Civil Liberties

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

In Communicate for Change, journalist and communication consultant Genelle Aldred offers suggestions and guidance to help us be better listeners, readers, watchers, and talkers. With insight drawn from years of experience, she breaks down the barriers to effective conversation so we can communicate in a more nuanced, thoughtful way and understand our part in bringing about a more just society. Thought-provoking and stimulating, it lays out how we can take that next step from learning and talking about anti-racism and unconscious bias to putting it into practice.

In Black Skinhead, Brandi Collins-Dexter explores the fragile alliance between Black voters and the Democratic party. Through sharp, timely essays that span the political, cultural, and personal, Collins-Dexter reveals decades of simmering disaffection in Black America, told as much through voter statistics as through music, film, sports, and the baffling mind of Kanye West. It is also a funny, deeply personal, and introspective look at Black culture and identity, revealing a Black America that has become disillusioned with the failed promises of its country.

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.

The war in Afghanistan has consumed vast amounts of blood and treasure, causing the Western powers to seek an exit without achieving victory. Seemingly never-ending, the conflict has become synonymous with a number of issues-global jihad, rampant tribalism, and the narcotics trade - but even though they are cited as the causes of the conflict, they are in fact symptoms.

In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anti-capitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span - a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and Whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X...each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of trust in the clock.

In gripping, novelistic detail, Saying It Loud tells the story of how the Black Power phenomenon began to challenge the traditional civil rights movement in the turbulent year of 1966. Saying It Loud takes you inside the dramatic events in this seminal year, from Stokely Carmichael’s middle-of-the-night ouster of moderate icon John Lewis as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to Carmichael’s impassioned cry of “Black Power!” during a protest march in rural Mississippi.

Tananarive Due, best-selling author and American Book Award winner, and her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, guide listeners through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Told in alternating chapters, their story is a triumphant memoir of their experiences with everyday people fighting for equality as members of grassroots organizations in the South. Filled with drama, heartache and rousing successes, Freedom in the Family will inspire and enlighten with its riveting account of one of America’s most progressive times.

In the summer of 1964, with the civil rights movement stalled, seven hundred college students descended on Mississippi to register black voters, teach in Freedom Schools, and live in sharecroppers' shacks. But by the time their first night in the state had ended, three volunteers were dead, black churches had burned, and America had a new definition of freedom.

A provocative history that reveals how guns - not abortion, race, or religion - are at the heart of America's cultural divide. Gunfight promises to be a seminal work in its examination of America's four-centuries-long political battle over gun control and the right to bear arms. Adam Winkler uses the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's capital, as a springboard for a groundbreaking historical narrative.

On May 30, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, amid the protests that rocked our nation after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, thirty-eight-year-old white bar owner and Marine veteran Jake Gardner fatally shot James Scurlock, a twenty-two-year-old Black protestor and young father. What followed were two investigations of Scurlock’s death, one conducted by the white county attorney Don Kleine, who concluded that Gardner had legally acted in self-defense and released him without a trial, and a second grand jury inquiry conducted by Black special prosecutor Fred Franklin that indicted Gardner.

It’s no secret that our country has a serious problem when it comes to wealth inequality–and systemic racism and patriarchy have only exacerbated the advantages of wealthy white men. Over the past three decades, America’s richest white men have only become richer, while those suffering in poverty have only gotten poorer. The divide may seem too great to bridge, but Rich White Men exposes the hidden and insidious ways that white male elites inherit, increase, and preserve their status—and, in this book, we get clear on how to uproot their monopoly on power.

El autor ofrece cuarenta breves historias de hombres y mujeres disidentes, que se separan de lo políticamente correcto, a los que ha podido entrevistar en Helsinki, Laponia, Estocolmo, Malmö, Upsala y otras ciudades de Suecia, Dinamarca y Noruega; todos ellos alternativos, de edades, profesiones y ambientes culturales bien distintos: historiadores, médicos, filósofos y sacerdotes, músicos o cantantes de rap, que recorren caminos lejanos a los propuestos por las ideologías dominantes.

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

Il 2 giugno 2018, festa della Repubblica, in una fornace abbandonata nelle campagne calabresi, un giovane africano viene ucciso con una fucilata alla testa. Si chiamava Soumaila Sacko, aveva 29 anni, veniva dal Mali. Con due amici stava raccogliendo lamiere per tirar su una baracca nel ghetto dei braccianti neri della piana di Gioia Tauro. Proprio quel giorno, mentre il giovane viene colpito a morte, Matteo Salvini, appena nominato ministro dell'Interno, scandisce in un comizio a Vicenza il suo slogan contro gli immigrati: "La pacchia è finita".

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era-labor, feminism, free speech, peace - is unquestioned.

The police now have unparalleled power at their fingertips: surveillance technology. Seamless, persistent, even permanent surveillance is available - sometimes already deployed, sometimes waiting for the right excuse. Automatic license-plate readers allow police to amass a granular record of where people go, when, and for how long. Drones give police eyes - and possibly weapons - in the skies.

In Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement, author Raymond Summerville explores how proverbs and proverbial language played a significant role in the long civil rights era. Proverbs have been used throughout history to share and disseminate brief, powerful statements of truth and philosophical insight.