Freedom Liberty

Millicent E. Brown's family home at 270 Ashley Avenue in Charleston, South Carolina, was a center of civil rights activity. There Brown gained intimate knowledge of the struggle for racial justice, and those experiences set her on a life course dedicated to the civil rights struggle. Best known as the named plaintiff in the federal court case that, in 1963, forced the initial desegregation of public schools in South Carolina, her experiences as an activist range across years and well beyond her native state. Another Sojourner Looking for Truth is Brown's insightful reflection.

For a century, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought to keep Americans in touch with the founding values of the Constitution. As its centennial approached, the organization invited Ellis Cose to become its first ever writer-in residence, serving as an "embedded journalist" with complete editorial independence. The result is Cose's groundbreaking Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU and Its 100-Year Battle for Our Rights, the most authoritative account ever of America's premier defender of civil liberties.

This biography of a seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and more.

Hubert Humphrey was one of the great liberal leaders of postwar American politics, yet because he never made it to the Oval Office, he has been largely overlooked by biographers. Historian Arnold A. Offner has explored vast troves of archival records to recapture Humphrey's life, giving us previously unknown details of the vice president's fractious relationship with Lyndon Johnson, showing how Johnson colluded with Richard Nixon to deny Humphrey the presidency, and describing the most neglected aspect of Humphrey's career.

Why have White supremacists and Black activists been so focused on Black mobility? From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought for over a century to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of "separate but equal" involved trains and buses, Mia Bay went back to the sources with some basic questions: How did travel segregation begin?

Cincuenta años tuvieron que pasar para conocer por qué ocurrió la masacre del 2 de octubre. Hoy podemos saber con certeza histórica por qué, cómo y quiénes orquestaron la oscura noche de Tlatelolco.

Die Meinungsfreiheit ist für eine freiheitliche Demokratie konstituierend. In Deutschland ist sie deshalb verfassungsrechtlich besonders geschützt. Trotzdem haben mehr als zwei Drittel der Deutschen das Gefühl, sie könnten ihre Meinung nicht frei äußern. Wie kommt das? Wolfgang Kubicki widmet sich der Frage, welche Fehler in Politik, Medien und Gesellschaft gemacht wurden, die zu diesem Vertrauensverlust führten und zeigt, wie wir zu einer neuen Diskurskultur finden.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that little Linda Brown couldn't be excluded from a public school because of her race. In that landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the court famously declared that public education must be available to all on equal terms. But 66 years later, many of the best public schools remain closed to all but the most privileged families. Empowered by little-known state laws, school districts draw attendance zones around their best schools, indicating who is, and who isn't, allowed to enroll.

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.

The people most likely to face discrimination today are those who do not or cannot conform to the whims of society. They are the freaks, geeks, weirdos, and oddballs among us. They do and wear strange things, have strange opinions, and need strange accommodations. Outsiders is filled with stories that demand attention, stories of people whose search for identity has cast them to the margins. Their stories reveal that we have entered a new phase of civil rights and need to refresh our vision.

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.

Can free speech coexist with an inclusive campus environment? Hardly a week goes by without another controversy over free speech on college campuses. On one side, there are increased demands to censor hateful, disrespectful, and bullying expression and to ensure an inclusive and nondiscriminatory learning environment. On the other side are traditional free speech advocates who charge that recent demands for censorship coddle students and threaten free inquiry.

Howard Fast's firsthand account of the infamous 1949 Peekskill riots, including historical documents, photos, and newspaper reports. In 1949, author Howard Fast found himself in the middle of a violent and terrifying anticommunist riot in Peekskill, New York. Fast was the master of ceremonies at a civil rights benefit concert featuring Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and others. But local newspapers stoked anticommunist anger, and the event was besieged by a mob armed with rocks, clubs, fence posts, and knives.

In May 2010, an intelligence analyst in the US Army's 10th Mountain Division was arrested on suspicion of leaking nearly half a million classified government documents, including the infamous "Collateral Murder" gunsight video and 260,000 State Department cables. After nine months in solitary confinement, the suspect now awaits court-martial in Fort Leavenworth. He is 24, comes from Crescent, Oklahoma, and his name is Bradley Manning.

G. Gordon Liddy's wit, wisdom, and no-holds-barred approach brought legions of devoted listeners to his daily radio program, and made his autobiography, Will, a monumental best seller. Now he brings the same inimitable style to When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. Listeners will be alternately infuriated and amused - but always enthralled - as "The G-Man" reveals what has been wrought by liberal politicians, government bureaucrats, "enviro-radicals", "fulminating feminists", and many others.

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.

When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture—responsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care—emergent from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave.

Phillips charts the way forward for progressives and people of color after four years of Trump, arguing that Democrats must recognize the nature of the fight we're in, which is a contest between democracy and white supremacy left unresolved after the Civil War. We will not overcome, Phillips writes, until we govern as though we are under attack—until we finally recognize that the time has come to finish the conquest of the Confederacy and all that it represents.

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.