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Martin Luther King, Jr. being arrested in Montgomery, 1958.

Martin Luther King Was a Law Breaker

On the second anniversary of MLK's assassination, political prisoner Martin Sostre wrote a tribute emphasizing his radical disobedience.
Man interviewing a group of people on the street.
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James Baldwin Comments on the Kerner Commission

The Kerner Commission was credited with exposing systemic racism that inspired resistance in Black communities. James Baldwin argued that it stated the obvious.
Black and white photograph of James Baldwin

A Report from Occupied Territory

These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom.
Kwame Ture at at a 1966 Mississippi Press Conference. Public Domain.
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Stokely Carmichael Interview

A field secretary of SNCC discusses the importance of maintaining political power inside communities at the county level.
Opponents of school desegregation in Montgomery, Alabama.

How Much Had Schools Really Been Desegregated by 1964?

Ten years after 'Brown v. Board of Education', Martin Luther King Jr. condemned how little had changed in the nation's classrooms.
James Baldwin

‘I Can’t Accept Western Values Because They Don’t Accept Me’

Revolution, the civil rights movement, and African-American identity.
Photos of William F. Buckley and James Baldwin.

When William F. Buckley Jr. Met James Baldwin

In 1965, the two intellectual giants squared off in a debate at Cambridge. It didn’t go quite as Buckley hoped.
Student Carl Griffin shows Senators Walter Mondale and Birch Bayh the bullet holes left by the police shooting at Jackson State.

DOJ Shakeup May Put Civil Rights Probe of 1970 Jackson State, Mississippi, Killings At Risk

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Act made way for investigations of racially motivated killings. The federal agency enforcing it is in disarray.
A National Police Week ceremony.

The Jim Crow Origins of National Police Week

Police brutality and corruption are painful realities. So are officers who die performing their duty. But the memorial in Washington fails to distinguish them.
Three Black men having a conversation.

Recovering the Forgotten Past of Black Legal Lives

Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history.
Book Cover of "An Ordinary White."

Basic Stuff About Reality

On David Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.”
A young boy peers out from a hole in a fence as his friends play basketball in a court where police officers are gathering for a patrol.

How White-Collar Criminals Plundered a Brooklyn Neighborhood

How East New York was ransacked by the real estate industry and abandoned by the city in the process.
A crew of inmate firefighters begins to work on containment during the Hughes Fire in California in 2025.
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The Troubling Slavery-Era Origins of Inmate Firefighting

The history of enslaved firefighters offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on involuntary labor to fight blazes.
A group of three abolitonists standing in front of a man holding a bag of money and brandishing a chair as a weapon, with the caption "The Disappointed Abolitionists."

The Tedious Heroism of David Ruggles

History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.
Peeling paint.

On “White Slavery” and the Roots of the Contemporary Sex Trafficking Panic

The ruling class used false claims about white women’s sexual virtue to regulate sexuality. But the “white slavery” panic was also about race, class and labor.
An older man standing outside a restaurant.

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night.
An artistic collage juxtiposing a transatlantic slave ship with a tenement in Harlem.

How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Continues to Impact Modern Life

A new Smithsonian book reckons with the enduring legacies of slavery and capitalism.
A drawing of two parents and a child running at a border, their silhouettes being sliced by a chainlink fence.

The Crime of Human Movement

Two recent books about our immigration system reveal its long history of exploiting vulnerable individuals for financial gain.
George Floyd protest

Reflections of the 60th Anniversary of Urban Uprisings in America

The media narrative used to discredit urban rebellions as violent betrayals of the civil rights movement has been attached to protests ever since.
Aerial view of big buildings, wide roads, open parking lots, and affordable housing from "Project One" in Newport, Virginia.

Urban Renewal in Virginia

Urban landscapes and communities all across the state of Virginia still bear the scars of urban renewal.
Carver Junior High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

How to Keep a School Open

Two Carvers and the fight for fair desegregation.

They Settled in Houston After Katrina — and Then Faced a Political Storm

The backlash against an effort to resettle 200,000 evacuees holds lessons for future disasters.
Fannie Lou Hamer speaks at the Democratic National Convention in 1964.

The Civil-Rights Era’s Great Unanswered Question

Is this America?
John Roberts, Lewis F. Powell Jr., and a statue of Lady Justice between them.

There’s a New Lewis Powell Memo, and It’s Wildly Racist

One young conservative lawyer would lead a determined fight to maintain Lewis Powell’s blindfolded race neutrality.
Sheet music depicting a fugitive slave.

Against the Slave Power: the Fugitive Liberalism of Frederick Douglass

Douglass elaborated a political theory attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws.
James Baldwin

The Brilliance in James Baldwin’s Letters

The famous author, who would have been 100 years old today, was best known for his novels and essays. But correspondence was where his light shone brightest.
Nora Kenworthy's book: "Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare".

Crowded Out: The Dark Side Of Crowdfunding Healthcare And Its Historical Precedents

The moral terrain of crowdfunding is fueled by two persistent social ideologies: the dual, and intertwined, myths of meritocracy and the “deserving poor.”
President Calvin Coolidge raising his hand behind a podium to be sworn into office.
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Behind America’s First Comprehensive Federal Immigration Law

Even as the primary targets of immigration restrictionism have shifted, the consequences for immigrants remain profoundly shaped by the system created in 1924.
Lithograph of George Washington on his land with people he enslaved.

What, to the American, Is Revolutionary?

The colonial rebellion we celebrate every July 4th doesn’t fit the definition.
Scale with hundred-dollar bills weighing down one side.

Markets and the Law

Neoliberalism isn’t just a set of economic precepts—it’s also an architecture of laws passed to reinforce those precepts. Those laws must be changed.

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