By Alan Bean Fred Shuttlesworth is dead at 89. He never thought he would survive the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. Far less protective of his personal safety than men like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, Shuttlesworth attributed his…
Jena, five years later
By Alan Bean Reed Walters, the prosecutor at the center of a national controversy five years ago over incidents in a small town Louisiana schoolyard, doesn’t think he did a very good job explaining his prosecution of what became known…
Why can’t Americans be honest about the Civil War?
By Alan Bean As we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a new Harris Interactive Poll suggests that 54 percent of Americans believe the South seceded over states rights, not slavery.That would have been news to the folks…