Fannie Lou Hamer was a firebrand. She was a civil rights organizer that doesn’t come along every day. Charismatic, she did not kowtow to charismatic leaders. An individual who was a force of nature, she preferred group leadership. A politician who could have led nationally, she believed fiercely in the local and in grassroots organizing. One of 20 children in a sharecropper’s Mississippi family, Hamer grew up in the 1920s and ‘30s no stranger to hunger. As a young child, she helped her parents pick cotton in the fields which ended her formal education at age 12. Often, she and her siblings had nothing for dinner besides a little four mixed with cooking grease. Lynchings of Black people were not uncommon in mid-20th century Mississippi, and it was not until Hamer was well into adulthood that she learned she had the right to vote. This knowledge changed her life. She became a voting rights activist. Getting her fellow African Americans to vote became her life’s work.

The death of Elizabeth Windsor’s husband Philip Mountbatten earlier this year prompted an establishment-led frenzy of monarchism across Britain, with wall-to-wall sycophantic TV and radio coverage and Covid public information boards replaced with Philip’s portrait. The standard view of the British monarchy is that they are no more than symbolic figureheads lacking any real power; mere ornaments adorning the British political system. But the truth is that Philip and his family were and are crucial pillars in the maintenance of the class power of the British imperialist bourgeoisie, both domestically and globally.

Late June, Nez Perce Creek, Yellowstone. I was following closely the path the renegade Nez Perce took 115 years ago, a trail that allowed them to put some space between themselves and homicidal General Otis Howard and his US Army troops. Even then Yellowstone, already a national park, stood as a sanctuary of freedom and wilderness.

Since many high school students across the country will be back to learning their history of the US from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, it's perhaps instructive to recall that when Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune's Auditorium in LA, to large protests by the NAACP, it was still called The Clansman, the title of the racist novel by Thomas Dixon it was based on. In fact, it's possible that the print that was shown at the White House, which generated such a frenzied reaction from Woodrow Wilson, was still called The Clansman. Dixon was a pal of Wilson's and had arranged the showing, the first film ever screened at the White House.