The Washington Monthly

In a New York Times essay in late October 2012, Columbia University political scientist Frederick Harris wrote that Barack Obama's presidency has "marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality."...

On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] American crime rates, especially violent crime rates, and American incarceration rates are twin national disgraces. We have five times the homicide rate and five times the incarceration rate of other economically advanced...

The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent's Guide to Socioconomically Mixed Public Schools by Michael J. Petrilli Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 119 pp. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the decades following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown...

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine published an oft-cited and controversial report entitled Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. The report concluded that members of minority groups, even when fully insured,...

The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State by Michael Landis Dauber University of Chicago Press, 378 pp. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Among the notable events of 2012 were Hurricane Sandy and the Supreme...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Separated by a thousand miles, two state borders, and nearly six decades, two young African American boys met tragic fates that seem remarkably similar today: both walked into a small market to buy some candy; both ended up...

Imagine you got to choose whether to be born black or born white in America. Here are a few health statistics that might inform your decision: If you chose to be born white, your chances of dying of Parkinson's disease would be twice as likely as...

The Emancipation Proclamation was in many ways a tremendous step forward for human rights, but it didn't bring any new rights to Native Americans. In fact, Abraham Lincoln is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian tribes and...

Ten years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass found himself in a fight with fellow Republicans over the extent to which the party of Lincoln should demand the enforcement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and...

In January 1865, the famous General William Sherman met with Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war, and twenty black church leaders in his quarters in Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of the meeting was to decide how to provide for the thousands...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A couple of years ago, speaking to a bipartisan group of college students about the Emancipation Proclamation, President Barack Obama commented, half jokingly, that if the executive order were signed today, headlines would...

Affirmative action as we know it is dying. A growing number of states have moved to prohibit public universities from considering race in admissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments in an anti-affirmative action lawsuit that left...

Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign emphasizes the importance of physical activity for combating obesity, a point she has driven home by dancing alongside school kids to Beyonce's workout video. But another kind of movement may also be important...