posts and bio
Clarence Lang
Clarence Lang is Professor and Chair of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75, and Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics.
This May I attended the commencement ceremony for a young cousin who was one of 117 graduates from an overwhelmingly black charter high school in a south suburb of Chicago. Launched in 2010, the school – which I will dub “South Charter High” – was the brainchild of black educators, and working-class and middle-class parents, a fair share of them former Chicagoans displaced from the city by urban redevelopment and a skyrocketing cost of living.
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One of several nightmarish outcomes of Kansas' swing to the Tea Party Republican right following the presidential election of Barack Obama, the state will soon allow individuals to carry loaded, concealed firearms without a permit or even safety training.
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Even if you did not know her personally, you should mourn Professor Leslie Brown, who passed away earlier this month. She was many wonderful things, among them an award-winning scholar in African American and women’s history whose first major work – Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South – is one of the best labor histories that I have read and still envy.
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The Million Man March commemorates its twentieth-year anniversary this month, which historians argue had problematic racial, class, and gender politics. Clarence Lang explores the event's place in history, its message, and continuing legacy.
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It is difficult to write about the situation in the black working-class community of Ferguson, Missouri, which began last week with the police shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. It is difficult because the details of the case have evolved so rapidly and unpredictably.
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Lee A. Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), recently announced that his union is severing ties with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), effective September 1. For about a decade, the two organizations had been partners in the Union Scholars Program, which introduced students of color to the labor movement, funded recipients’ education expenses during their junior and senior years, and served as a pipeline to employment opportunities in AFSCME and social justice organizations.
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Another national observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is upon us. I know that I’m speaking to the choir here when I say that many of the issues for which he fought in his short lifetime remain part of today’s unfinished political agenda.
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I’ve long appreciated how athletics mirror and shape broader social relations (Consider, for instance, C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, which famously approached cricket as a metonym for colonialism.) From this standpoint, the recent NFL controversy involving Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Jonathan Martin and Dolphins guard Richie Incognito presents an entanglement of racial, class, gender, and work dynamics.
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This past summer, I organized a LaborOnline forum on “Campus Labor and the Corporate University” (July 9, 2013), which featured commentary from James R. Barrett, professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Naomi Williams, a Ph.D.
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