States Rights

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of Black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South.

The religious right taught America to misread the Bible. Christians have misused Scripture to consolidate power, stoke fears, and defend against enemies. But people who have been hurt by the attacks of Christian nationalism can help us rediscover God's vision for faith in public life. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explores how religious culture wars have misrepresented Christianity at the expense of the poor, and how listening to marginalized communities can help us hear God's call to love and justice in the world.

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet, school integration was not the only - or even always the dominant - civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift and community empowerment.

During the civil rights movement, the state of Mississippi created an elaborate spy network. Its mission was to preserve segregation by any means necessary—including voter interference, sponsorship of white supremacy groups, and even murder.

Read the law; discover the benefits that are endowed to the indigenous Americans. Many sovereign rights belong to American Indians; and many tribal nations are unaware of the rights and power that they have been imbued with by the United States of America and United Nations. Author Rudy James reveals the secrets that not only benefit the tribal nations but could positively impact millions of other Americans.

The New York Times bestselling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to offer a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today—an urgent yet hopeful story for our current political climate

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did.

Thomas Sowell takes a tough, factual look at whether the civil rights movement has lived up to its hopes or its rhetoric. In the decades since the historic Supreme Court decision on desegregation, who has gained and who has lost? Which of the assumptions behind the civil rights revolution have stood the test of time, and which have proven to be mistaken or even catastrophic to those who were supposed to be helped?

The Civil Rights Movement in America is a broad term for the movement in the mid-20th century among and for the African American community in pursuit of equal protection and rights under the law. In reality, it began much earlier than the 1950s and continues until this day. What is more, it was about so much more than the extension of universal rights; the Civil Rights Movement is about the story of the long struggle to overcome the legacies of slavery and racism. It is a story of triumph over adversity and perseverance in the face of great hardship.

In his 60-plus years as a trial lawyer, Gerry Spence has never represented a person accused of a crime in which the police hadn't themselves violated the law. Whether by covering up their own corrupt dealings, by the falsification or manufacture of evidence, or by the outright murder of innocent civilians, those individuals charged with upholding the law break it every day - in ways more scandalous than the courts have dared admit.

As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more 'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude sections of their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan. William I. Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The global police state uses a variety of methods of control, including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of environmental activists.

Michael Posner (executive director of Human Rights First) wisely said, "If we are going to transform the Middle East, we have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace - otherwise it is not going to work." We must respond to acts of terrorism, but before we respond hastily with hostility to further perpetuate an endless cycle of violence, we must be willing to ask ourselves the sources of our enemies’ hatred—the root of the problem—which we must honestly deal with in order to respond correctly to transform the world in which we live to be a safer more tolerant ...

The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.

From Minneapolis to Louisville, to Portland, Kenosha, and Washington, DC, America’s reckoning with its unmet promises on race and class is at a boiling point not seen since the 1960s. While conversations around pathways to progress take place on social media and cable TV, history tells us that meaningful change only comes with radical legislation and boots-on-the-ground activism. Here, Mallory shares her unique personal experience building coalitions, speaking truth to power, and winning over hearts and minds in the struggle for shared prosperity and safety.

American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude.

“Now here I was, post-Snowden, relying on a system President Obama, Congress, and IC leaders had touted as successful and functional. But was it truly working? My case exposed it as nothing more than a sham. Would the CIA and the IC attempt to rectify the situation? Did they genuinely desire to fix the broken system? Or would they persist in employing their illegal bullying tactics to silence whistleblowers? I was determined to take action, offering them an opportunity to correct their behavior.” —From The Broken Whistle The Broken Whistle is a searing exposé that unveils a chilling ...

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions - those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves in the fight against a system that is still rigged.

In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the 20th century, the "radical right", and discusses its adherents' different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism. Questioning democracy's most basic norms and practices, these critics rejected ideas about human equality, minority rights, religious toleration, and cultural pluralism not out of implicit biases, but out of explicit principle.

Acclaimed historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a kaleidoscopic narrative history of 1963, the pivotal moment in America’s long civil rights movement—the year of the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy.