Civil Rights History

American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace.

The mother of Matthew Shepard shares her story about her son's death and the choice she made to become an international gay rights activist.

Looting - a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods - is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement. But Vicky Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying property are direct, pragmatic strategies of wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class - not to mention the brazen messages these methods send to the police and the state.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was not trying to start a movement. She was simply tired of the social injustice. Yet her simple act of courage started a chain of events that forever shaped the landscape of American race relations. Now, decades after her quiet defiance inspired the modern civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks' own words tell of her courageous life, her passion for freedom and equality, and her strong faith.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which was unavailable for more than 10 years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering.

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.

In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the US Military in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, DC. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny - like gay men and women for generations - was promptly dismissed from the military. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back.

On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.

The National Rifle Association is unique in American life. Few other civic organizations are as old or as large. None is as controversial. It is largely due to the NRA that the US gun policy differs so extremely - some would say so tragically - from that of every other developed nation. But, as Frank Smyth shows, the NRA has evolved from an organization concerned above all with marksmanship - and which supported most government efforts around gun control for a hundred years - to one that resists all attempts to restrict guns in any way.

The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice.

Hong Kong was an experiment in governance. Handed back to China in 1997 after 156 years of British rule, it was meant to be a carve-out between hostile systems: a bridge between communism and capitalism, authoritarianism and liberal democracy. “One country, two systems” kept its media free, its courts independent and its protests boisterous, designed also to convince Taiwan of a peaceful solution to Beijing’s desire for reunification. In Among the Braves, Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin tell the story of Hong Kong’s past.

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power - and how it transformed America.

In 1996 Amy Goodman started a radio show called Democracy Now! to focus on the issues that are underreported or ignored by mainstream news coverage. Shortly after September 11, 2001, they were broadcasting on television every weekday. Today it is the only public media in the US that airs simultaneously on satellite and cable television, radio, and the Internet. Now Amy and her journalist brother, David, share stories of the progressive heroes - the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protestors - who have brought about remarkable, often invisible change.

The life story of the most controversial, volatile, misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights. At a time of increasing gun violence in America, Waldman's book provoked a wide range of discussion. This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers. The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men - who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present.

Is a fight against equality and for privilege a fight for religious supremacy? Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional attorney and author of the critically acclaimed book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, dives into the debate on religious liberty, the modern attempt to weaponize religious freedom, and the Supreme Court's role in that “crusade.”

Ottobah Cugoano’s tumultuous life put him in a unique position to testify to the horrors of slavery on many important levels. Though some of the details of his biography remain obscure (he disappeared from public record in 1791), he provides vivid testimony here about his own kidnapping on the Gold Coast at the age of thirteen; his repeated sale and transport across Africa, and eventually across the Atlantic Ocean; his experiences as part of a chain gang in the West Indies; and the way in which he managed to purchase his freedom.

Nigger: it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy - author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law - “put[s] a tracer on nigger”, to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.

The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a White cop suffocated him. The video of that night’s events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation’s history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the '60s. While Floyd’s death was certainly the catalyst (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color), it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever-filling powder keg.

A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick. Kennedy and King traces the emergence of two of the 20th century's greatest leaders, their powerful impact on each other, and on the shape of the civil rights battle between 1960 and 1963. These two men from starkly different worlds profoundly influenced each other's personal development. Kennedy's hesitation on civil rights spurred King to greater acts of courage, and King inspired Kennedy to finally make a moral commitment to equality.