Civil Rights

   
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The Birth of Free Agency

The drama of modern free agency has become as much a part of professional sports as the games themselves. But it wasn’t always that way. Today’s free agents owe a big debt of gratitude to Curt Flood.
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Athletes vs. Injustice: Protests in Sports

When N.F.L. players, starting with Colin Kaepernick, took a knee during the National Anthem to protest they ignited an uproar over injecting politics onto the playing field.
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How an Underground Abortion Network Got Started

It started with one request. A friend's sister was pregnant and suicidal. Before long a clandestine group called Jane was created to help women in Chicago with illegal abortions.
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Operation Ceasefire: Inside a Community's Radical Approach to Gang Violence

Our latest collaboration with The New Yorker, tells the story of cops, African-American pastors, gang members, and academics coming together to create positive change for Boston, while upending notions of traditional policing in a way that is especially pertinent today.
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Trump Administration Sued for Torpedoing Enforcement of Landmark Housing Law

Ben Carson, Secretary of HUD, is being sued for not enforcing the Fair Housing Act -- landmark legislation that was passed 50 years ago during the Civil Rights era.
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Gerrymandering's Surprising History and Uncertain Future

Both political parties have always played the redistricting game. But some of today’s battles have roots in a civil rights case decided by the Supreme Court 30 years ago.
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Louis Armstrong And The Black Celebrity's Dilemma

As America's jazz icon, Louis Armstrong was seen as a smiling, easygoing entertainer. But in 1957, he invited controversy by speaking forcefully on behalf of his fellow African Americans, putting him in a position familiar to many black athletes today.
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What Jesse Owens's Story Tells Us About Sports and Politics

This season, NFL players have been derided for injecting politics into the country's favorite sport. But, when convenient, America has also celebrated black athletes for acting as political emissaries.
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How Zero Tolerance Blurred the Lines Between Schools and Criminal Justice

Over the last 30 years, schools across the country have enacted tough new discipline policies. Some of those schools say they went too far.
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Fair Housing

Has the government done enough to stop housing discrimination?
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Where Does the American Dream Live?

How a little-known public housing program from the 1970s is changing housing policy today.
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Welfare and the Politics of Poverty

Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare reform was supposed to move needy families off government handouts and onto a path out of poverty. Twenty years later, how has it turned out?
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Transgender Rights: A Decades-long Struggle for Equality

This #PrideMonth, 50 years after Stonewall, many transgender people are still struggling for inclusion, even amongst the LGBT community.
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How Geography Drove MLK's Fight for a Ferry in Alabama

Weeks before Selma's Bloody Sunday in 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged residents of Gee's Bend, Ala., to vote, and fed a continuing fight over a small ferry that would last for decades.
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The Superpredator Scare

In the mid-1990s, after a decade of soaring juvenile crime, some social scientists warned the violence would only get worse. Reality proved otherwise.
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Stealing J. Edgar Hoover's Secrets

Long before Edward Snowden, there was the greatest heist you've never heard of. On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.
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The Battle For Busing

A story of America's school integration and what happened when the buses stopped rolling.