Justice

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.

Colorblindness has a long history in college admissions, the Black intellectual tradition, and today’s assault on affirmative action and race-conscious policies.

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

A 1968 student uprising at the Tuskegee Institute married practical demands with political vision.

Faculty and staff once owned slaves, and professors taught racial eugenics.

The idea of proportionality has roots in midcentury Japanese American advocacy.

The little-told tale of the 1651 trial of Hugh and Mary Parsons.

Suffragists coalesced in San Francisco to push for nationwide women' suffrage and send a petition to Congress for the vote.

Proposition 6, better known as the Briggs Initiative, was the first attempt to restrict the rights of lesbian and gay Americans by popular referendum.

Why the truth is crucial, even it it means losing an American Indian hero.

On the persistent myth of the colorblind Constitution that the Supreme Court's conservatives have embraced.

What we can learn from fifty years of anti-abortion propaganda.

How the Supreme Court has weaponized the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education against antiracism.

Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.

An admission of wrongdoing from the U.S. government came later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact.

Assessing age — and protecting children — has always been subjective.

Saidiya Hartman’s unrelenting exploration of slavery and freedom in the United States first appeared in 1997 and has lost none of its relevance.

The story of Motley's legal career prior to Brown v. Board, and her crucial participation in it.

Charles Sherrod wasn’t a big name, but his life has a lot to tell us about the civil rights movement.

Without Murray’s intense commitment to the freedom struggle, the more famous civil rights leaders would not have had the successes they did.

Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

Tying the fight for equal rights to the founders and the Constitution has worked before.

By age 44, most people are figuring out how to live and die peacefully. That was certainly not the case with sharecropper and hero Fannie Lou Hamer.

Service members were attacked, discredited, and shortchanged on GI benefits—with lasting implications.

Despite several new lawsuits, investigations, and the bombshell revelations, Trump’s fate will be like that of the former vice president.

When cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.

An enslaved woman’s experience with General Sherman’s army.

An online roundtable on a new biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.