Justice

Today’s special education system was shaped five decades ago, when parents fought for disabled children’s right to learn.

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.

The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him.

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

John Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them, and aggressively bought them when he could.

Trans Americans have taken to the courts for decades to fight against the notion that they are a threat.

Chronicling the policing of gay life in the mid-20th century.

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

The author of “The Engagement" discusses the activists, politicians, and judicial figures who were at the forefront of the battle over same-sex marriage.

By limiting discussion of the infamous Supreme Court decision, law-school professors risk minimizing the role of racism in American history.

Communes, free love, coming out, getting arrested, consciousness-raising rap sessions, gun shooting, acid dropping, and trying to be macrobiotic at McDonald’s.

John Marshall Harlan's relationship with an enslaved man who grew up in his home showed how respect could transcend barriers and point a path to freedom.

Campus police forces developed as part of an effort to wall off universities from Black neighborhoods.

A local gay rights activist launched a publicity stunt that became so much more. Congress couldn’t help but notice.

The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 was one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history. It was also part of a larger pattern across the country.

The life of Tulsa attorney B.C. Franklin is a testament to the triracial history of the West.

A popular theory links the closing of state psychiatric hospitals to the increased incarceration of people with mental illness. The reality is more complicated.

The theory has not provided the clarity some of its early proponents had hoped it would.

Remembering Asian-American activists Corky Lee and Yuri Kochiyama.

Tsökahovi Tewanima held an American record in running for decades, but his training at the infamous Carlisle school kept him from his ancestral Hopi lands

One hundred and twenty five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, there are still lessons to be gleaned from the case.

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin knew the fates of the civil rights and labor movements were intertwined. The same is true today.

The theory, drawing the ire of the right, can help us understand our past.

On the 100th anniversary of Yuri Kochiyama’s birth and the passage of the Emergency Quota Act, Railton explores inclusion and exclusion in US history.

Organizing and advocacy are key when confronting bigotry.

The roots of “protecting children” in U.S. political rhetoric lie in efforts to defend white supremacy.

How conservative politicians and pundits became fixated on an academic approach.

I can’t ignore what this country has done to Black people. How do I find my place in it?

Activists on the campaign were dedicated, but the city of Chicago and the FBI had conspired to murder the city’s best organizer that night in December 1969.

Support for and opposition to the ERA are not positions that are fundamentally tied to either conservatism or liberalism.