Showing titles in Civil Rights & Liberties

Thomas E. Ricks offers an utterly new perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King Jr.’s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but through recruiting, training, discipline, and organization—the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.

Why does inequality persist despite unprecedented awareness? Because racism has evolved. It no longer requires hatred or conscious prejudice. It operates as invisible code running in the background of institutions—algorithms that predict the future based on biased pasts, policies that appear...

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.

La liberté d'expression, c'est la faculté de dire ce qu'on pense être juste et vrai, mais cette liberté est menacée par la politique même, où la vérité ne prévaut guère. Ce recueil propose les meilleures pages d'Orwell sur cette question centrale aujourd'hui, dans nos sociétés de post-vérité.

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in...

From Reconstruction to redemption, civil rights to the Southern strategy, the multiracial protests of 2020 for social justice to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive, equitable society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. This pattern is a result of an American pastime: creating and implementing tactics to deny Black truth.

“This book is an effort to shed light on the truth. . . . To the extent that our leaders embody aspects of who we are as a people, studying how each president has participated in our nation’s complicated and often shameful treatment of Black people is as good a place as any to start.” —...

Chaînes Brisées : La Traite des Êtres Humains Dévoilée Chaînes Brisées de Keith Grounsell est une exploration saisissante et sans concession de l’un des crimes les plus odieux et les plus dissimulés de notre société : la traite des êtres humains. S’appuyant sur une carrière exceptionnelle de 28 ans dans les forces de l’ordre — aux niveaux municipal, départemental, étatique, fédéral et international — et enrichi par des recherches approfondies reposant sur plus de 150 sources crédibles, cet ouvrage offre une analyse inégalée des réalités brutales de la traite ...

Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking city streets to protest officer misdeeds.

From the fearless defense attorney and civil rights lawyer who rose to fame with Netflix’s The Staircase comes a “bracing account of abuses of power and corruption in the criminal justice system.” (The Guardian) “A fine companion to Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Emily Bazelon’s...

The inspiring memoir of Evie Rich, a fearless African-American activist whose lifelong fight for justice, equality, and workers’ rights shaped pivotal moments in American civil rights history.

The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals plays a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. 

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.

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. 

Glenn Beck, the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Reset, makes a passionate, fact-based case for guns that reveals why gun control isn’t really about controlling guns at all; it’s about controlling us. When our founding fathers secured the Constitutional “right of the people...

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.

Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers’s life’s work. It’s a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth. 

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.