On a summer morning in Louisville in 1965, the Ohio River carried an unbearable message. The body of Alberta Odell Jones—34 years old, a prominent Black attorney, and Louisville’s first female prosecutor—was found floating near Fontaine Ferry Park. In the blunt language of police work and bureaucratic recordkeeping, her death would be categorized, revisited, argued over, and filed away. In the lived language of the city she served, it landed as something else: a warning flare and a void, the sudden removal of a person who had been building Black political power with the unglamorous tools of law and electoral mechanics.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops brought music that had been forgotten and even looked down upon into the rarefied world of art music—the country mouse ushered from dusty backwoods to the velvet seats of the city mouse’s concert hall. While at first listen the Carolina Chocolate Drops might sound like a scratchy field recording from the wanderings of Alan Lomax, their collective musicianship and charisma gained them enthusiastic audiences who knew little or nothing of the well from which they were drawing.

Since the financial crisis and Great Recession of the early Obama era, a core group of community and union organizers in Minnesota had been building what they called “alignment.” January 23 was one fruit bore from that labor.