Showing results for "Struggle for Freedom" in Politics & Activism

When the bodies of two Black men were found sitting with a crackpipe in a parked car in a rundown section of town in 1994, it seemed just another day in Kansas City, Kansas. The swift arrest and conviction of a seventeen-year-old Black kid from a broken home raised no eyebrows either. And yet, thirty years later, Lamonte McIntyre would prove to be the David that took down the Goliath of corruption that had long controlled the city’s power structure and enveloped the city’s justice system.

Master storyteller and bestselling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln—two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin. John Brown was a charismatic and deeply religious man who heard...

Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his "depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness." Until now, his story has been largely untold. In this book, R. J. M. Blackett brings light to Ward's life and his important role in the struggle against slavery and discrimination, and to the personal price he paid for confronting oppression.

In January of 1950, Mary Church Terrell, an 86-year-old charter member of the NAACP, headed into Thompson’s Restaurant, just a few blocks from the White House, and requested to be served. She and her companions were informed by the manager that they could not eat in his establishment, because they were “colored.” Terrell, a former suffragette and one of the country’s first college-educated African-American women, took the matter to court. Three years later, the Supreme Court vindicated her outrage: District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc. was decided in 1953.