Mabel Ping-Hua Lee.

The 16-Year-Old Chinese Immigrant Who Helped Lead a 1912 US Suffrage March

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee fought for the rights of women on two sides of the world.
Equal Rights Amendment supporters cheer for the passage of the House ERA Resolution at the Capitol in Richmond, VA
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2021 Could Finally Be the Moment for the Equal Rights Amendment

The turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic could push the amendment across the finish line after a century of work.
Clipping of a newspaper article titled "Helen Keller and Socialism"

Problematic Icons

Political activists Greta Thunberg and Helen Keller have been just as misunderstood by their supporters as by their detractors.
A collage of Black and Asian people with an upside down American flag in the background

How Racism and White Supremacy Fueled a Black-Asian Divide in America

After a recent surge in anti-Asian attacks, the narrative quickly turned to hostilities between Black and Asian American communities.
photo of Otto Kerner with quote: "freedom for every citizen to live and work according to his capacities and not his color"

We Were Warned About a Divided America 50 Years Ago. We Ignored the Signs

As in the 1960s, the nation today stands at a turning point.
A 1951 meeting between ADL leadership and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

The Anti-Democratic Origins of the Jewish Establishment

The history of the ADL and AJC reveals that they were created to consolidate the power of wealthy men and stifle the grassroots left.
Activists holding a banner saying "STOP ASIAN HATE"
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Violence Against Asian Americans Is Part of a Troubling Pattern

Recognizing that is crucial to ending the violence and the hate driving it.
Illustration of a gavel by Vahram Muradyan

Why Do Americans Have So Few Rights?

How we came to rely on the courts, instead of the democratic process, for justice.
Members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

The Secret Feminist History of the Temperance Movement

The radical women behind the original “dump him” discourse.
Rodney King at a press conference surrounded by reporters
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Video of the Police Assault of Rodney King Shocked Us. But What Did It Change?

Thirty years after the police beating of Rodney King, it's clear that shock and anger don't translate into meaningful reform.
Photo of former African American woman, Bernette Johnson, wearing judicial robes

The Dissenter

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.
A view looking up at the Statue of Liberty

Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do

Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?
Protester standing with sign that says "End the Violence Against Asians"

The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence

It’s difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent historical account of what it actually looks like.
Veteran and militia during 1919 Chicago Race Riot

Rereading 'Darkwater'

W.E.B. DuBois, 100 years ago.
Headshot of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass and the American Project

It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
Yearbook photo of a an African American girl, in front of newspaper headlines and pictures of her as an adult

Meet Claudette Colvin, the 15-Year-Old Who Came Before Rosa Parks

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.
Martin Luther King Jr.

What Dignity Demands

A new book persuasively places Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at the center of each other’s most dramatic transformations.
A still from "Judas and the Black Messiah."

The Unsettling Message of ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

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.
Black Students Matter demonstrators march through Washington, D.C., June 19, 2020
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My Great-Grandmother Ida B. Wells Left A Legacy Of Activism In Education. We Need That Now.

The gap in education equality is holding America back.
A row of black and white pencils.

Anna Deavere Smith on Forging Black Identity in 1968

In 1968, history found us at a small women’s college, forging our Black identity and empowering our defiance.
Segregated waiting room at Union Station railroad depot in Jacksonville, Florida.

Historian Mia Bay on ‘Traveling Black’

Bay’s new book explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.
A car window with a sign in it that reads "let freedom ring" with an illustration of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Challenge to Liberal Allies — and Why It Resonates Today

King understood the perils of submerged racism.
Artistic collage of black leaders surrounded by images associated with prohibition.

The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.
A newspaper clipping from the Aug. 7, 1958, issue of the Enlightener, a Black newspaper in Wichita shows the Dockum Drug Store lunch counter sit-in, one of the earliest in the United States.

The Brave, Forgotten Kansas Lunch Counter Sit-in That Helped Change America

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.
Book cover of Feminine Mystique

The Powerful, Complicated Legacy of Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique'

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

Malcolm’s Ministry

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.
Deputy sheriff at county fair in Gonzales, Texas.

New Sheriff in Town

Law enforcement and the urban-rural divide.
Cover of Coast Magazine titled "Gays Fight Back! San Francisco's Lavender Vigilantes," featuring a man on the floor holding the leg of another man dressed in all black holding a gun.

Queer as Cop: Gay Patrol Units and the White Fantasy of Safety

In the 1970s, gay patrol units in San Francisco and New York City rallied around their whiteness to produce a sense of safety.
Black man holding a protest sign that says "you may be next!"; cover image of book The Condemnation of Blackness.

Lying with Numbers

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.
a pro-Trump protestor climbing scaffolding above a crowd

The Persistence of Hate In American Politics

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