The Conversation - The NAACP's origin story

Although I spent most of my childhood in Chicago, I never learned about the rampage by a brutal white mob that took place in 1908 in Springfield, Illinois. I also didn’t know that the mob’s racist violence spurred the NAACP’s formation or anything about James Weldon Johnson, the brilliant renaissance man who became the first Black person to lead the storied civil rights group. Those facts are worth understanding today because, as historian Anthony Siracusa explains, “the killing of Black Americans that led to the NAACP’s founding remains a harrowing continuity from the Jim Crow era.”

This week we also liked articles about the history of Tab, the barriers that women like Janet Yellen and Kamala Harris are toppling and why you should laugh more.