We Have Been Here Before

Japanese American incarceration is the blueprint for today’s migrant detention camps.
Broadside for debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Lothrop Stoddard.

When W.E.B. Du Bois Made a Laughing Stock of a White Supremacist

Why the Jim Crow-era debate between the African-American leader and a ridiculous, Nazi-loving racist isn’t as famous as Lincoln-Douglas.
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Why Trying to Distinguish Between Useful and Dangerous Immigrants Always Backfires

Yesterday’s “good" immigrant can turn into tomorrow’s radical.
Margaret Sanger appeals before a Senate Committee for federal birth-control legislation in Washington, D.C., March 1, 1934.

The Socialist Pioneers of Birth Control

When birth control was still taboo, early socialists fought to make it accessible to working-class women.

The Contradictions of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Supreme Court justice may have been heralded by many of his progressive peers, but the legacy he left behind is far more ambiguous.

When the FBI Targeted the Poor People’s Campaign

Recently unearthed surveillance documents show how the FBI tried to destroy the Poor People’s Movement.

They Were Killers With Submachine Guns. Then the President Went After Their Weapons.

Franklin Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act of 1934 was aimed at John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other murderous gangsters.

A Lynch Mob of One

The assault rifle has enabled racists to act alone.
Cathy Gillies, Kitty Lutesinger, Sandy Good, and Brenda McCann, of the Manson Family, kneel on the sidewalk outside the Los Angeles Hall of Justice on March 29, 1971.

The Manson Family Murders, and Their Complicated Legacy, Explained

The Manson Family murders weren’t a countercultural revolt. They were about power, entitlement, and Hollywood.

The Bad-Apple Myth of Policing

Violence perpetrated by cops doesn’t simply boil down to individual bad actors—it’s also a systemic, judicial failing.
Supreme Court building under dark rainclouds.

Critics of the Administrative State Have a History Problem

If they return governance to its 19th century roots, they will also do away with courts' ability to review agency action.

Elaine Race Massacre: Red Summer in Arkansas

An interactive exhibit that explores the events and consequences of the deadliest racial conflict in Arkansas history.

The Radical Roots of Free Speech

Conservatives like to claim that leftists are opponents of free speech. But that’s nonsense.

The Supreme Court Decision That Kept Suburban Schools Segregated

A 1974 Supreme Court decision found that school segregation was allowable if it wasn’t being done on purpose.
Know Nothing flag reading "Beware of foreign influence."

The 19th Century Roots of Federal Immigration Policy

Let’s get the history of American immigration policy straight.
Black men confront armed whites in a Chicago street.

Tying Black Resistance to Communism Is a Time-Tested American Tradition

When modern conservatives associate activists of color with communism, they’re drawing on a racist history that goes back over 100 years.
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How Advocates can Defeat Trump’s Latest Assault on Asylum Seekers

Immigration activists helped give power to asylum protections once before. They can do it again.

The New Fugitive Slave Laws

In criminalizing the provision of humanitarian assistance to migrants, we have resurrected the unjust laws of antebellum America.
Andrew Jackson, standing

Trump Wasn’t the First President to Confront the Supreme Court – and Back Down

The story of President Andrew Jackson and Worcester v. Georgia, decided in 1832.
Dilapidated boathouse

The Brothers Who Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave Their Family's Land

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery.

Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It

The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.

What to an American Is the Fourth of July?

Power comes before freedom, not the other way around.

Before the Central Park Five, There Was the Trenton Six

In both cases, false confessions were used against a group of black men with only precarious links to one another.

A Crime by Any Name

The Trump administration’s commitment to deterring immigration through cruelty has made horrifying conditions in there inevitable.
Supreme Court building under dark rainclouds.

The Supreme Court Is in Danger of Again Becoming ‘the Grave of Liberty’

Supreme Court decisions have practical consequences, which justices too often blithely ignore.

The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women’s Suffrage

A century after the 19th Amendment, it’s worth remembering why suffragists fought so hard, and who was fighting against them.

Before Stonewall, There Was a Bookstore

Networks of activists transformed Stonewall from an isolated event into a turning point in the struggle for gay power.
Political cartoon of Columbia giving the Civil Rights bill to a Black man.

What Are These Civil Rights Laws?

The context and aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

Fifty years after Stonewall, the gay-panic defense seems absurd. But, for decades, it had the power of law.
Pride flags outside the Stonewall Inn.

The Forgotten History of Gay Entrapment

Routine arrests were the linchpin of a social system intended to humiliate LGBTQ people.