Justice

How we came to rely on the courts, instead of the democratic process, for justice.

The radical women behind the original “dump him” discourse.

Thirty years after the police beating of Rodney King, it's clear that shock and anger don't translate into meaningful reform.

The rise of the first Black woman on the Louisiana Supreme Court was characterized by one battle after another with the Deep South’s white power structure.

Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?

It’s difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent historical account of what it actually looks like.

W.E.B. DuBois, 100 years ago.

It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.

Claudette Colvin is a Civil Rights hero you've probably never heard of. In 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, months before Rosa Parks.

A new book persuasively places Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at the center of each other’s most dramatic transformations.

The new crime thriller about a magnetic leader of the Black Panther Party is a sharp criticism of the FBI’s surveillance of social movements past and present.

The gap in education equality is holding America back.

In 1968, history found us at a small women’s college, forging our Black identity and empowering our defiance.

Bay’s new book explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.

King understood the perils of submerged racism.

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.

The 1958 civil rights protest by Black teens led to the end of segregation at lunch counters all over the state and inspired a wave of sit-ins across the country.

The acclaimed reformer stoked the white, middle-class feminist movement and brought critical understanding to a “problem that had no name”

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion.

Law enforcement and the urban-rural divide.

In the 1970s, gay patrol units in San Francisco and New York City rallied around their whiteness to produce a sense of safety.

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

Lessons about organizing from the SNCC co-founder.

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Let the Lord Sort Them,’ Maurice Chammah explains where a 1970s legal team fighting the death penalty went wrong.

When I spoke with my boyhood hero 25 years after his famous home run, I learned why he’d kept going through the death threats and the hate.

During the 1860 presidential election, political parties dueled over the intent of the framers.

By making health care broadly available, the government helps ensure our freedom.

A new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

An experiment in oral history of the present.