Fannie Lou Hamer’s timely message for today

Plus: Halloween and Steny Hoyer |

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Like many elements of the 1950s-1960s chapter of the U.S. civil rights movement, activism and advocacy aimed at eradicating poverty are ongoing. One short-lived program that remains instructive was the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer started in 1969 to help feed impoverished Americans in rural Mississippi. In an essay for TIME, historian Keisha Blain, author of the new book Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, explains how Hamer helped lay the groundwork for activism to combat economic inequality today. “Hunger has no color line,” Hamer told novelist Paule Marshall in 1970. “And I’d walk a mile for any man who is hungry, Black or white.” Click here to read the full story. Here’s more history to know:

HISTORY ON TIME.COM Steny Hoyer: Letting the Filibuster Stand Will Break American Democracy By Steny H. Hoyer "In many ways, the United States Senate is an anachronism left over from a time when thirteen colonies were independent sovereign nations" Read More » How Activists Are Radically Interrogating Berlin's Colonial Past—and Reshaping Its Future By Suyin Haynes A group of activists, artists and educators is working to draw attention to Germany's dark history of colonialism through mapping, exhibitions, walking tours and more Read More » An NYC Commission Voted to Remove a City Hall Statue of Thomas Jefferson. Where It’s Going Remains Unclear By KAREN MATTHEWS/AP The statue of the former U.S. president will be removed by the end of the year. The question remains: where will it go? Read More » It's Hard to Enforce Pandemic Health Rules on Halloween. Just Look at What Happened in 1918 By Olivia B. Waxman The cancellation of costume parties and street celebrations makes Halloween 2020 eerily similar to 1918 Read More » Should Christians Celebrate Halloween? The Question Has Been Picking Up Steam Since the '60s By Olivia B. Waxman The history of Halloween and Christianity goes back to the Middle Ages Read More »

FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1974: Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper “Between them, the two very different, identical comediennes are the season's brightest clowns. On every show they prove that women need not be dingbats or contralto foghorns to win applause or affection…From the look of the ladies and the sound of their followers, TV '74 has a glow that extends to viewers who may yet be witnessing television's true Golden Age of comedy—stronger and longer than the one in the '50s. Indeed, Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper are enough to make almost anyone forget the comedies of the past. And even the crustiest nostalgia buffs cannot ponder Rhoda or The MTM Show without admitting that on these long autumn evenings, all that glitters is not old.” (Oct. 28, 1974) Read More » This week in 1976: King Kong “At best it is low camp, at worst a lunacy that should have sent people howling into the night long before Kong hauled himself to the top of the Empire State Building for the climactic battle with the biplanes that is one of the great iconic sequences of movie history. Yet somehow it worked, back in the early days of talking pictures, and damned if it does not look like it is going to work again, in a supposedly more sophisticated age. The ultimate triumph of special effects over common sense? A weird sexual charge, heavy in portent, reassuringly innocent in presentation? A comic strip rendering of a myth dredged up out of the collective unconscious and splashed so boldly on the screen that the audience is awed into acceptance by its sheer audacity? Or is it, finally, just an act of primal showmanship, a Barnum-like invitation to admit to ourselves that we are all members of the great fraternity of suckerhood and simply revel in the release of cultural inhibitions that admission sometimes encourages?” (Oct. 25, 1976) Read More » This week in 1986: David Byrne “He has been, for ten years now, a cool hand at bringing up all manner of crawly things from just below the surface. Byrne and the Heads made music that examined some of the oddest, spookiest manifestations of modern emotional life, sang songs that turned grim tidings into deadpan jokes and disaffection into disarming social parables. Byrne's lyrics played four-wall handball with anomie and, floating all around the band's cunning and enterprising rhythms, moved the Heads past punk and over the crest of rock's new wave into a forefront they had sharpened up for themselves.” (Oct. 27, 1986) Read More »

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB Suits: NPR’s Jaclyn Diaz reports that the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the state of Oklahoma over a law it says is unconstitutional and has limited the full teaching of the history of racism. Museums: Amid a wider reckoning over ‘stolen’ art and antiquities, the New York Times’ Tom Mashberg reports that Cambodia has asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art for about four dozen artworks it says were looted from the country between 1970 and 2000. Dark chapters: For the Washington Post’s “Made By History” section, Reece Jones looks back at one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history, the 1871 Los Angeles massacre, in which a white mob attacked Chinese immigrants in L.A. on Oct. 24, 1871.  Climate change: CNN’s Rachel Ramirez explores St. Malo in Louisiana, the first permanent Filipino settlement in the United States—and how rising sea levels threaten to wash away its history. Food for thought: Writer Talia Lavin traces the history of the bacon, egg, and cheese, breakfast sandwich in her newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich.

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