Showing titles in Civil Rights & Liberties

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern Moses", becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process.

Distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

Nigger: it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy - author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law - “put[s] a tracer on nigger”, to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.

In 1972, during the Black Power Movement, iconoclast Dick Gregory challenged one of the foundations of America itself - its history, which had been written almost exclusively from the white male perspective. In No More Lies, this true trailblazer gave voice to African Americans, speaking their truth about the past and race relations in the United States. No More Lies offers this incomparable satirist’s intellectual, conspiratorial, and humorous spin on the facts.

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

New York Times best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations - denunciations by the press, rejection from the president, dismissal by the country's Black middle class and militants, assaults on his character, ideology, and political tactics, to name a few - all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty, and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

The legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoys regular acclaim from historians, politicians, and educators. But is that true? Deploying an abundance of primary source evidence and well-reasoned arguments, historian and distinguished professor emeritus David T. Beito masterfully presents a complete account of the real Franklin D. Roosevelt: a man who abused power, violated human rights, targeted dissidents, and let his crude racism imprison American citizens merely for being of Japanese descent.

When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.

In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism’s very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled. In Metaracism, pioneering scholar Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back.

“It’s the year 2050… and racism has ended.” Could this really be our future? If so, what has to happen now to achieve such a radical change? In How We Ended Racism, Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski reveal a path for real and lasting global impact—not just talking about it, studying it, or making small steps, but actually ending racism in one generation. Williams and Tygielski draw from a wide array of scientific studies, as well as their practical successes in teaching a multitude of diverse groups across perceived “divides,” to show us how to shift our perspective.

The world’s discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: This is President Jimmy Carter’s call to action. A Call to Action addresses the suffering inflicted upon women by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare. Key verses are often omitted or quoted out of context by male religious leaders to exalt the status of men and exclude women.

How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.

Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a 100,000 people at rallies across North Carolina to protest restrictions to voting access and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests - the largest state government-focused civil disobedience campaign in American history - came to be known as Moral Mondays and have since blossomed in states as diverse as Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York.

When our founding fathers secured the Constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear arms”, they also added the admonition that this right shall not be infringed. It is the only time this phrase appears in the Bill of Rights. So why aren’t more people listening? History has proven that guns are essential to self-defense and liberty - but tragedy is a powerful force and has led many to believe that guns are the enemy, that the Second Amendment is outdated, and that more restrictions or outright bans on firearms will somehow solve everything. They are wrong.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights.

In Before the Movement, Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery.

In The Second, historian and award-winning author Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a 'pro-gun' nor an 'anti-gun' book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the 20th century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the US Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and to cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve....

On May 30, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, amid the protests that rocked our nation after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, thirty-eight-year-old white bar owner and Marine veteran Jake Gardner fatally shot James Scurlock, a twenty-two-year-old Black protestor and young father. What followed were two investigations of Scurlock’s death, one conducted by the white county attorney Don Kleine, who concluded that Gardner had legally acted in self-defense and released him without a trial, and a second grand jury inquiry conducted by Black special prosecutor Fred Franklin that indicted Gardner.

The grandson of a slave, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family to an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. When his neighbors attempted to drive him out, Sweet defended himself, resulting in the death of a white man and a murder trial for Sweet. There followed one of the most important (and shockingly unknown) cases in Civil Rights history. Also caught up in the intense courtroom drama were legal giant Clarence Darrow and the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).