Justice

Updating the Registry Act and uncoupling legalization from punitive measures could be first steps.

How does a plant become a crime?

Even as they carve out space for Black scholarship, established universities remain deeply complicit in racial capitalism. We must think beyond them.

It basically started the wave of activism that revived the left—and taught people to get serious about power.

In 2011, a grassroots anticapitalist movement galvanized people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It changed me, and others, but did it change the world?

In 1969, a group of Puerto Rican youth in East Harlem leveraged a garbage problem to demand reform.

Two new books on the history of feminism emphasize global grassroots efforts and the influence of American women labor leaders on international agreements.

Critics of Black Lives Matter have held up King as a foil to the movement’s criticisms of law enforcement, but those are views that King himself shared.

It’s time to demand law enforcement accountability for the death of unarmed citizens not just on America’s streets but also in our prisons.

Interrogated, examined, blackmailed: how law enforcement treated abortion-seeking women before Roe.

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.

Historically, the failures and limitations of federal policy have emboldened activists.

If this nation hopes to achieve a justice system that is just, it must remain ever vigilant for any echo from Attica.

In 1905, the high court made a fateful ruling with eerie parallels to today: One person’s liberty can’t trump everyone else’s.

The history of patrolling sex in public.

Governor Ralph Northam pardoned seven young Black men put to death in 1951— a step forward in addressing Virginia's imperfect criminal justice system.

Winfred Rembert on protesting in the Jim Crow South and getting arrested.

On the therapeutic turn in Indigenous politics.

In the nineteenth century, laws in many parts of the country prohibited "undeserving" disabled people from appearing in public.

In the wake of 9/11, some called for rounding up whole groups of people but Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta knew the U.S. had done that before.

Transnational networks have long helped pregnant people navigate treatment options.

Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.

The 1963 March on Washington put a government guarantee to a job at the front of the civil rights agenda. It’s long past time to complete the work.

Today, drowning rates are disproportionately high among Black children. What’s being done?

Traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful, practical democratic vision, rendering it largely marginal to the day-to-day lives of most Americans.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

Players, fans and authors recall the landmark 1971 starting nine.

These men, who had sacrificed so much for the country, faced racist attacks in 1946 as they laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement to come.

Dress codes are about social control, not student wellbeing.

Historians have demonstrated how central racism has been to the formation of the U.S. But many of those same ideas have also been vital to combating white supremacy.