Antiracism & Social Justice Resources

A nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.

The Marshall Project explains its decision to offer free news to incarcerated people on tablets that otherwise charge users.

A day after prosecutors charged five former Memphis police officers with murder over the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, we speak with his parents, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, about their drive to seek justice for their son. “He had a beautiful soul, and he touched everyone,” RowVaughn Wells says of her son. Nichols was a 29-year-old Black father, amateur photographer and longtime skateboarder who died January 10 from kidney failure and cardiac arrest, three days after he was brutally beaten by the five officers during a traffic stop. The officers were fired earlier this month and indicted on Thursday with second-degree murder, kidnapping and other charges for their role in Nichols’s death. We also speak with civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family.

We speak with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors about her new book, “An Abolitionist’s Handbook,” which lays out her journey toward abolition and 12 principles activists can follow to practice abolition, which she describes as the elimination of police, prisons, jails, surveillance and the current court system. “We have to imagine what we would do with these dollars, with these budgets, and they have to really be an imagination that’s grounded in care,” says Cullors. She also speaks about her community organizing in Los Angeles, which fought $3.5 billion worth of jail expansion, and her multi-year contract with Warner Bros. Television Group to create original storytelling content around abolition.

We look at calls for police accountability in Los Angeles, where officers killed three men of color within 48 hours earlier this month, including 31-year-old Black school teacher Keenan Anderson, who died hours after he was repeatedly tasered. We speak with Anderson’s cousin Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, who has joined in protests over the police killings. “The last two weeks have been a nightmare,” says Cullors. “No human being deserves to die in fear, to die publicly humiliated and without their dignity.”

ALA is the first organization to launch a nationwide public-facing anticensorship campaign with Unite Against Book Bans.

Welcome Back!  The law library is developing a collection of materials we are calling the Antiracist Collection. The items in this collection include cross-disciplinary resources in addition to boo…

Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is a consortium of over ninety institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. These schools are focused …

Voice of Witness (VOW) is an oral history nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by—and fighting against—injustice. VOW’s work is driven by the transformative power of the story, and by a strong belief that social justice cannot be achieved without deep listening and learning from those marginalized by systems of oppression. Through our programming, we work with communities to ensure that: voices of marginalized and silenced communities are centered in narrative contexts (education, media, movements, and policymaking); students and communities have the tools and training to tell their own stories through oral history; storytelling practitioners and institutions use ethics-driven methodologies to gather narratives. The VOW Book Series depicts human rights issues through the edited oral histories of people, VOW narrators, who are most deeply impacted and at the heart of solutions to address injustice. The series explores issues of race-, gender-, and class-based inequity through the lenses of personal narrative. The VOW Education Program brings unheard stories and our ethical oral history methodology to classrooms and organizations across the US, connecting students, educators, and advocates with training and tools for storytelling in order to advance social change. Through our partnerships and consulting, VOW offers expert storytelling and program support to nonprofits, activists, schools, foundations, and more. These customized projects and workshops use VOW’s award-winning approach to promote empathy, build relationships, and amplify community voices.

CHICAGO — The Public Library Association (PLA) Strategic Plan 2022—2026 is now available on the PLA website, following its unanimous approval by the PLA Board of Directors in June 2022. Informed by member surveys, member and partner interviews, and PLA leadership and staff engagements, the PLA strategic plan centers Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (EDISJ) and expands PLA’s role as a platform for innovation and amplifier for sharing public library community impacts. The PLA Board of Directors began the process of updating the strategic plan in 2021.

Forty years after Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 to raise awareness about censorship, the issue has taken on new importance for booksellers across the country, who increasingly find themselves on the front lines, alongside librarians, in defending people’s freedom to read.

Eco-friendly tiny houses offer safety, stability, and savings.

In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines the laws and practices that created a bipolar caste system in the U.S. — and how the Nazis borrowed from it.

As AALL and RIPS committee work ramps up again this fall, the RIPS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force is off and running.  Not familiar with the Task Force?  Let me get you up to …

This collection of resources is designed to be of use both to new collection development librarians as well as those … "Collection Development Resources on the Web"

The enemy of well-intentioned DEI initiatives is backlash — and not just from people from privileged groups. Backlash from all directions is often due to DEI initiatives being framed as solutions to individual problems to be fixed rather than to correct for systemic issues at play in an organization. To reframe the conversation the author recommends five steps to implement in your DEI strategy: 1) Collect data to diagnose specific inequities in your organization, 2) communicate about initiatives using a systems-focused framing, 3) as change-making efforts begin, appeal to “fairness,” 4) clearly lay out expectations for change alongside resources and support, 5) sustain momentum by affirming effort and celebrating wins.

Libraries do a lot of the heavy lifting for society. They not only circulate books, but also provide crucial Internet access for job seekers and students

Today, the Biden Administration is announcing additional actions to reduce gun crime and make communities safer. This plan builds on the steps the President has taken since the beginning of his Administration to stop the flow of guns being used in crimes, bolster federal, state, and local law enforcement, invest in community-based programs that…

Access to justice and research innovation were important topics at the recent World Justice Forum 2022 and the Annual Summit of Canada’s Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters. In this article, as part of a growing body of access to justice opportunities and initiatives, we discuss some exciting new developments […]

The White House's recently announced "fund the police" measure confirms that President Joe Biden’s administration will not pursue the kind of transformative criminal justice reform many voters supported during his candidacy, despite his previous rhetoric.

A federal grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky, returned two indictments that were unsealed today, and the Department of Justice filed a third charging document today, in connection with an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old woman who was shot and killed in her Louisville home on March 13, 2020, by police officers executing a search warrant.

Law schools should be free to individualize admission criteria, argue two law school deans, a chancellor, and a law professor. They call on the ABA to repeal the requirement that applicants for J.D. programs submit standardized test scores for admission.

EPA approves plan to truck contaminated soil from one North Carolina Black community to another; hazardous waster landfills

The ACLU says the law, which bans filming of police within eight feet, is ‘blatantly unconstitutional’.

We should trust individuals to make their own decisions. Raise your voice for everyone's freedom to read. #UniteAgainstBookBans