Justice

He challenged the violence of US power, abroad and at home. His radical internationalism, from Congo to Palestine, speaks to our moment.

Since the earliest days of the Republic, American citizenship has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia.

The Fugitive Slave Act erased the most basic of constitutional rights for enslaved people and incentivized US Commissioners to support kidnappers.

His jurisprudence has been overshadowed by that of his showier colleagues but was a model of principled restraint.

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Act made way for investigations of racially motivated killings. The federal agency enforcing it is in disarray.

A graphic episode from "Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me."

A warning for us all about history repeating itself.

Police brutality and corruption are painful realities. So are officers who die performing their duty. But the memorial in Washington fails to distinguish them.

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.

RFK’s call for “wellness farms” revives a grim legacy of forced labor, racial injustice, and eugenics disguised as mental health reform.

The very features that made the LAPD appear more professional also expanded its reach and capacity for violence.

Removal orders targeting student activists echo America’s long past of jailing and expelling immigrants because of their race, or what they say or believe.

When Donald Trump and his followers go in search of historical forerunners to justify their regime, they turn with striking regularity to the presidency.

She translated Black freedom movements' ideals into forms that children could enjoy and grasp, nurturing their political consciousness through music-making.

Fifty years after the Vietnam War’s end, lessons from the peace movement on mobilizing resistance.

If the justices take up a case on Virginia’s felon disenfranchisement law, they’ll be burrowing back to Reconstruction-era jurisprudence.

Legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone says we’re closer than ever to finally piecing together the mystery of November 22, 1963.

More than a year before Pearl Harbor, President FDR heard arguments from the civil rights leaders of the era for the desegregation of the military.

Trump is relying on a 1798 law with a bad history.

Chief Justice John Roberts called it “obvious” that the infamous decision has “no place in law under the Constitution.” Recent events suggest otherwise.

The birth of the sanctuary movement some 45 years ago can teach us a lot about how to respond to today’s attacks on immigrants.

Ryan White changed perceptions of the disease in the United States.

Making a whole group of people this vulnerable does not just happen overnight.

Can a new book rescue Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s activism from irrelevance?

How a dispute with a Scottish lord over westward expansion, gunpowder, and the future of enslaved labor made the southern colonies’ embrace the radical cause.

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history.

On David Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.”

The “war on terror” led to a sweeping curtailment of immigrants’ rights that swept up green card holders as well as citizens.

The U.S. government repeatedly tried to deport the midcentury labor leader over his alleged ties to the Communist Party.