on this Good Friday.

One of the great sins of our time is the abduction and splitting up of families. A group of clergy and other New Yorkers including @kairoscenter.org, marking the stations of the cross and the abuse of migrants for Good Friday

“The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cited Othman Atta, the executive director of the mosque, as saying that deportation documents focused on Sarsour's arrest by Israeli authorities as a teenager living in the West Bank to argue he ​provided material support for extremists.” Sarsour is 53 years old.