Civil Liberties

During World War II, Heinz Drossel saved Soviet prisoners of war and several Jews, including Marianne Hirschfeld. Again and again, he wasn't afraid to risk his own life when others' safety was at risk. Nearly all of Hirschfeld's family members were murdered by Nazis; she survived in hiding - and met Heinz again by coincidence after the war was over. They married in 1946. At that time, starting over was difficult. In the judicial service, Drossel witnessed Nazis continuing with their careers....

Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner - now wife - Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights.

No two public figures were more crucial in the drama of race relations in this era than Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Fifty years after they were both murdered, noted journalist David Margolick explores the untold story of the complex and ever-evolving relationship between these two American icons. Assassinated only 62 days apart in 1968, King and Kennedy changed the United States forever, and their deaths profoundly altered the country’s trajectory.

In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O'Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O'Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police

For over 50 years, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., a Baptist minister, activist, and organizer, has worked for civil rights, peace, and the promise of true democracy. From his years in the Civil Rights movement, his work as founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and as an international ambassador for human rights, he has left an indelible impression on the history of our time. These speeches and sermons include the famous speeches he delivered at the Democratic Party conventions of 1984 and 1988 following his historic campaigns for the presidential nomination.

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, a World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia - one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day.

The Border Patrol has grown exponentially, ICE detention centers have cropped up across the country, and the southern border is more militarized than ever before, but we are no safer. Instead, families are being ripped apart, undocumented people are living in fear, and thousands of migrants have died in detention or crossing the border. Taking listeners to the border patrol outposts, unmarked graves, detention centers, and halls of power, Sand and Blood is a frightening, essential story we ignore at our peril.

Journalist Jo Napolitano delves into the landmark case in which the School District of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was sued for refusing to admit older, non-English speaking refugees and sending them to a high-discipline alternative school. In a legal battle that mirrors that of the Little Rock Nine and Brown v. Board of Education, 6 brave refugee students fought alongside the ACLU and Education Law Center to demand equal access.

Even if you're not an activist (yet), at a time when the news is written for clicks and elections are fought with three-word slogans, it's crucial to preserve some record of events that isn't 'fake news' or political spin. In part, this book is my attempt to counter the re-writing of how Australia achieved one of the most significant social changes in a generation. Sally Rugg is one of Australia's most influential campaigners for social change. How Powerful We Are is her manifesto for championing what you believe is right.

For Henry David Thoreau, there was no separation between public politics and personal principle. "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is his famous account of the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery and waged war. His impassioned stand for justice later inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and many other peaceful revolutionaries. This volume includes Thoreau's other important political writings: "A Plea for Captain John Brown", "Life Without Principle", and the poem "Independence".

Injustice. Black America. Media. Corruption at the highest levels of government. Only one dollar. This is the case you've never heard of--until now. In City of Los Angeles v. Preferred Communications, the US District Court, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the US Supreme Court agreed that the city had violated the civil rights of half a million people for 10 years and had refused to comply with a nine-zero decision by the Supreme Court of the United States.

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".

To understand the most contentious issues around religious liberty, this volume provides influential philosophical ideas from the US’ founding to the present day and key US Supreme Court judgements to ask how the two twin pillars of religious freedom - free exercise and the limit on religious establishment - unfold in daily life.

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 the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: "selling out", or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and shows how its usage bedevils Blacks and Whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.

LaFayette was one of the primary organizers of the 1965 Selma voting rights movement and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and he relates his experiences of these historic initiatives in close detail. Today, as the constitutionality of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act is still questioned, citizens, students, and scholars alike will want to look to this audiobook as a guide. Important, compelling, and powerful, In Peace and Freedom presents a necessary perspective on the civil rights movement in the 1960s from one of its greatest leaders.

How have our rights to privacy and justice been undermined? What exactly have we lost? Pulitzer Prize-winner David K. Shipler searches for the answers to these questions by examining the historical expansion and contraction of our fundamental rights and, most pointedly, the real-life stories of individual men and women who have suffered.

Timothy Sandefur's insightful book provides a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law and argues a vital truth: our Constitution was written not to empower democracy, but to secure liberty. Yet the overemphasis on democracy by today's legal community - rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence - has helped expand the scope of government power at the expense of individual rights.

One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today.

On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, was bombed, killing four young girls. Who were the perpetrators? Due to reluctant witnesses and racial prejudice, the FBI closed the case without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bending Toward Justice is a detailed account of this key moment in our national struggle for equality and the long road to prosecuting those responsible for the tragedy, related by an author who played a major role in the investigation.