Freedom Civil

The Black and Latina daughter of a working-class family, Victoria Pratt learned to treat everyone with dignity, no matter their background. When she became Newark Municipal Court’s chief judge, she knew well the inequities that poor, mentally ill, Black, and brown people faced in the criminal justice system. Pratt’s reforms transformed her courtroom into a place for problem-solving and a resource for healing.

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was universal.

In August of 2014, 29-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays out the intellectual, pragmatic political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, and much more....

In Lighting the Fires of Freedom Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women’s all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that remain important and relevant today.

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage’s unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows listeners how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

Landmark cases address the origins of judicial review, racial discrimination, civil rights and liberties, The 14th amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and federal government regulatory powers. A recommended classroom resource.

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.

In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza exposes lesser-known aspects of racism in American history and how Black people have consistently been depicted as responsible for their own oppression to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and gross inequality. Goza’s iconoclastic and incisive account exposes how revered figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln embedded white supremacy deep into our nation’s consciousness—and how Ronald Reagan manipulated this ideology so that society cheered as he advanced a set of policies that wounded our nation and intensified Black America’s suffering.

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal.

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.

Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism.

Among the piles of obsolete farm and household implements, haystacks, dust, and debris abandoned in her historic barn, Katie Aldridge discovered a box containing the Civil War letters of Charles Freeman Biddlecom. Painstakingly transcribing and lightly editing more than 100 letters written by the soldier to his wife during his service, Ms. Aldridge resurrected the voice of the Civil War combat soldier. The tone and character of "Charlie's" detailed accounts of the war compelled Ms. Aldridge to find out more.

Reflexión erudita, testimonio urgente y alegato políticamente poderoso de Sebreli que, al cumplir noventa años, en plena pandemia del Covid-19, habiéndose contagiado y recuperado, rescata el concepto clásico de desobediencia civil y lo propone como modo de resistencia responsable a los atropellos a la libertad y de defensa de la democracia.

There's a critical debate taking place over one of our most treasured rights: free speech. We argue about whether it's at risk, whether college students fear it, whether neo-Nazis deserve it, and whether the government is adequately upholding it. But as P. E. Moskowitz provocatively shows in The Case Against Free Speech, the term has been defined and redefined to suit those in power, and in recent years, it has been captured by the Right to push their agenda. What's more, our investment in the First Amendment obscures an uncomfortable truth

Voting is our most important right as Americans—“the right that protects all the others,” as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act—but it’s also the one most violently contested throughout US history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump’s effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy.

On 6 February 1918, after campaigning for over 50 years, British women were finally granted the vote. In November 1919, the first woman MP, Lady Nancy Astor, was elected to the House of Commons. History was made. A hundred years on, it is time to reflect on the daring and painful struggle women undertook to break into a political system that excluded them.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."

Jamie Margolin has been organizing and protesting since she was 14 years old. Now the co-leader of a global climate action movement, she knows better than most how powerful a young person can be. You don't have to be able to vote or hold positions of power to change the world. In Youth to Power, Jamie presents the essential guide to changemaking, with advice on writing and pitching op-eds, organizing successful events and peaceful protests, time management as a student activist, utilizing social and traditional media to spread a message, and sustaining long-term action.

For many, it can feel like change just takes too long, and that it might seem we have not moved very far. But, political activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that publicprotest is a vital part of affecting change, even if that change doesn’t come “right now.” He examines the activism of people of all ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds that helped change America, documenting events from the Free Speech Movement through the movement for civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and, of course, the protests against the Vietnam War