Civil Rights Movements & the Law

This week we are joined by LexisNexis' Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer and Head of Global Talent Development, Ronda Bazley Moore. Ronda and a team

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.”

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 …

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.

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.

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’.

States must craft policies to rein in unbridled police access to newborn blood samples.

The latest Tweet by Reuters states, 'Whole Foods workers lose appeal over 'Black Lives Matter' masks ...' 🌎 Whole Foods Workers Lose Appeal over 'Black Lives Matter' Masks - Latest Tweet by Reuters.

Post contributed by John B. Gartrell, Director, John Hope Franklin Research Center Duke University Libraries is pleased to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA) that designates the Duke Libraries as the stewards who will preserve and sustain the CRMA when the current managers are no longer … Continue reading Duke Libraries Partners with the Civil Rights Movement Archive to Sustain Activist Centered History →

Violators of the new law, which includes exceptions for traffic stops, will face a misdemeanor charge and up to 30 days in jail

Recently signed legislation in Arizona would bar people from recording video of police officers within 8 feet after being told not to.

Everywhere you look someone is worried that America has gotten too woke, writes W. Kamau Bell. For the premiere episode of the new season of 'United Shades of America,' Bell delves into the war on 'woke' in the state he refers as 'desert Florida.'

Data from last year showed that of the state police department's roughly 1,400 troopers, only 172 were Black.

Spurred by a growing grassroots movement during the mid-20th century, Congress passed landmark legislation to protect Americans’ civil rights, to end discrimination, and to ensure access to the ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 focused on access to public accommodations and equal employment. Despite its far-reaching provisions, the bill did not fully address barriers to voting in America, leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The narratives in this exhibit tell the stories of these important pieces of legislation.

On Tuesday, we gathered with more than 70 of our colleagues for an information session on our recently announced Digital Equity Project. Our goal was to give some context and background on the project, share information on our big-picture plans and the opportunities this new funding presents, and answer questions from our community.  In 2019, …

By Lynie Awywen Black Lives Still Matter. It has been over two years since the untimely death of George Floyd, a Black man who died when Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, knelt on his ne…

A Black woman who fought for the law for years alongside her twin sister became emotional, calling the law a “win.”

New findings show how Hispanic-serving institutions recognize that graduating isn’t the end of the college journey.

J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, two of the former Minneapolis Police officers convicted of federal charges in the fatal arrest of George Floyd, were sentenced to 3 years and 3.5 years in prison, respectively, on Wednesday.

The probe was opened following reports of systemic racially biased arrests, violence and targeting.

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