Civil Rights Movements & the Law

ChangeLab is a racial justice think tank based in Seattle, WA. We promote cross-sectoral analysis of the political, economic, cultural and ideological dimensions of race and racism in the United States, with a particular focus on Asian Americans.

At the request of the local prosecutor, a judge on Monday dismissed the charges and convictions against the Groveland Four: Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin.

Readings on Race and Professional Responsibility Notes for users: This bibliography is arranged first by type of source (e.g., scholarly articles, books, popular press, etc.) and then by topic (e.g., The Bar Exam, Malpractice, Advertising and Solicitation, etc.). Many but not all of the sources...

Gilbert Gee is a professor at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, and he says the coronavirus outbreak reminds him of what happened during both the SARS and AIDS crises. As the battle against the current outbreak continues, Gee tells Hari Sreenivasan about racism's role in public health emergencies.

Anti-racist syllabus by Ibram X. Kendi: beginning

As protests draw attention to killings of African-Americans, advocates are demanding more coverage of violent policing in Latino communities.

The Globe collected 10 years worth of public records from the Boston Police Department and created this database. Records include an internal investigations log, discipline, awards, case summaries, arbitration and civil service decisions, and payroll. The database covers 3,095 internal affairs cases involving 7,500 total allegations and data regarding 1,553 officers. One case may contain multiple allegations and multiple officers. The BPD records have holes. Pending cases do not include officers’ names and neither do some completed cases. In all, about 1,840 charges belong to officers whose identity was not released. Some officers in the database are no longer on the force, and some may have changed rank. The data spans January 2010 to August 2020.

How should Asian Americans respond to rising anti-Asian racist actions? History may offer some lessons during the pandemic.

The repeal of a controversial law means previously secret allegations of misconduct have now been made public

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

Officers and officials also donated to fundraisers for far-right activists and fellow officers accused of shooting black Americans

Daniel Perry, a US army sergeant stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, had been found guilty of murder in a 2020 shooting.

Domestic abuse survivor Ny Nourn lived this pipeline. Then her fight against this system became a fight for others.

Protests over the US police killings of Black people have spread across the US, and worldwide.

A new report from the National Governors Association gives states recommendations on how they can close their digital divides as the pandemic drags on.

The mothers of Jamarion Robinson and Oscar Cain on fighting for justice amid the trauma of more police killings.

Black women’s interaction with the state, through law enforcement, is marked by violence. Black women are murdered by the police.4 They are assaulted and injured by the police.5 They are arrested unlawfully by the police;6 and finally they are tried, convicted and incarcerated for defending themselves against nonpolice violence.7 State violence against Black women is long-standing, pervasive, persistent, and multilayered, yet few legal actors seem to care about it. This Article will bring together the strands of scholarship that exists across several fields on the dilemma of state sponsored violence against Black women, to highlight for legal scholars the depth of the problems Black women experience. The relationship between Black women and the state was birthed in violence, through the establishment of slavery in the colonial world. Part I of this Article explores the historical roots of Black women’s interaction with the state. The historical exploration is necessary because in the foundational years of interaction between Black women and White colonists the process of dehumanization and genesis of cultural stereotypes were created. Throughout the research cited in this Article, contemporary linkages to both legal policy, as well as law enforcement behavior will be made to stereotypes fostered and maintained through slavery.

This toolkit is a project of love from the grassroots, from and by Asian American communities.As Asian Americans, we believe that our liberation is tied to Black liberation and we continue to dream about a world where all of our people will be free.

'The Black Renaissance is stirring Black people to be themselves. Totally. Unapologetically. Freely.'

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.

Troy Anthony Davis, who maintained his innocence until his last breath, was executed by the state of Georgia Wednesday night. As the world watched to see whether his final appeal for a stay of execution would be granted by the U.S. Supreme Court, Democracy Now! broadcast live for six hours from outside the prison grounds where Davis was ultimately killed by lethal injection at 11:08 p.m. EDT. [includes rush transcript]

“I can’t breathe” — that’s what George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, repeatedly told a white Minneapolis police officer who pinned him to the ground Monday with a knee to his neck. Video of the police attack went viral. Now four officers have been fired. This comes as another video went viral of a white woman calling the cops on a Black man in New York City’s Central Park and falsely accusing him of “threatening her life” after he asked her to leash her dog. We discuss these developments and more with Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University and National Book Award–winning author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” and “How to Be an Antiracist.”

In a Juneteenth special, we mark the federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We speak to the writer and poet Clint Smith about Juneteenth and his new book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both-handedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

As the Sikh community in Indianapolis and across the United States is in mourning after a gunman killed eight people at a FedEx facility last week, where four of the victims are Sikh, we speak with Simran Jeet Singh, scholar, activist and senior fellow for the Sikh Coalition, which is calling for a full investigation into the possibility of racial or ethnic hatred as a factor in the killings in Indianapolis. A majority of the workers at the warehouse are Sikh, and while authorities have not shared evidence Brandon Hole was targeting Sikh workers when he attacked the FedEx facility, police revealed Monday they previously found evidence that Hole had browsed white supremacist websites. The mass shooting took place as more than 15 states across the U.S., including Indiana, mark April as Sikh Awareness and Appreciation Month. “This community, in Indianapolis, all around the world, is really devastated,” says Singh. “Given the pattern of violence against Sikhs, we are demanding a full investigation into the possibility of bias and racism in this attack.”

CNN spoke to six people around the US who are helping protect and uplift Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Here are their stories.

USING ACTIVE LISTENING, EMPATHY, AND PERSONAL STORYTELLING TO PROMOTE RACIAL EQUITY

"The ABA Legal Education Police Practices Consortium aims to contribute to the national effort examining and addressing legal issues in policing and public safety including conduct oversight and the evolving nature of police work. The Consortium will leverage the ABA's expertise and that of participating ABA accredited law schools to collaborate on projects to develop and implement better police practices throughout the United States. "

On May 31 and June 1, 1921, mobs of white residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses in the city's Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street. The attacks from the ground and private aircraft killed an unknown number of Black people, estimated to be between 75 and 300, and injured and displaced hundreds more. The massacre was largely undiscussed in local, state, and national histories, even after a state commission on the event published its final report in 2001 but gained increased public awareness when it was featured in the HBO series Watchmen in 2019 and Lovecraft Country in 2020.