Showing titles in Civil Rights & Liberties

Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion?

Decades ago, Malcolm X eloquently stated that communities have the legitimate right to defend themselves “by any means necessary” with any tool or tactic, including guns. This wide-ranging anthology uncovers the hidden histories and ideas of community armed self-defense, exploring how it has been used by marginalized and oppressed communities as well as anarchists and radicals within significant social movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

After 72 arduous years, the fate of the suffrage movement and its masterwork, the 19th amendment, rested not only on one state, Tennessee, but on the shoulders of a single man: 24-year-old legislator Harry Burn. Burn had previously voted with the anti-suffrage forces. If he did so again, the vote would be tied and the amendment would fall one state short of the 36 necessary for ratification. At the last minute, though, Harry Burn’s mother convinced him to vote in favor of the suffragist, and American history was forever changed.

Curtis J. Austin chronicles how violence brought about the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, dominated its policies, and finally destroyed the party as one member after another - Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Alex Rackley - left the party, was killed, or was imprisoned.

America Is Better Than This tells the inside story of how one senator, with no background as an immigration activist, became a leading advocate for reform of the brutal policies that have created a humanitarian crisis on the southern US border. It represents the heartfelt and candid voice of a concerned American who believes his country stands for something far bigger and better.

Religious liberty is under attack in America. Your freedom to believe may not last much longer. To all those who say they don't care about the culture war, Erick Erickson has only one response: "The Left will not let you stay on the sidelines. You will be made to care." Now the former editor in chief of RedState.com joins with Christian author Bill Blankschaen to expose the war in America on Christians and all people of faith who refuse to bow to the worst kind of religion - secularism - one intent on systematically imposing its agenda and frightening doubters into silence.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs.

Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States - one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans.

On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, "Gays protest CBS prejudice!" He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community.

From June 12, 2020, until the passage of the state law making the occupation a felony two months later, peaceful protesters set up camp at Nashville's Legislative Plaza and renamed it for Ida B. Wells. Central to the occupation was Justin Jones, a student of Fisk University and Vanderbilt Divinity School whose place at the forefront of the protests brought him and the occupation to the attention of the Tennessee state troopers, state and US senators, and Governor Bill Lee.

For nearly 40 years, Washington and much of the American public have held up disclosure and campaign finance laws as ideals and the path to cleaner and freer elections. This book will show, through firsthand accounts, how both have been hijacked by the Left as weapons against free speech and free association, becoming the most powerful tools of those intent on silencing their political opposition.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

"Bloody Sunday" - March 7, 1965 - was a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. The national outrage generated by scenes of Alabama state troopers attacking peaceful demonstrators fueled the drive toward the passage of the Voting Rights Acts later that year. But why were hundreds of activists marching from Selma to Montgomery that afternoon?

After the 2011 Tucson shooting that nearly took her life, basic questions consumed Gabby Giffords and her family: Would Gabby survive the bullet through her brain? Would she walk again? Speak? Her hard-won recovery, though far from complete, has now allowed her and Mark to ask larger questions that confront us as a nation: How can we address our nation’s epidemic of gun violence? How can we protect gun rights for law abiding citizens, while keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill?

Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point. Interweaving her own experience, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity.

A provocative examination of race, gun laws, and violence that exposes how the state of Florida bungled the Trayvon Martin case through new interviews and revelations about the trial. Suspicion Nation expertly captures the state of a country conflicted not only about the Trayvon Martin injustice but divided over issues of race, violence, and gun legislation.

Well-known resistance author Claire Wolfe (The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook and the Hardyville Tales) has teamed up with counterintelligence analyst and liberty activist Kit Perez to pen a beginning "how-to" for those who are ready to do more than complain on social media. You'll learn about how to get properly set up, ideas for action ranging from easy to dangerous (but never violent or harmful), and how to find and collaborate with like-minded folks in a way that will help keep you safe and out of jail while still getting stuff done.

Helen Lewis argues that feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. Too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines. It’s time to reclaim the history of feminism as a history of difficult women.

The glorification of citizenship is a given in today's world, part of a civic narrative that invokes liberation, dignity, and nationhood. In reality, explains Dimitry Kochenov, citizenship is a story of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination, flattering to citizens and demeaning for noncitizens. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kochenov explains the state of citizenship in the modern world.

In American Hate: Survivors Speak Out, Arjun Singh Sethi, a community activist and civil rights lawyer, chronicles the stories of individuals affected by hate. In a series of powerful, unfiltered testimonials, survivors tell their stories in their own words and describe how the bigoted rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration have intensified bullying, discrimination, and even violence toward them and their communities.