Martin Luther King Jr.

As a young woman, civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray discovered that the flag could be used as a symbol of defiance.

The Kerner report neglected that police were not simply careless with black lives; they deliberately sought to punish black lives.

The conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report portrayed race relations like no other report in history.

The baseball great warned of lasting repercussion for black voters during Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.

Malcolm X died fifty-one years ago today, just as he was moving toward revolutionary ideas that challenged oppression in all its forms.

Louis Farrakhan and the Black Lives Matter protests.

We are again caught between nationalists longing for an imagined past, and activists invoking ideals the nation has not attained.

President Obama espouses a facile faith in history bending toward perfection and morality-against evidence and reason.

Recovering black radicalism.

On the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

In 1968, impoverished Americans flocked to DC to live out MLK's final dream: economic equality for all.

It’s in vogue to call the new movement against police violence "leaderless." But as Ella Baker taught us, it's more correct to say that it has many leaders.

More than 150 years after Appomattox, Americans are still fighting over the great issues at the heart of the conflict.

“There has never been an honest movie about the civil rights movement,” says civil rights leader Julian Bond.

How a post-Civil War massacre impacted racial justice in America.

The stall-in threatened to interrupt a certain imaginary of progress, democracy, and freedom with the reality of racial injustice.

How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.

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

The Civil Rights movement ignored one very important, very difficult question. It’s time to answer it.

Nelson “Little D” Ross talks soul and significance with music historian Robert Gordon.