Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it”. As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.”Now, 10 years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a 10th-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.  Read more

From the prizewinning rising legal star, the deeply researched and definitive book on the way the media and police distract us from what matters“Alec Karakatsanis is a leading voice in the legal struggle to dismantle mass incarceration. . . . What he says cannot be ignored.”—James Forman‚ Jr.“Copaganda” is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.Copaganda is all around us. When you hear on the radio that crime is up when it’s actually down—that’s copaganda. When your local TV station obsessively focuses on shoplifting by poor people while ignoring crimes of wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution that harm far more people—that’s copaganda. When you hear on your daily podcast that there is a “shortage” of prison guards rather than too many people in prison—that’s copaganda. When your newspaper quotes an “expert” saying that more money for police, prosecutors, and prisons is the answer to violence despite scientific evidence to the contrary—that’s copaganda.Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on the criminal legal system and a featured guest on shows like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and The Breakfast Club, Karakatsanis brings his sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous personal storytelling to delve into one of the most critical topics in our society today. Read more

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"Clear. Accessible. Compelling." —Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers—one white, one Black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain.  When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.   Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity—a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.   In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. Using a multigenerational narrative, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits. Read more

In a nation where the Constitution should reign supreme, safeguarding the fundamental rights of its citizens, the contentious "Anti-Conversion Laws" have sparked fierce debate. Titled The Freedom of Religion Acts by various state legislatures, these laws aim to regulate religious conversions but raise critical questions about their alignment with India's constitutional ethos.In this meticulously researched thesis, G. Bibu delves into the heart of this controversy, examining whether these laws withstand the litmus test of constitutionality. With a focus on Article 25(1), which guarantees the right to practice, profess, and propagate religion, Bibu probes whether the right to convert is an inherent part of these freedoms. Through a rigorous analysis, he challenges the legitimacy of state interventions under the guise of public order, morality, and health, and scrutinizes provisions that may discriminate against minority faiths.This treatise is not just a legal inquiry but a clarion call for objectivity in a polarized discourse. Bibu navigates the complex interplay of law, religion, and equality, exposing the historical and social undercurrents that fuel resistance to religious conversion. A must-read for scholars, policymakers, and anyone passionate about upholding the spirit of India's secular democracy, this book dares to ask: Can laws restricting conversion truly coexist with the constitutional promise of freedom?"A compelling and fearless exploration of constitutional rights in the face of legislative overreach." Read more

Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History One of NPR's Books We Love in 2022 • Named a Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, and Publishers Weekly A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law?In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard. 25 black-and-white illustrations Read more

From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it “Usual Cruelty cuts to the core of what is critical to understand about our legal system, and about ourselves.” —Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLUAlec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums.He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional.Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it. Read more

This book reproduces in a convenient, slim volume the text of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended through P.L. 113-287, enacted December 19, 2014, as maintained by the Office of Legislative Counsel of the United States Congress as of July 26, 2019. This is an unofficial publication and is neither authorized nor endorsed by the United States Congress or any governmental body. Read more

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself is an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave, published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for its author. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book documents Jacobs's life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels "to address race and gender issues." She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away.In the book, Jacobs addresses White Northern women who fail to comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution. Read more

2023 Reprint of the 1961 Edition. The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African American road trippers. It was originated and published by African American mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966, during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans especially and other non-whites was widespread. Although pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging African American middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could, though they faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African Americans, eventually expanding its coverage from the New York area to much of North America, as well as founding a travel agency. Many Black Americans took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, "all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult." Black Americans employed as athletes, entertainers, and salesmen also traveled frequently for work purposes. Shortly after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed the types of racial discrimination that had made the Green Book necessary, publication ceased, and it fell into obscurity. There has been a revived interest in it in the early 21st century in connection with studies of black travel during the Jim Crow era. Read more

If You Are Interested in Black American History, You Will Love This Bonus!This unique 2-in-1 book compilation combines the impactful narratives of two essential works: Black American History and Crime in Black America. Each standalone book is a treasure trove of insights and revelations, shedding light on critical aspects of the Black experience in America.In Black American History, the reader is taken on a journey through the depths of slavery, the injustices of Jim Crow, and the pervasive effects of police misconduct. From the annals of known history to the shadows of the unknown, this book boldly asserts that the trials endured by Black people over centuries are not random occurrences but part of a deliberate campaign of systematic elimination.This book aims to equip those at the forefront of the fight for racial equality with a deeper understanding of their history and present circumstances, addressing common sentiments along the way.With its concise, straightforward language, this book is accessible to all readers, ensuring ease of comprehension and engagement.A clear call reverberates throughout these pages: Black America is in a State of Emergency, demanding collective action and solidarity from every quarter.Plus You Get This Bonus Book!Crime in Black America delves into the intricate web of causes behind urban crime, transcending traditional notions to encompass a broader spectrum of criminal activities. Through meticulous research, compelling statistics, and insightful charts, it unveils the myriad factors—from systemic domination to societal challenges—that contribute to the complex tapestry of crime in Black communities.This compelling compilation is more than just a literary endeavor; it is a powerful manifesto that confronts entrenched narratives and challenges preconceived notions. By examining the interplay between historical oppression and contemporary crime, it offers a profound understanding of the resilience and struggles of Black Americans.Through these pages, readers will gain a deeper appreciation for the resilience of a community that has endured centuries of adversity. They will come to understand that the stereotype of a disproportionately criminal Black population is not only misleading but a gross oversimplification of a complex social reality.In combining these two seminal works, this book aims to provoke thought, inspire dialogue, and ultimately pave the way for a more just and equitable society. It is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and a rallying cry for truth, justice, and understanding in the face of adversity.Draws from a variety of disciplines and sources to analyze the intricate influences shaping street crime, including systemic racism, white domination, black apathy, drugs, poverty, mental illness, American values, and the allure of crime profits.Advocates for personal accountability while addressing societal factors contributing to crime.Explores a spectrum of criminal activities beyond street crime, broadening the discussion to encompass various forms of wrongdoing.Examines the far-reaching impacts of crime on individuals, communities, and society at large, shedding light on its profound social and economic consequences.The quality of writing in this book is so exceptional that upon briefly flipping to any random page, you'll undoubtedly recognize it as the premier choice on the market for understanding crime in the Black community. Take action now! Read more

Loren Miller was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960s and successfully fought discrimination in housing and education. Alongside Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued two landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decisions effectively abolished racially restrictive housing covenants. One of these cases, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), is taught in nearly every American law school today. Later, the two men played key roles in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in public schools. Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and for the first time fully reveals his life for what it was: an extraordinary American story and a critical chapter in the annals of racial justice. Born to a former slave and a white midwesterner in 1903, Loren Miller lived the quintessential American success story, blazing his own path to rise from rural poverty to a position of power and influence. Author Amina Hassan reveals Miller as a fearless critic of those in power and an ardent debater whose acid wit was known to burn “holes in the toughest skin and eat right through double-talk, hypocrisy, and posturing.” As a freshly minted member of the bar who preferred political activism and writing to the law, Miller set out for Los Angeles from Kansas in 1929. Hassan describes his early career as a fiery radical journalist, as well as his ownership of the California Eagle, one of the longest-running African American newspapers in the West. In his work with the California branch of the ACLU, Miller sought to halt the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens, helped integrate the U.S. military and the Los Angeles Fire Department, and defended Black Muslims arrested in a deadly street battle with the LAPD. In 1964, Governor Edmund G. Brown appointed Miller as a Municipal Court justice for Los Angeles County, honoring his ceaseless commitment to improving the lives of Americans regardless of their race or ethnicity. “Either we shall have to make democracy work for every American,” Miller declared, or “we shall not be able to preserve it for any American.” The story told here is of an American original who defied societal limitations to reshape the racial and political landscape of twentieth-century America. Read more

Pulled over in America? When you're white, you might get a ticket. When you're black, you might end up dead. In a fictional Michigan town, a man is pulled over by the local police. The driver wonders: “What did I do wrong?” The officer asks for I.D.; the driver casually mentions he legally carries a gun. The officer panics—confusion reigns—shots ring out—an innocent man lays bleeding to death and the incident is captured on video. The shooting becomes the national headline—the dead man is black—the shooter is white. A community is thrown into chaos. Protestors on both sides of the racial divide take to the streets. A widow struggles to make sense of senseless tragedy. She turns to high-profile trial lawyer, Zachary Blake. Together, they dare to fight city hall. Will police lie to protect the status quo?"Small Great Things" meets "The Hate U Give" in Mark M. Bello's explosive new social justice legal thriller, Betrayal in Black. Read more

"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground." ―Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review"Passionate and well researched." ―Louis Menand, The New YorkerThe epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs―and the defeat of desegregation in the North.In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools―and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight―and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate―and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures―including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise. Read more

Argues that racial inequality reproduces itself automatically over time because early unfair advantage for whites has paved the way for continuing advantageThis book is designed to change the way we think about racial inequality. Long after the passage of civil rights laws, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why have we made so little progress?Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial inequality lives on because white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disciplines, Roithmayr brilliantly compares the dynamics of white advantage to the unfair tactics of giants like AT&T and Microsoft.With penetrating insight, Roithmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in positive feedback loops that connect the dramatic disparity of Jim Crow to modern racial gaps in jobs, housing and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors. Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers immediately take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system. Read more

"Powerful and important . . . an instant classic." ―The Washington Post Book WorldThe award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the authorIn this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"―almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome―that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face "second-generation sundown town issues," such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force. Read more

Reader-friendly, jargon-free guide to legal issues all college faculty need to know so that they can make teaching decisions within the bounds of the law. Read more

White by Law was published in 1996 to immense critical acclaim, and established Ian Haney López as one of the most exciting and talented young minds in the legal academy. The first book to fully explore the social and specifically legal construction of race, White by Law inspired a generation of critical race theorists and others interested in the intersection of race and law in American society. Today, it is used and cited widely by not only legal scholars but many others interested in race, ethnicity, culture, politics, gender, and similar socially fabricated facets of American society.In the first edition of White by Law, Haney López traced the reasoning employed by the courts in their efforts to justify the whiteness of some and the non-whiteness of others, and revealed the criteria that were used, often arbitrarily, to determine whiteness, and thus citizenship: skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and, most importantly, popular opinion.Ten years later, Haney López revisits the legal construction of race, and argues that current race law has spawned a troubling racial ideology that perpetuates inequality under a new guise: colorblind white dominance. In a new, original essay written specifically for the 10th anniversary edition, he explores this racial paradigm and explains how it contributes to a system of white racial privilege socially and legally defended by restrictive definitions of what counts as race and as racism, and what doesn't, in the eyes of the law. The book also includes a new preface, in which Haney Lopez considers how his own personal experiences with white racial privilege helped engender White by Law. Read more

In our era of mass incarceration, gun violence, and Black Lives Matters, a handbook showing how racial justice and restorative justice can transform the African-American experience in America.This timely work will inform scholars and practitioners on the subjects of pervasive racial inequity and the healing offered by restorative justice practices. Addressing the intersectionality of race and the US criminal justice system, social activist Fania E. Davis explores how restorative justice has the capacity to disrupt patterns of mass incarceration through effective, equitable, and transformative approaches. Eager to break the still-pervasive, centuries-long cycles of racial prejudice and trauma in America, Davis unites the racial justice and restorative justice movements, aspiring to increase awareness of deep-seated problems as well as positive action toward change.Davis highlights real restorative justice initiatives that function from a racial justice perspective; these programs are utilized in schools, justice systems, and communities, intentionally seeking to ameliorate racial disparities and systemic inequities. Chapters include:Chapter 1: The Journey to Racial Justice and Restorative JusticeChapter 2: Ubuntu: The Indigenous Ethos of Restorative JusticeChapter 3: Integrating Racial Justice and Restorative JusticeChapter 4: Race, Restorative Justice, and SchoolsChapter 5: Restorative Justice and Transforming Mass IncarcerationChapter 6: Toward a Racial Reckoning: Imagining a Truth Process for Police ViolenceChapter 7: A Way ForwardShe looks at initiatives that strive to address the historical harms against African Americans throughout the nation. This newest addition the Justice and Peacebuilding series is a much needed and long overdue examination of the issue of race in America as well as a beacon of hope as we learn to work together to repair damage, change perspectives, and strive to do better. Read more