Bayard Rustin

The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him.

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.

Union activists linked the struggle for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, to the broader struggle against capitalist domination.

The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created, and how we can dismantle it.

Five years since its inception, a look at what the Black Lives Matter movement accomplished and the important work it left unfinished.

50 years after King's death, his image has been transformed and stripped of its radicalism.

Because both thinkers neglect political economy, they end up promoting a politics that is responsible for the nation's growing inequality.

City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.

The forgotten crusade of Morris Milgram.

Why the policies of the Federal Reserve were a central focus for the civil rights movement.

Historian Judith Stein debunks liberal myths about racism, the New Deal, and why the Democrats moved right.

A documentary website that tells the story of how young activists united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement that transformed the nation.

The Popular Front and American culture.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the galvanizing voice of the civil rights struggle, an uncompromising, complicated figure who soared in the pulpit.