Showing titles in Civil Rights & Liberties

Larry Krasner spent thirty years learning about America’s carceral system as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia, working to get some kind of justice for his clients in a broken system, before deciding that the way to truly transform the system was to get inside of it. So he launched an unlikely campaign to become the district attorney of Philadelphia, a city known for its long line of notorious “tough on crime” DAs who had turned Philly into a city with one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country.

In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress, had no idea she was changing history when, fed up and tired, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in segregated Alabama. Today, she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight. Who was she, before and after her historic act, and how did that act sound the death knell for Jim Crow?

Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain is the remarkable story of a couple who came together during the Civil Rights Movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers’ rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity—with the strength of their love and commitment—to bring about meaningful change.

On 6 February 1918, after campaigning for over 50 years, British women were finally granted the vote. In November 1919, the first woman MP, Lady Nancy Astor, was elected to the House of Commons. History was made. A hundred years on, it is time to reflect on the daring and painful struggle women undertook to break into a political system that excluded them.

In the early 20th century over 200 of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names - Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney, and the like - carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.

Years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one Black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

Too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to vote. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress's ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all. Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

The fascinating and very moving story of the lovers, lawyers, judges, and activists behind the groundbreaking Supreme Court case that led to one of the most important national civil rights victories in decades - the legalization of same-sex marriage.

An industry that started in the 1990s by fact-checking chain emails and Bigfoot sightings has evolved over the past decade into the American political left’s strongest tool in justifying the censorship of their political opposition and shaping the national narrative in their favor.

Here Rebecca Nagle tells the story of the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in Eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the 19th century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing and life make clear why feminism as a liberation movement has flourished here as nowhere else in the world.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.

When Scott Dozier was sent to Nevada’s death row in 2007, convicted of a pair of grisly murders, he didn’t cry foul or embark upon a protracted innocence campaign. He sought instead to expedite his execution—to hasten his inevitable death. He decided he would rather face his end swiftly than die slowly in solitary confinement. In volunteering for execution, Dozier may have been unusual. But in the tortuous events that led his death date to be scheduled and rescheduled, planned and then stayed, his time on death row was anything but.

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In this audiobook, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight white supremacy. It's a must-listen for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.

We Shall Not Be Moved puts the Jackson Woolworth's sit-in into historical context. Part multifaceted biography, part well-researched history, this gripping narrative explores the hearts and minds of those participating in this harrowing sit-in experience. It was a demonstration without precedent in Mississippi - one that set the stage for much that would follow in the changing dynamics of the state's racial politics, particularly in its capital city.

Ever since the nation's most important secret meeting - the Constitutional Convention - presidents have struggled to balance open, accountable government with necessary secrecy in military affairs and negotiations. For the first 120 years, a culture of open government persisted, but new threats and technology have long since shattered the old bargains. Today, presidents neither protect vital information nor provide the open debate Americans expect.

When the states ratified the Bill of Rights in the 18th century, the Fourth Amendment seemed straightforward. It requires that government respect the right of citizens to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Of course, "papers and effects" are now digital and thus more vulnerable to government spying. But the biggest threat may be our own weakening resolve to preserve our privacy.

America's political leaders have considered suffrage not a natural right but a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Today, voter identification laws, political gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box. We cannot blame the founders alone for America's embattled vote. Best-selling author Allan Lichtman notes that subsequent generations have failed to establish suffrage as a universal right.