civil rights

Three US presidents from the South’s borders—Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson—worked against Southern politicians to support civil and voting rights.

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

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

The attorney general is pushing an agenda that could erase many of the legal gains of modern America's defining movement.

The lesser-known beginning of the desegregation of public transportation.

Fifty years later, Bobby Kennedy’s passionate, inspiring, and tragic presidential campaign still fascinates.

In dismantling Obamacare and slashing Medicaid, Republicans would strike a blow against signature victories for racial equality in America.

Woodrow Wilson arrived at the White House determined to eliminate the gains African-Americans made during Reconstruction.

Before the end of Black History Month, we should remember some of the leaders who shaped the movement in the years before Roe v. Wade.

How black plaintiffs in the Jim Crow South sought justice.

Confronting segregation as Black urbanites' fight for access and equality in northern cinemas.

How fascists and authoritarians have used antisemitic conspiracy theories to harm Jewish communities and undermine democracy.

Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.

In 1901, a series of articles took a dim view of the era, and of the idea that all Americans ought to participate in the democratic process.

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

In 1866, the famous abolitionist laid out his vision for radically reshaping America in the pages of "The Atlantic."

Kevin Phillips help set the Republican Party on the path that led it to Trump.

On upending the accepted narrative of the movement.

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.