Fred Klonsky is a retired teacher who blogs regularly about Chicago, Illinois, the nation, politics, and culture. In this post, he draws an interesting comparison between the recent expulsion of two Black legislators in Tennessee and events concurrent with the end of the Reconstruction era and the reign of Jim Crow. There is this difference: The two ousted members are very likely to be restored to their seats in the legislature by their local elected officials. The Tennessee Three are now national figures revealing the fascist hand in the iron glove of the Republican Party when it has the majority.

Robert Smalls, Congressman during Reconstruction.

The expulsion of Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson from the Tennessee legislature has a direct historical link to the overthrow of real democracy and Reconstruction following the Civil War.

On May 13, 1862 an enslaved man named Robert Smalls, who labored on a…

From the cover of Révolution Africaine.

“Less than one year after the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) signed peace accords with the French government to end the Algerian War for Independence, a small cadre of militants joined to draft the first edition of a new magazine: Révolution Africaine. The publication promised to serve the new nation and the African continent. It sought to ‘make known the struggles of [African] peoples… and call on all men enamored with liberty and progress to fight at their side.’ In the 1960s, Révolution Africaine developed from a site of Franco-Algerian anticolonial solidarity to an organ of official policy, reflecting a broader transformation in Algerian popular media. Founded by French-Vietnamese Trotskyist Jacques Vergès and FLN fighter Zohra Drif, the weekly publication presented itself as proof of Algeria’s commitment to popular democracy, African liberation, and global anti-colonialism. They featured articles about anti-colonial struggles in…

Stuart Egan teaches in North Carolina and blogs about the state’s politics. North Carolina has a Democratic Governor, Roy Cooper, but Republicans control both houses of the General Assembly. In the State Senate, they were one vote shy of a super-majority. And then—BOOM—a Democratic legislator switched parties, giving Republicans a super-majority, meaning they can override any vetoes by Governor Cooper.

Egan writes about the defector, Tricia Cotham, here and here.

Cotham was a teacher of the year. Her family was long involved in Democratic politics. She campaigned as a Democrat. She said she supported abortion rights. She said she was a strong supporter of public schools.

Yet now she has joined a party that is determined to ban abortion. That has spent the past dozen years attacking public schools, demonizing teachers, and introducing charter schools and vouchers.

Egan wrote in his open letter to Cotham:

Five previous terms in…

“Future Shock is a 1970 book by American futuristAlvin Toffler, written together with his spouse Adelaide Farrell, in which the authors define the term ‘future shock’ as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. The shortest definition for the term in the book is a personal perception of ‘too much change in too short a period of time’. The book, which became an international bestseller, has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated. … Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a ‘super-industrial society‘. This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation’—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components…

The Indiana legislature is considering a bill that would empower parents to censor books they find objectionable and to criminalize librarians who allow such books in libraries. The story was originally reported on WYFI, the NPR station in Indiana.

Chalkbeat reported:

The House Education Committee heard hours of testimony Wednesday from school employees, librarians, and others across Indiana who expressed opposition to a proposed amendment to a bill that would strip these employees of a legal defense against charges they distributed material harmful to minors.

The hearing was the latest evolution in a months-long legislative process driven by concerns among some parents that pornography is rampant in schools. While lawmakers have drafted legislation to address these concerns, they’ve presented little evidence to suggest it’s a widespread problem. The latest iteration of the legislation also targets public libraries.

Rep. Becky Cash (R-Zionsville), who crafted the amendment, said she’s heard from “thousands”…

“Bob Dylan’s classic album Highway 61 Revisited was released in August 1965. The first song on the album, ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ reached number two on the Billboard charts. It was kept from the top spot only by The Beatles and their demand for ‘Help!’ The second track on Dylan’s album, ‘Tombstone Blues,’ features more than a dozen named characters, including one who might be William S. Burroughs.

Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of a hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after.

Iggy Pop thinks ‘Brother Bill’ is a reference to Burroughs. At least he said as much in a 2014 BBC radio documentary on Burroughs’ life and influence. However, as with most things Dylan has touched and said, written and lived, there are competing…

Heather Cox Richardson writes that the Republican Party has tied itself to unpopular issues—like banning abortion—and their only strategy now is to suppress the vote, not only the Black vote but the youth vote. The fact that they are defending other unpopular issues—like vouchers, tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, and eliminating any kind of gun control—also explains why they are blowing up “culture war” issues of litttle consequence, like their demonizing of trans youth and their faux outrage about drag queens. It’s all a smoke screen for their real agenda.

Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin reinforces the polling numbers that show how overwhelmingly popular abortion rights and fair voting are, and it seems likely to throw the Republican push to suppress voting into hyperdrive before the 2024 election.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed the idea of “ballot integrity” or, later, “voter fraud” to justify…

Jan Resseger nails the central issue in the Chicago mayoral race: school reform. Pail Vallas tried to make the race about crime and his promise to control it. But the deciding issue was education, and their very different visions for improving it.

How do we know? Vallas has no record as a crime-fighter. He has a long resume as a school superintendent, starting in Chicago. He was the ultimate technocrat, who ruthlessly imposed his test-and-punish and school closing-choice ideology, regardless of how parents, students, and teachers felt about it.

Brandon Johnson was a social studies teacher and then a community organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. He was the antithesis of Vallas. He knew that the root of school problems was not in the schools but in the social and economic conditions in which children were growing up.

Brandon is the heir of the late, great Karen Lewis. She changed…

I like small paperbacks for reading on airplanes. Recently I got a new kindle, which is good for making sure I never run out of books and don’t have to pack extra weight, but I prefer paperbacks for ease of page turning and marking (I read so fast I’m continually poking the side of the kindle for the next page and I like to dog-ear my book when I find something I want to comment on later). On my last trip I finished the last of the Dresden Files series books by Jim Butcher, always reliably entertaining no matter what kind of narrow seat I’m squished into or what’s going on with connections and airports. So now I have to widen my choices for airplane books.

During one recent flight I read Madeline Miller’s Circe, since it’s out in paperback. It was all right; not as entertaining as I…