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The New Racism

A glimpse inside the Alabama State House suggests that the civil rights movement may have reached its end.

Straight Razors and Social Justice: The Empowering Evolution of Black Barbershops

Black barbershops are a symbol of community, and they provide a window into our nation's complicated racial dynamics.
LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

How LBJ Saved the Civil Rights Act

Fifty years later, new accounts of its fraught passage reveal the era's real hero—and it isn’t the Supreme Court.

Modern Segregation

Policies of de jure racial segregation and a history of state-sponsored violence continue to have an impact on African Americans.
Soldiers around tanks on the street.

Want to Understand the 1992 LA Riots? Start with the 1984 LA Olympics

The causes were many, but police brutality and economic insecurity were supercharged in Los Angeles after the 1984 Olympics. 

That World Is Gone: Race and Displacement in a Southern Town

The story of Vinegar Hill, a historically African American neighborhood in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Restarting the Civil Rights Movement

Is there still a civil rights movement?
Ticket for Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral service at Morehouse College, April 9, 1968.

The Shot That Echoes Still

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.
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.
An apartment building on fire.

Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?

To some, the fires lit in New York in the late seventies signaled rampant crime; to others, rebellion. But maybe they were signs of something else entirely.
A drawing of the Division Street uprising, depicting a barricade and Puerto Rican flags.

How Chicago's Division Street Rebellion Brought Latinos Together

In 1966, police shot a young Puerto Rican man. What followed created a blueprint for a new kind of solidarity.
Buildings drawing and black and white negative, on the cover of "Yale and Slavery."

What Universities Owe

David Blight's report "Yale and Slavery" considers institutional accountability in the context of a world marked by systemic violence and inequality.
Fiorello La Guardia

Lessons from La Guardia

Can Zohran Mamdani reshape New York—and national—politics like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once did?
Grover Cleveland

The Gilded Age Roots of American Austerity

Both Trump and Cleveland employed the rhetoric of worthiness and efficiency, anti-fraud and anti-corruption, as justifications for their austerity measures.
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.

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