Justice

After Texas Rangers and ranchers shot 15 unarmed men and boys in 1918, Porvenir killings were largely forgotten.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.

The justices’ decision not to hear challenges to the explicitly racist Insular Cases is part of a long tradition of favoring process over substance.

The F.B.I. director promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within.

The oft forgetten story of fugitive slaves whose escape from bondage found them in the Antebellum South's major cities.

Behind his tough image, the longtime FBI director was a man of profound contradictions.

A quiet movement that began in the 1920s didn’t disappear—it just went underground.

Haaland v. Brackeen could have major consequences for tribes’ right to exist as political entities.

The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

Enslaved women’s experiences with war must be extended to include the everyday warfare of slavery.

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.

Colorblindness has a long history in college admissions, the Black intellectual tradition, and today’s assault on affirmative action and race-conscious policies.

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

A 1968 student uprising at the Tuskegee Institute married practical demands with political vision.

Faculty and staff once owned slaves, and professors taught racial eugenics.

The idea of proportionality has roots in midcentury Japanese American advocacy.

The little-told tale of the 1651 trial of Hugh and Mary Parsons.

Suffragists coalesced in San Francisco to push for nationwide women' suffrage and send a petition to Congress for the vote.

Proposition 6, better known as the Briggs Initiative, was the first attempt to restrict the rights of lesbian and gay Americans by popular referendum.

Why the truth is crucial, even it it means losing an American Indian hero.

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.

What we can learn from fifty years of anti-abortion propaganda.

How the Supreme Court has weaponized the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education against antiracism.

Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.

An admission of wrongdoing from the U.S. government came later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact.

Assessing age — and protecting children — has always been subjective.

Saidiya Hartman’s unrelenting exploration of slavery and freedom in the United States first appeared in 1997 and has lost none of its relevance.

The story of Motley's legal career prior to Brown v. Board, and her crucial participation in it.

Charles Sherrod wasn’t a big name, but his life has a lot to tell us about the civil rights movement.