Social Movements & the Law

Fresh Air from WHYY, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Hosted by Terry Gross, the show features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.Subscribe to Fresh Air Plus! You'll enjoy bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening - all while you support NPR's mission. Learn more at plus.npr.org/freshair

"On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum. In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America's evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital's wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus. In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable"--

As international health agencies warn that COVID-19 could become a pandemic, fears over the new coronavirus' spread have activated old, racist suspicions toward Asians and Asian Americans. It's part of a longer history in the United States, in which xenophobia has often been camouflaged as a concern for public health and hygiene.

"Millions of Americans do not recognize their problems can be solved through legal tools. Law democratized offers a blueprint for expanding access to legal help for all regardless of resources. Building upon more than a decade of research about innovation in legal services around the globe, the book features stories of what works and what doesn't to craft a series of recommendations for solving the justice crisis"--

Listen to this episode from Women at Work on Spotify. As we wait for company leaders to make good on the anti-racism commitments they made earlier this year, we check in with four Black women about how their work lives have and haven’t changed. Then we talk with an expert who helps us understand how to keep pushing forward and supporting our Black colleagues while we wait for long-overdue change.

"This book takes a harsh, critical look at capital punishment and points out the glaring flaws and misconceptions about its effectiveness. It makes a factual, legal, and moral argument for its abolition while refuting the main arguments in support of the death penalty"--

Kathryn Rubino talks to Lia Dorsey, newly elected President of the Association of Law Firm Diversity Professionals, and Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Dentons, about Biglaw's response to the violent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to Black Lives Matter. Episode Resources     Episode Highlights A difficult topic - 1:13 Tangible actions behind words - 2:34 Lia’s role and Biglaw’s role - 3:20 All the firms' different statements - 4:25 Lia’s piece of advice for law firms - 7:20 The culture of a firm - 9:13 An opportunity for the firms’ leaders - 10:06 Everybody has a role to play - 11:42 How we can move forward - 14:11 Having access to money and resources - 18:49 Promoting diversity - 19:57 Nobody has the right answer right now - 23:36   Subscribe, Share and Review To get the next episode subscribe with your favorite podcast player. Subscribe with Follow on Leave a review on

A law professor examines four Supreme Court cases won by a trailblazing Kentucky-born lawyer dedicated to seeking just treatment for those condemned to death.

The American Law Institute is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.

"In late 2018, the First Step Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump just hours preceding a government shutdown. It was one of the few major pieces of federal criminal justice reform since the 1970s to move towards reversing the incarceration frenzy that had characterized United States policy. While it did not amount to revolutionary reform, in Reform Nation Colleen P. Eren investigates it as a symbol for the larger movement's trajectory. Its unlikely passage during a period of political polarization was testament to the power of a new constellation of advocates, stakeholders, and strange bedfellow alliances. These intriguing and complex dynamics are indicative of a longer, twenty-year shift in which the movement became nationalized and mainstreamed. Using in-depth interviews with major players in the national movement, formerly incarcerated activists, celebrities, and donors, this is the first book to turn the mirror back on the criminal justice reform movement itself--the frames used, the voices heard, the capital activated among elite participants, and the bitter controversies. This snapshot in time raises much larger questions about how our democratic processes inform criminal justice policy, and where we are going in the decades to come"--

Professor Michele Goodwin starts at the beginning and brings us up to date. If only America’s institutions would do the same.

As seen on CBS This Morning, award-winning attorney Ben Crump exposes a heinous truth in Open Season: Whether with a bullet or a lengthy prison sentence, America is killing black people and justifying it legally. While some deaths make headlines, most are personal tragedies suffered within families and communities. Worse, these killings are done one person at a time, so as not to raise alarm. While it is much more difficult to justify killing many people at once, in dramatic fashion, the result is the same-genocide.--

Podcast downloads for Black history

"In the American judicial system, even accused murderers, rapists, arsonists, and child abusers have voices and rights; and as the Miranda warning says, if they cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent them. Enter the public defender, who must try to help people who have done reprehensible things-no matter their personal assessment of the client and situation. Former PD Allen Goodman draws upon a deep understanding of that milieu, conveying its complexities and dilemmas, reveling in great moral victories, enduring administrative inanity, and staggering from defeats. It is an intensely idealistic job, but also one that breeds corrosive cynicism. Goodman limns the difficulties of remaining a good human being while defending the worst of them"--

Some call it Hurricane Katrina. Some call it the Federal Flood. Others call it the day the levees broke. On August 29, 2005, the city of New Orleans was submerged. That story of hubris, incompetence, and nature's wrath is now etched into the national consciousness. But the people who lived through the flood and its aftermath have a different story to tell. A story of rumors, betrayal, and one of the most misunderstood events in American history. Hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II.

"A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America's obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times-bestselling Barracoon. Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American's personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans-including author Deborah Plant's brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on the history of slavery in America-are deprived of these basic freedoms every day. In her studies of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant became fascinated by Hurston's explanation for the atrocities of the international slave trade. In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote: "But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory." We look the other way when the basic human rights of marginalized and stigmatized groups are violated and desecrated, not realizing that only the practice of justice everywhere secures justice, for any of us, anywhere. An active vigilance is required of those who would be and remain free; with Of Greed and Glory, Deborah Plant reveals the many ways in which slavery continues in America today and charts our collective course toward personal sovereignty for all." --

American Libraries senior editor and Call Number host Phil Morehart speaks with New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project and honorary chair of Preservation Week, about the project’s origins, her team’s research, and why community archives are vital to preserving history. If you have feedback for the podcast team, email us or … Continue reading Call Number Podcast: A Conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones →

"Legal decisions continue to mystify: Why was this person convicted and that person acquitted of the same crime? Why did she sue for breach of contract and he did not? Legal rules are supposed to provide answers to these questions, but their answers are radically incomplete. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a theory that explained legal decisions, which predicted how legal cases are likely to be brought and decided? Drawing on Donald Black's theory of the behavior of law, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America aims to offer some answers, looking specifically at who receives the death penalty in the US. Drawing on large datasets, including the Baldus study which demonstrated racial bias in sentencing decisions, this book considers the ways in which social characteristics such as race, class, moral reputation, organizational status affect legal decision making, and the wide discrepancies in the use of capital punishment. Geometrical Justice will be of interest to those engaged in criminal justice, criminology and socio-legal studies, as well as students taking courses on sentencing, corrections and capital punishment"--

Each episode of the Black History Buff Podcast will take you on a thrilling journey through a chapter of Black History. Covering the full historical tapestry of the African Diaspora you’ll hear tales covering everything from African Samurai’s to pistol wielding poets. So take a seat kick back relax and enjoy the show.

"A demonstration of how wrongful convictions have transformed American criminal justice, and how political ideology divides and shapes the innocence movement's fight for reform"--

America was founded on the ideal of democracy. Black people fought to make it one.

"Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power contends that the deep economic inequality and racial disparities that Americans take for granted have been quietly held in place by the four-decade campaign of racialized state violence known as mass incarceration. Tasseli McKay presents detailed evidence that the steep direct costs of mass-scale imprisonment are far overshadowed by its hidden costs and harms, many of which have been kept out of sight by women's invisible labor. Finding that the economic value of the damages to Black individuals, families, and communities totals $7.13 trillion--a sum equivalent to 85 percent of the current Black-White household wealth gap--McKay points to the urgency and feasibility of reparation and to the possibilities that lie beyond it"--Provided by publisher.

Historian Kerri Greenidge tells the story of William Monroe Trotter, a Black newspaper editor who was a forceful crusader for civil rights in the early 20th century. He built a national following in his time as a fierce advocate for the full citizenship rights that had been promised to former enslaved people after the Civil War. Trotter organized mass protests, confronted presidents, and openly challenged leaders such as Booker T. Washington who took a more cautious approach to Black empowerment. Greenidge's new book is called 'Black Radical.'

"The first comprehensive history of probation and parole-and a provocative and compelling argument for abolishing both-from the former Probation Commissioner of New York City"--

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are frequently seen as opposing forces in the struggle for civil rights, but Black Power scholar Dr. Peniel Joseph says the truth is more nuanced. His new book, 'The Sword and the Shield,' braids together the lives of the two civil rights revolutionaries.

Injustice, Inc. : how America's justice system commodifies children and the poor-book

Listen to this episode from Resistance on Spotify. In the low country of South Carolina the Gullah Geechee are engaged in a fight to preserve their land and determine their destiny. You can find the transcript for this episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"A groundbreaking look at how America exported mass incarceration around the globe, from a rising young historian"--

Michelle Singletary has an honest conversation about affirmative action. And, we take your questions about voting this year, starting with a listener in California.

"From the struggles of childhood abuse to becoming a female police officer, this book tells the story of a woman's journey through the male dominated world of law enforcement. Through this personal account and unique perspective, a better understanding of policing strengths and weaknesses is gained"--