Martin Luther King Jr.

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.

A lethal incident of police brutality in Miami in 1979 offers just one of countless examples of the reality generations of African Americans have faced.

At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.

How today's protests are struggling to reclaim the vision of the great abolitionist leader.

The media must make the long years of organizing as visible as the eruptions and uprisings.

A new collection of essays demonstrates how the civil rights icon’s thinking evolved amid the upheavals of the 20th century.

Clinton disparaged Carmichael at John Lewis’s funeral. But Black radicalism speaks more to the present moment than Clinton’s centrist politics.