Freedom Civil

The Torture Machine takes listeners from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark - and the historic 13-years of litigation that followed - through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects.

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.

Activists from Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi to the Movement for Black Lives have long recognized that there are times when, rather than having a duty to obey the law, we have a duty to disobey it. Taking seriously the history of this activism, A Duty to Resist wrestles with the problem of political obligation in real world societies that harbor injustice. Candice Delmas argues that the duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and political association impose responsibility to resist under conditions of injustice.

As white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, rabid misogyny, and anti-immigrant fervor coalesce, a new and uniquely American form of fascism looms. Could our current moment actually bring about the end of democracy in the United States? Are Americans willing to surrender their freedom and dignity, along with their ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and mutual respect in the face of the rising tide of political and ideological extremism?

Fifty years ago Malcolm X told a White woman who asked what she could do for the cause, "Nothing." Dyson believes he was wrong. In Tears We Cannot Stop, he responds to that question. If we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how Black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north.

A provocative examination of race, gun laws, and violence that exposes how the state of Florida bungled the Trayvon Martin case through new interviews and revelations about the trial. Suspicion Nation expertly captures the state of a country conflicted not only about the Trayvon Martin injustice but divided over issues of race, violence, and gun legislation.

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

The Supreme Court has issued a decision, but that doesn't end the debate. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled, Americans face momentous debates about the nature of marriage and religious liberty. Because the Court has redefined marriage in all 50 states, we have to energetically protect our freedom to live according to conscience and faith as we work to rebuild a strong marriage culture.

More than 40 years after President Johnson signed the landmark Fair Housing Act into law, residential segregation in America remains unresolved. Designed to help dismantle the nation’s racially divided housing patterns, the act has gone largely ignored by every presidential administration - Democrat and Republican alike - since 1968. In Living Apart, ProPublica investigates this failing.

In Revolutionary Power, Shalanda Baker arms those made most vulnerable by our current energy system with the tools they need to remake the system in the service of their humanity. She argues that people of color, poor people, and indigenous people must engage in the creation of the new energy system in order to upend the unequal power dynamics of the current system.

Mab Segrest explores her singular experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina in this best-selling political memoir.

Radical Volunteers tells the largely unknown story of southern student activism in Tennessee between the Brown decision in 1954 and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in May 1970. As one of the first statewide studies of student activism—and one of the few examinations of southern student activism—it broadens scholarly understanding of New Left and Black student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

Imagine being physically denied access to your office, business, or livelihood. Imagine being refused entry to a grocery store or being told who you can or cannot sit with at a restaurant. Imagine being barred from a hospital room when you or your family member needs critical care. Unthinkable? Today, these scenarios and worse are happening in “democracies” all over the world, and could be our collective future—orchestrated by AI, Big Tech, and state-sponsored apps—all in the name of “protecting” public health with vaccine passports.

Alan Dershowitz has been called "one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America" by Politico and "the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights" by Newsweek. He is also a fair-minded and even-handed expert on the Constitution and our civil liberties, and in this book offers his knowledge and insight to help listeners understand the war being waged against free speech by the ostensibly well-meaning forces seeking to constrain this basic right.

A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s Black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression. This is a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols - images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing - to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change.

The author of Lincoln's Boys takes us inside Lyndon Johnson's White House to show how the legendary Great Society programs were actually put into practice: Team of Rivals for LBJ. The personalities behind every burst of 1960s liberal reform - from civil rights and immigration reform, to Medicare and Head Start - and what we'll lose if those programs are dismantled.

The world's eyes were on Mississippi during the summer of 1964, when civil rights activists launched an ambitious African American voter registration project and were met with violent resistance from white supremacists. Sue Sojourner and her husband arrived in Holmes County, Mississippi, in the wake of this historic time, known as "Freedom Summer". Thunder of Freedom unites Sojourner's personal experiences with her insights regarding the dynamics of race relations in the 1960s South, providing listeners with a unique look at the struggle for rights and equality in Mississippi.

Née à Montauban en 1748, Olympe de Gouges devient femme de lettres et s'engage politiquement luttant par ses écrits contre l'esclavagisme puis contre les inégalités en général. On lui doit cette déclaration des droit de la femme. "La femme a le droit de monter sur l'échafaud ; elle doit avoir également celui de monter à la Tribune." Ses combats la mèneront à la guillotine à 45 ans. Ce titre comprend "Forme du Contrat social de l'Homme et de la Femme" et une courte "Biographie d'Olympe de Gouges".

Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they were an afterthought for the Framers. Only as a result of the racial strife that exploded during the Civil War—and a series of resulting missteps by the Supreme Court—did rights gain such outsized power. Over and again, courts have treated rights conflicts as zero-sum games in which awarding rights to one side means denying rights to others. As eminent legal scholar Jamal Greene shows in How Rights Went Wrong, we need to recouple rights with justice—before they tear society apart.