Martin Luther King Jr.

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.

As Presidents' Day approaches, historians look back at the most notable recent uses and misuses of "the Great Emancipator's" words.

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.

A stroll through the archives of Editor & Publisher shows an industry with moments of glory and shame — and evidence that not all of today's problems are new.

In 1969, an activist set out to build an African-American metropolis from scratch. What would have happened if Soul City had succeeded?

Lessons about organizing from the SNCC co-founder.

His blazing rendition at Woodstock still echoes throughout the years, reminding us of what is worth fighting for in the American experiment.

By making health care broadly available, the government helps ensure our freedom.

A new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

In 1964, the John Birch Society was the most active far-right group in the United States—unless you count the Republican Party.

This op-ed celebrates the life and legacy of economist, attorney, and civil rights advocate Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander.

Guns have always loomed large in Black people's lives — going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery, explains reporter Alain Stephens from The Trace.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

How the presumption of bystanders’ responsibility crystallized into the predominant opinion.

The hope for historical vindication is loud now but not new.

In our current politics we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

On a documentary in which stars from Bob Dylan to Nile Rodgers discuss how music played a vital role in the unknown politician’s rise to power.

Every statue defends an idea about history, but what if those ideas are wrong?

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

After two decades in a filing cabinet and three next to a parking lot in Baltimore, the author returns to New York.