Civil Liberties

In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

Hailed as America’s greatest civil rights advocate, Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired the people of the United States to demand equality, regardless of the color of their skin. And he did it peacefully. Time may have passed, but in today’s world, his teachings are needed more than ever. With Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wisdom and unwavering dedication to making the opposition listen, you can become a peaceful leader and advocate for the way the world should look, no matter who stands in your way.

If there's one thing most of the world knows about the USA, it's that we love guns. Depending on who you are, this might be a source of pride; knowing that your country provides you with the ultimate freedom to preserve life and liberty. For others, it's a source of shame that despite being the richest nation in the world, the USA doesn't even have the same level of gun regulations as many third world nations. No matter how you feel about guns, knowing what to do about them is a difficult question for anybody. There are no easy answers to the debate about gun control.

Larry Krasner spent thirty years learning about America’s carceral system as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia, working to get some kind of justice for his clients in a broken system, before deciding that the way to truly transform the system was to get inside of it. So he launched an unlikely campaign to become the district attorney of Philadelphia, a city known for its long line of notorious “tough on crime” DAs who had turned Philly into a city with one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country.

In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress, had no idea she was changing history when, fed up and tired, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in segregated Alabama. Today, she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight. Who was she, before and after her historic act, and how did that act sound the death knell for Jim Crow?

Black Snake is the story of four leaders - LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White - and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.

How does the First Amendment really work? Is it a principle or a value? What is hate speech and should it always be banned? Are we free to declare our religious beliefs in the public square? What role, if any, should companies like Facebook play in policing the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and opinions? With clarity and power, Stanley Fish explores these complex questions in The First.

Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, all born into the beginning of the 20th century and its deadly landscape of racial prejudice. Jim Crow. Exploitation. Unpoliced violence. Police violence.

Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

In The Second Amendment, Michael Waldman traces the ongoing argument on gun rights from the Bill of Rights to the current day. Now, in The Fight to Vote, Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at an even more crucial struggle: the past and present effort to define and defend government based on "the consent of the governed". From the writing of the Constitution, and at every step along the way, as Americans sought the right, others have fought to stop them.

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," declared Martin Luther King, Jr. He had come to that city of racist terror convinced that massive protest could topple Jim Crow. But the insurgency faltered. To revive it, King made a sacrificial act on Good Friday, April 12, 1963: he was arrested. Alone in his cell, reading a newspaper, he found a statement from eight "moderate" clergymen who branded the protests extremist and "untimely." King drafted a furious rebuttal that emerged as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

Born into abject poverty in Haiti, young Jim St. Germain moved to Brooklyn's Crown Heights, into an overcrowded apartment with his family. He quickly adapted to street life and began stealing, dealing drugs, and growing increasingly indifferent to despair and violence. By the time he was arrested for dealing crack cocaine, he had been handcuffed more than a dozen times. At the age of 15, the walls of the system were closing around him.

The Border Patrol has grown exponentially, ICE detention centers have cropped up across the country, and the southern border is more militarized than ever before, but we are no safer. Instead, families are being ripped apart, undocumented people are living in fear, and thousands of migrants have died in detention or crossing the border. Taking listeners to the border patrol outposts, unmarked graves, detention centers, and halls of power, Sand and Blood is a frightening, essential story we ignore at our peril.

"From Roman Speculatores to the NSA: Evolution of Espionage and Its Impact on Statecraft and Civil Liberties" is a thrilling journey from the shadows of ancient espionage to the high-tech spy networks of today. It's a must-read for anyone captivated by the enigmatic world of spies, as depicted in iconic fiction like James Bond and John le Carré, but eager to peel back the curtain on the real-life drama of intelligence work. Dive into the clandestine operations that shaped history, from the cunning Speculatores of Rome to the cutting-edge surveillance of the NSA. This book doesn't just ...

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

Some of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement are those of young people engaged in social activism, such as children and teenagers in 1963 being attacked by police in Birmingham with dogs and water hoses. But their contributions have not been well documented or prioritized. The Young Crusaders is the first book dedicated to telling the story of the hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers who engaged in sit-ins, school strikes, boycotts, marches, and demonstrations.

On January 31, 2011, Zach Wahls addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public forum regarding civil unions. The 19-year-old son of a same-sex couple, Wahls proudly proclaimed, "The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character." Hours later, his speech was posted on YouTube, where it went viral, quickly receiving more than two million views. By the end of the week, everyone knew his name and wanted to hear more from the boy with two moms.

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.

Within It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong, New York Times (2011) best-selling author and judge Andrew P. Napolitano lays out the case that the US government, whose first obligation is to protect and preserve individual freedoms, actually does neither.