By Doug Miller
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says it has concluded reinvestigations into 56 of 109 cold cases involving Civil Rights-related murders dating back to the 1940s, and acknowledges that for a variety of reasons – including the deaths of suspects and witnesses and the destruction of evidence – most of them are unlikely to result in prosecutions.

Today, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) commemorates the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a bill that remains a cornerstone feature of American democracy. The Act is widely considered one of the most successful and effective civil rights statutes ever passed by Congress and continues to play an important role in combating ongoing voting discrimination throughout our nation.

By Desiree Cooper
It’s interesting that while the black Civil Rights Movement looked to Gandhi as a model of social change, Dalits look to African-American militant movements.

By William L. Taylor
I have had the good fortune to be a participant, not just a spectator, in the enormous social transformations of American life that occurred during the last half of the twentieth century. I see the changes in my everyday life and in the status of people of color, women, and people with disabilities.

By Bruce Watson
In the summer of 1964, the civil rights movement was stalled.

A decade had passed since the team of attorneys from NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund had won Brown v. Board of Education, yet much of the South was still defying the landmark decision. Bombs, police dogs, and fire hoses had repelled marchers from Birmingham to St. Augustine, Florida. Martin Luther King, Jr. was reaching new heights of eloquence but he could not be everywhere at once. Something startling was needed to revive the movement. That something was Freedom Summer.

By John Payton
I realize when I say we’re a very racially diverse democracy, sometimes I say it in a way that makes it sound like a triumph; in fact, it’s a challenge.

By Lee A. Daniels
I’m a great believer in surveys. They’re a great way to take an accurate measurement of popular sentiment. But I learned a long time ago that the popular sentiment isn’t always morally correct.

In April Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court spoke at the New York Historical Society about the historical and present-day importance of the infamous Dred Scott decision, which played a critical role in bringing about the Civil War. We cannot think of a more fitting momemt to contemplate Justice Breyer’s words than on Memorial Day, which began in 1868 in the North as a day to pay homage to the Civil War dead.

By Lee A. Daniels
Paul revealed – again — that when it comes to protecting citizens from discrimination, libertarianism favors a policy of governmental benign neglect that would leave the targets of discrimination stranded in a vast, turbulent sea of injustice.

By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.
In New York State Thurgood Marshall Day –appropriately — also marks the anniversary of a great American milestone.