#racial-segregation

#racial-segregation

US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks' similar but more famous act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86. Although she remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvin's 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis for the federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation.

The Coconut Grove Playhouse, designed by the architect Richard Kiehnel, opened on New Year's Day 1927 with the luxuries of air-conditioning and the largest Wurlitzer organ in the US. Like many opulent venues at the time, the playhouse followed local Jim Crow laws and only welcomed white customers. A few blocks to the west, the much more modest Ace Theatre opened for Black audiences in the early 1930s in an area known as Little Bahamas, where many of Miami's Caribbean founders lived. In the 1950s, the Ace was the only movie theatre in the neighbourhood serving the Black community.

Two hilly, wooded parcels of land in Llanafan Fawr were bought by the Woodlander Initiative (TWI), a land-buying scheme led by Simon Birkett, a far-right figure with links to Patriotic Alternative, the UK's largest fascist group. Critics say Wiltshire-based Birkett's aim is to create a racially exclusive settlement; he has cited Orania, a whites-only town in South Africa, as an inspiration for the project. TWI successfully bought the two small plots totalling a few acres from a local farmer late last year, after attempts in Cumbria and East Sussex fell through. Since launching in 2023, the group has raised 165,000 of a goal of 1m money Birkett plans to use to buy land or property in every county in Britain.