Civil Liberties

This audio adaptation focuses primarily on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the key moments that defined his rise to the forefront of the civil rights movement. From Rosa Parks' monumental arrest in Montgomery to King's imprisonment in Birmingham and his triumphant march on Washington, Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness.

Now is an extraordinary time. Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning.

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.

In graduate school, Rachel Martin was sent to a small town in the foothills of the Appalachians, where locals wanted to build a museum to commemorate the events of September 1956, when Clinton High School became the first school in the former Confederacy to attempt court mandated desegregation.

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

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.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights.

If 1968 marked a turning point in a pivotal decade, 1964—or rather, the long 1964, from JFK’s assassination in November 1963 to mid-1965—was the time when the sixties truly arrived. It was then that the United States began a radical shift toward a much more inclusive definition of “American,” with a greater degree of equality and a government actively involved in social and economic improvement.

Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression.

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.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a bright new age for children appeared on the horizon, with progress on ending child labor, providing public education, combating indigence, promoting wellness, and creating a juvenile justice system. But a hundred years on, the promised light has not arrived. Today, more than eleven million American children live in poverty and more than four million lack health insurance.

What really is cancel culture? Blacklisting celebrities? Censorship? Until now, this has been the general consensus in the media. But it’s time to raise the bar on our definition— to think of cancel culture less as scandal or suppression, and more as an essential means of democratic expression and accountability. The Case for Cancel Culture does just that. This cultural critique from award-winning journalist Ernest Owens offers a fresh progressive lens in favor of cancel culture as a tool for activism and change.

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.

We’ve all heard this phrase countless times, echoing in courtroom dramas and blockbuster films. It's a solemn promise, a cornerstone of justice. Yet, for those who have faced the harsh realities of divorce, financial disputes, child custody battles, and other court proceedings, the notion of truth in the legal system often seems like a cruel joke. The author grew up believing that the law was fair, that justice was a clear line between right and wrong, upheld by judges, courts, and the police. His first family court hearing shattered that illusion.

Many of us think, I don’t support the police. But what should take their place? Or: Prisons don’t keep us safe. But what new systems could? A lot of books about racial justice ask us how we got here, but Reimagining the Revolution is different: award-winning journalist and activist Paula Lehman-Ewing presents an inside-access look at the activists redefining where we go from here.

This work offers a critical and in-depth analysis of how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and social networks are transforming power dynamics in contemporary society. By exploring the intersections between technology, digital governance, and social control, the book reveals the ethical and political implications of the use of these innovations.

The Battle for the Black Mind delves into the complex history of Black education in the United States from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954. Dr. Karida Brown explores the struggle to define and control the education of African Americans amid shifting societal attitudes and forms of systemic exclusion.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen - first black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

The top-secret world that the government created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has become so enormous, so unwieldy, and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or exactly how many agencies duplicate work being done elsewhere. Award-winning reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin here uncover the enormous size, shape, mission, and consequences of this invisible universe.

Prejudential is a concise, authoritative exploration of America’s relationship with race and Black Americans through the lens of the presidents who have been elected to represent all of its people.