Deeply researched and widely reported, this exploration of the Black Power phenomenon that began to challenge the traditional civil rights movement in 1966 offers portraits of the major characters in the yearlong drama and the fierce battles over voting rights, identity politics, and the teaching of Black history.

While the world may know the major names of the Civil Rights movement, there are countless lesser-known heroes fighting the good fight to advance equal justice for all, heeding the call when no one else was listening, often risking their lives and livelihoods in the process. This book shines a light on everyday people called to do extraordinary things--like Pauli Murray, whose early work informed Thurgood Marshall's legal argument for Brown v. Board of Education; Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus months before Rosa Parks did the same; and Gwen Carr, whose private pain in losing her son Eric Garner stoked her public activism against police brutality. -- adapted from jacket

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

"This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear. Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time. Covering topics as varied as "the commonality of pain," "when lawyers are heroes," and the concept of an "equality dividend" that is due to people of color for helping America brand itself internationally as a country of diversity and acceptance, Ifill, Lynch, Stevenson, and Thompson also explore topics such as "when did 'public' become a dirty word" (hint, it has something to do with serving people of color), "you know what Jeff Sessions is going to say," and "what it means to be a civil rights lawyer in the age of Trump." Building on Stevenson's hugely successful Just Mercy, Lynch's national platform at the Justice Department, Ifill's role as one of the leading defenders of civil rights in the country, and the occasion of Thompson's launch of a new center on race, inequality, and the law at the NYU School of Law, A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America's perpetual fault line."--Amazon.com.

"More than just a legal doctrine, color-blind constitutionalism has emerged as the defining metaphor of the post-Civil Rights era. Even for those challenging its constitutional authority, the language of color-blindness sets the terms of debate. Critics of color-blind constitutionalism are in this sense captured by the object of their critique. And yet, paradoxically, to enact a color-blind rule actually requires a heightened awareness of race. As such, color-blind constitutionalism represents a particular form of racial consciousness rather than an alternative to it. Challenging familiar understandings of race, rights, and American law, [this book] explores how current equal protection law renders the pursuit of racial equality constitutionally suspect. Identifying hierarchy rather than equality as an enduring constitutional norm, the book demonstrates how the pursuit of racial equality, historically, has been viewed as a violation of white rights. Arguing against conservative and liberal redemption narratives, both of which imagine racial equality as the perfection of American democracy, Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional? calls instead for a break from the current constitutional order, that it may be re-founded upon principles of racial democracy." -- Publisher's website.

"First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West's introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon's most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said's Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X"--