This issue carries an implicit Black Lives Matter theme. We begin with Carl Sandburg's poetic takedown of bronzed heroes on horseback, a fitting foreshadow of later battles over Confederate statuary. In the first of two research articles, Matthew Nichter reexamines the epochal Emmett Till murder case from a novel angle. From the day in early September when a train carrying his mutilated body arrived in Chicago to the trial of his alleged assailants a few weeks later in Sumner, Mississippi, members of Chicago's District 1 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America helped to lead a multiracial coalition demanding not only accountability for a horrific crime but a larger transformation of southern codes of racial subordination. In the second essay, Naomi Williams excavates local racial and class politics in Racine, Wisconsin. Avant la letter, it seems, Racine activists were building a powerful intersectional alliance.
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