By Nicholas Lemann
“On Easter Sunday, when the Christian world was chanting anthems in commemoration of the resurrection of the world’s Redeemer, when from every sanctuary the gospel of love and peace was proclaimed, it was then that angels veiled their faces, and devils howled at the bloody and revolting scenes that were enacted on the banks of the Red River.”

By David Levering Lewis
February is the month of America’s emancipators. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, emancipator of African-American citizenship, was born February 23, 1868. Du Bois’s eloquent turn-of-the-century meditation, The Souls of Black Folk, explained Americans of color to themselves with a saliency that still inspires and defines them today.

By The Editors
Before Barack Obama became the first black and the 44th President of the United States, Richard Pryor portrayed the 40th Commander-in-Chief on his comedy show.

The Story Behind the Photo:
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett, a 17 year-old white woman living in central Florida’s Lake County, reported that she had been attacked and raped by four black teenagers. Local white citizens vowed to “wait and see what the law does, and if the law doesn’t do it right, we’ll do it.”

The Story Behind the Photo: In 1940s American society, there was an unwritten rule that a black man could be lynched for transgressing certain social boundaries with white women, including touching a white woman or looking one in the face.  But in the 1943 photograph shown above, civil rights activist and labor leader A. Philip [...]

The Story Behind the Photo In September of 1950, Gregory Hayes Swanson (center) registers for classes at the University of Virginia Law School.  Swanson was the first African American student to be admitted to the University of Virginia Law School in its 131-year history. Four years before the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. [...]

The Story Behind the Photo: On July 15, 1963, photographer Bill Hudson snapped this photograph as members of the Birmingham Fire Department turned their hoses full force on civil rights demonstrators.  It wasn’t the first time that Hudson and other photographers and cameramen of the era captured such striking images that stirred the nation’s moral [...]

Oliver Hill provides a glimpse into his extraordinary life in his own words.

The Story Behind The Photos: In this week’s issue of TheDefendersOnline we are featuring the 1971 firebombing of former LDF Director-Counsel Julius Chambers’ law office in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. A fire, believed to have been deliberately set at about 4:30 in the morning on February 5th, gutted the offices belonging to Chambers and his [...]

By Stacey Patton
In this premier issue of The Defenders Online, it is fitting for us to pay tribute to Oliver White Hill, Sr., a man who spent nearly a century fighting for equality and justice for all.  He died last August in his Richmond home at age 100.