Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, helped usher in the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), a law that promised to not only stop unjust discrimination but also reverse decades of government-created segregation.

The broad outlines of America’s partisan divides are visible on any national map. Republicans typically dominate in most Southern and Plains states, and Democrats in Northeastern and West Coast ones. Democrats cluster in urban America, Republicans in more rural places.

But keep zooming in — say, to the level of individual addresses for 180 million registered voters — and this pattern keeps repeating itself: within metro areas, within counties and cities, even within parts of the same city.

America’s schools spend less money on Black students. Closing the gap is key to equality.

The walls at the high school Leanne Nunes attended in the Bronx were painted a color she likes to call “penitentiary beige.”

The cafeteria, located in the basement, had no windows. About half of her classrooms didn’t have windows, either. “It felt kind of jail-like,” Nunes, now a first-year student at Howard University, told Vox. “It felt like the building itself was trying to keep you in.”

Reflecting on George Wallace’s 1963 promise of “segregation forever” and his 1979 apology to the congregation where Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach, our commentator learns that “forgiveness controls the future.”

As this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day approached, my thoughts turned to George Wallace, who for years as governor of Alabama opposed King at every turn – and then apologized.

“I’m your black friend,” B. L. Wilson assures us, “but I won’t educate you about racism. That’s on you.” This has become a common refrain in the anti-racism movement. White folks (like me) are supposed to come to grips with our own subliminal anti-black prejudices, but without asking black people to explain what those prejudices look like. We may as well demand the French to learn Swedish without asking a Swede. Those who genuinely wish to purge any unconscious bigotry are forced to pay enormous sums of money to other whites who style themselves as “experts” on white racism.

Two black students at New York University created a petition calling on the administration to designate racially-segregated housing for black and "black-identifying" students. But contrary to viral social media claims, NYU has not agreed to this demand.

"NYU does not have and will not create student housing that excludes any student based on race," John Beckman, a spokesperson for the university, told Reason.

Czesław Miłosz, a future Nobel Prize-winning poet who had just defected from Poland, began work in 1951 on a book called “The Captive Mind.” Even as Stalinist totalitarianism tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, many Western European intellectuals lauded the brave new world of Soviet communism as a model for overcoming “bourgeois forces,” which in their view had caused World War II. Living in Paris, Miłosz wrote his book, which was published in 1953, to warn the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system.

Sixty-six years ago, Marion Ford, an ambitious Houston teenager who had been set to become one of the first African American undergraduates at the University of Texas, received a terse letter returning his $20 deposit to room in an all-Black dormitory because his admission had been rescinded.

The transgression committed by Marion Ford, a saxophonist, writer, academic standout, star athlete, and all-around striver? He told a reporter he wanted to try out for the all-white Texas Longhorns football team.

HARTFORD, Conn. — The moon pulls 6-year-old Romeo Lugo to the window at night.

The autistic child loves to gaze up at it, howling like a werewolf as it rises like a luminous pearl over the horizon of city buildings and trees he sees from his second-floor apartment.

But on one particular evening four years ago, his mother, Aida, noticed something else as they stood at the window: a man getting out of a gray car in front of their building and walking toward the nearby barber shop, gun drawn.

She grabbed Romeo and ducked.

I GOT INTO TOWN JUST AFTER SUNSET. The lights were on at a place called the Brick House Grill, and if you were out on South Main Street on a Friday night in February, chances are, that’s where you were going. So I went in, too.

I took a seat at the bar. A man two stools over from me struck up a conversation. I told him I was a journalist from Chicago and asked him to tell me about this town. “You know how this town is called Anna?” he started. “That’s for ‘Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.’” He laughed, shook his head and took a sip of his beer.