**The book that inspired the documentary A Crime on the Bayou2021 Chautauqua Prize Finalist**The "arresting, astonishing history" of one lawyer and his defendant who together achieved a "civil rights milestone" (Justin Driver).In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a wh...

**Finalist for 2021 Audie Award in History/BiographyThe book that inspired the documentary A Crime on the Bayou2021 Chautauqua Prize Finalist**The "arresting, astonishing history" of one lawyer and his defendant who together achieved a "civil rights milestone" (Justin Driver).In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes ...

“We can no longer see ourselves as minor spectators or weary watchers of history after finishing this astonishing work of nonfiction.” —Kiese Laymon, author of HeavyConnor Towne O’Neill’s journey onto the battlefield of white supremacy began with a visit to Selma, Alabama, in 2015. There he had a chance encounter with a group of people preparing to erect a statue to celebrate the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most notorious Confederate gener...

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, whose 50-year-career as a journalist put her in the forefront of the fight for social justice, offers a comprehensive view of racial relations and the media in the U.S.Most civil rights victories are achieved behind the scenes, and this riveting, beautifully written memoir by a "black first" looks back with searing insight on the decades of struggle, friendship, courage, humor and savvy that secured what seems commonplace today-people of col...

A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it.Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charlest...

An American fighter pilot doomed to die in Buchenwald but determined to survive.On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his forty-fourth combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 170 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story.Moser was just twenty-two years old, a farm boy from W...

This "crucial" (The Advocate) and "compelling" (BuzzFeed) history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of individu...

One of Buzzfeed's 24 New Books We Couldn’t Put Down“One of the smartest young writers of her generation.”—Book RiotFrom the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing—a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with”—comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the ...

**The gripping tale of three Sudanese boys who were driven from their homes by civil war and began an epic odyssey of survival, ultimately finding their way to a new life in America.“A moving, beautifully written account, by turns raw and tender.” —Los Angeles Times**1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of other young boys known as the Lost Boys, took flight from the massacres of Sudan’s civil war. They set out in search of refuge wit...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history-the Ku Klux Klan.On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. The...

From a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura comes a fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms.For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one reason to take the train all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota—one sure to garner disapproval from fellow passengers. On the American frontier, the new state...

**Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPRThis inspirational memoir serves as a call to action from prison reform activist Yusef Salaam, of the Exonerated Five, to turn our stories into tools for change in the pursuit of racial justice.**They didn't know who they had. So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one's life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam's seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew fr...