Jubilee and Justice Network

04/15/2026

04/15/2026

I speak, Americans, for your good. We must and shall be free, I say, in spite of you. You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery ,to enrich you and your children; but God will deliver us from under you. And woe, woe, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.
~David Walker, Appeal, 1829

04/15/2026

Six major slave rebellions took place between 1712 and 1831 - although hundreds more went undocumented: New York Slave Rebellion 1712, Stono, SC 1739, Gabriel Prosser conspiracy, 1800, Louisiana Slave revolt, 1811, the Denmark Vesey uprising, 1822 and the Nat Turner rebellion, 1831.
~Encyclopedia of African American Heritage

04/15/2026

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slave children (infants, toddlers, and children)died from being poorly clothed, from being fed from troughs - normally reserved for animals - and from neglect, sickness and malnutrition.

04/14/2026

Cornel West’s Unfinished Argument With America
From Race Matters to the 2024 campaign, West has kept pressing the same question: what does justice require from a nation that keeps mistaking success for virtue?

Cornel West has spent so long in public that he can seem less like a single person than a recurring American argument. He is a philosopher and theologian, but also a street-corner moralist, a campus celebrity, a jazz-inflected lecturer, a television presence, a protest veteran, and, more recently, a presidential candidate. He is one of the rare scholars whose name traveled far beyond seminar rooms, largely because he refused to act as though the seminar room were the final destination of thought. For West, ideas were never supposed to remain polished and still. They were supposed to enter the mess of democratic life: churches, picket lines, talk shows, bookshelves, commencement stages, jail cells, and ballot fights. That ambition made him famous. It also made him polarizing.

Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/04/07/cornel-wests-unfinished-argument-with-america/

04/14/2026

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04/12/2026

“Betrayal” is still real!

04/12/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CtaGFxDcM/

On Good Friday, 63 years ago today, my father was arrested in Birmingham for leading nonviolent protests against segregation and injustice.

At the time, I was just two weeks old, and my mother was at home recovering after giving birth to me. Even in that moment, our family was living the reality of the movement, sacrifice, separation, and an unwavering commitment to justice.

From that jail cell, my father would go on to write what became one of the most important moral documents of our time, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” reminding us that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

He was arrested because he refused to wait, refused to accept injustice, and refused to turn away from the work of transforming this nation.

That witness still calls to us today. The work did not end then, and it cannot end now.

04/12/2026

"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent."

-KING, "Beyond Vietnam," 4 April 1967.

📖 more: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/beyond-vietnam


📸 Bob Fitch photography archive, © Stanford University Libraries.

04/11/2026

Before History Smoothed the Edges, There Was C.T. Vivian
A preacher with a strategist’s mind and a street fighter’s nerve, Vivian helped define the civil-rights movement not as a pageant of heroes, but as a sustained practice of pressure, sacrifice and public witness.

There are some figures from the civil-rights movement whose names became civic shorthand almost immediately. Martin Luther King Jr. is one. John Lewis became another. And then there are people like C.T. Vivian, towering in influence but, for too long, less fully absorbed into the mainstream American memory than their work deserved. That imbalance says less about Vivian than it does about how the country remembers social change. America likes a few saints, a few speeches, a few commemorative bridges. It is less comfortable with the organizers, tacticians and movement clergy who made democracy answerable to its own promises day after day, city after city, jail after jail. Vivian was one of those people. He was not ornamental to the movement. He was structural to it.

Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/04/06/before-history-smoothed-the-edges-there-was-c-t-vivian/