Spring 2025

A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever. A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each …

“The first act has come off very well, but who is going to write the second?” A local realtor addressed this question to the assembled “Central Committee” of the student movement in a large Southern city. The Negro businessman had …

The sit-in demonstrations begun by four A. and T. College freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, had greater effect on the students of Alabama State College than most of us realized. Students here, as in other colleges, …

Sunday, March 6, 1960 dawned clear and cold in Montgomery, Alabama. It was like any other quiet Sunday morning, yet a feeling of unrest pierced the deceptive calm. Two days before, the Negro ministers of the city had scheduled a …

If a cartoonist wished to exhibit the essentials of the current racial war in Alabama, he would only have to picture the actual scene that took place Tuesday morning, March 8, 1960, at the intersection of Thurman and Jackson streets …

Sons and daughters of the soil, on Monday, 21st March, 1960, we launch our Positive Decisive Action against the Pass Laws. Exactly 7 a.m. we launch. Oh, yes, we launch—there is no doubt about it. (ALL OVER.) We have reached …

Editors: Irving Howe claims that if Christ gave his Sermon on the Mount next week, among other routine reactions would be that “Dwight Macdonald would write that while ‘Mr. Christ makes some telling points’ they suffer from syntactical confusion and …

THE ORDEAL and spectacular death of King Kong, the giant ape, undoubtedly have been witnessed by more Americans than have ever seen a performance of Hamlet, Iphigenia at Aulis, or even Tobacco Road. Since RKO-Radio Pictures first released King Kong, …

THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY, by Michael Young. Random House, New York Neither socialists nor sociologists have done full justice to the ambiguities of the idea of human equality. “Socialists,” writes Michael Young, “did not see that, as it was …

We have survived yet another crisis in France. I use the passive form feelingly. It shows how far we have come since May 13, 1958 [the date of the Gaullist coup] and indeed since long before then. To some of …

One of the most significant political events of the 1950s was the movement of the African states, and in particular the Negro peoples of sub-Sahara Africa, toward independence. As the previous decade belonged to the liberation movements of Asia, so …

Successful co-existence of capitalist countries with the Soviet bloc depends on the realization in the former that the non-totalitarian ecnonomic system has been put on the defensive. The rising standard of comfort and ease in rich capitalist countries and the …

When the Roman Empire had grown old and tired it began to rely, for the defense of its ramparts, less and less on the prowess of its citizens; instead, it paid subsidia to its minor allies, and even tributum to …

According to UN statistics, the nations of the world are spending about $90 billion annually in preparation for the kind of thermonuclear war which would destroy civilization and perhaps mankind— this in a world where 70 per cent of its …