Politics and Prose Presents

It began with a name. Sancho. Gleaned from the memory of his oldest living relative, that name set author Keith Rushing on a quest to recover his family's story. Rushing came to learn that Sancho was an African name, a common practice among the Gullah-Geechee communities of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands. He found that Sancho had been born into slavery on Hilton Head Island and later fought as a soldier in a war for self-emancipation. Rushing learned that after that war Sancho had become a small landowner. Above all, he discovered that his family's story was richer than he had ever imagined.

In Descended, Rushing recounts his own journey of discovery, and in the process unfurls a dramatic story about the transformation of Hilton Head. Descended is a story about family, place, and the desire to understand where we have been and where we are going.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781643365626?ic_referral=c8HrEJW1Cn9C7fl5hvN4A6bxd9g-OYQJ8WekJAzoT58wMynmJnyNBcN9354VCivXpuj8kKgZSE1TYyZOJOAf2jgBHd2rlikhJ6FX_9IQFdIdhyGmza-geO6Kfj6iNDNcxM5_bg

Keith Rushing is a former reporter who worked at newspapers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California and now works as a communications strategist for an environmental nongovernmental organization.

Rushing is in conversation with Rion Amilcar Scott, the author of the story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His debut story collection, Insurrections, was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in The New Yorker and a number of literary journals. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

*recorded 4/30/2025

This event is in partnership with the 1882 Foundation’s Talk Story program. The 1882 Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising public awareness about Asian American history and the continuing impact of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act–the only piece of legislation to bar a specific group from entering the United States. Since 2013, the Talk Story Series has been one of the 1882 Foundation’s staple programs. Through Talk Story events, the Foundation provides space for people to share the history, culture, and personal experiences of Asian American individuals and communities.  

In 1889, while upholding the latest in a series of exclusionary laws targeting Chinese immigrants, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as "impossible to assimilate with our people" and "strangers in the land." Today, there are twenty-four million people of Asian descent in the United States, and yet, as Luo observes in his riveting, sorrowful narrative, the question of belonging still trails them.

Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan­--Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed the Chinese arrivals, but as their numbers grew on the Pacific coast, sentiment shifted and horrific episodes of racial violence erupted. A prolonged economic downturn that commenced in the mid-eighteen-seventies and idled legions of white working men helped create the conditions for what came next: federal legislation aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country. It marked the first time the United States barred a people from immigrating based on their race. Violence soon crested. Luo documents the driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West, a shameful and little-known chapter of American history.

Luo follows the Chinese in America as they persisted amidst suspicion and as a native-born population took shape. Finally, in 1965, America's gates swung open to people like his parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Strangers in the Land is an epic history of exclusion, belonging, and the complications of America's multiracial democracy.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780385548571?ic_referral=6ZfzQn4hOWHRcru9cPP5hNTCuJ7Njnoc09cBMwnY_S8wM0Q1Z1PcT6O6IXOb6cxOVdPZUYdpA8zvJp2V8V1IFm1AxrCesuSuzDYVO3shBzefAt38l8UpAGet9-5yWVeRO3eM2Nk

Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker and writes regularly for the magazine on politics, religion, and Asian American issues. He joined The New Yorker in 2016. Before that, he spent thirteen years at the New York Times, as a metro reporter, national correspondent, and investigative reporter and editor. He is a recipient of a George Polk Award and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists.

Luo is in conversation with Jia Lynn Yang, the National editor at The New York Times, where she has worked since 2017. She is also the author of One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, a political history of the landmark immigration law that allowed her family to settle in this country. The book was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Excellence for Nonfiction in 2021.

*recorded 4/30/2025

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work--and why it matters.

To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals.

Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC's AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel's war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today's world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation.

By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593854259?ic_referral=vcTfMPNgyhKHgkv4AKLUctufllXr_zm771xoo9qxzlswM0fndbtXoezAgLk67dv3qdcM-6grHAks2S7rkRsbpVssRl60Tk71s7V5EOwezgHHjgb-qMRHpedYbyXfs5VBcF7PdA

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. Her books include Gentrification of the Mind, Conflict Is Not Abuse, and Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993 and the novels The Cosmopolitans and Maggie Terry. Schulman's honors include a Fulbright in Judaic Studies, a Guggenheim in Playwriting, and honors from Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, NLGJA, the American Library Association, and others. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Schulman holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Northwestern University and is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Schulman is in conversation with Gwydion Suilebhan, a cultural critic, journalist, and playwright. A lifelong arts advocate, he serves as both the Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and the Project Director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network. With co-author Steven Gimbel, Suilebhan writes about comedy, politics, and philosophy for Salon, Moment, and USA Today, among other publications. Together, they are working on a social history of Jewish American comedy. As a playwright, Suilebhan’s writing has been noted for its “dexterous theatricality and unexpected pleasure” (Washington Post).

*recorded 4/29/2025

Ella Jenkins is one of the most influential musicians you've never heard of--her songs "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song" and "Who Fed the Chickens?" are classics in the world of children's music. In a career spanning more than sixty years, she recorded forty albums, won a lifetime-achievement Grammy, and became the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Records, the independent label that played a significant role in the 1960s folk revival movement and introduced listeners to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. During her remarkable career, Jenkins joined forces with twentieth-century luminaries such as Odetta, Big Bill Broonzy, Armando Peraza, Bayard Rustin, and Fred Rogers. Despite her wide-reaching influence on children's music, Ella Jenkins's sonic civil rights activism isn't widely known today.

Based on dozens of interviews and access to Ella Jenkins's personal archives, Gayle F. Wald's This Is Rhythm shares how Jenkins, a "rhythm specialist" with no formal musical training, became the most prolific and significant American children's musician of the twentieth century, creating a beloved catalog of songs grounded in values of community-building, antiracism, and cultural pluralism. Wald traces how the daughter of southern migrants translated the music of her own Black girlhood on the South Side of Chicago into a form of civil rights activism--a musical education that empowered children by introducing them to Black history, African diasporic rhythms, and a participatory, community-centered approach to music. Wald also discusses how, beginning in 1961, Jenkins built a life with a female partner who supported her materially and emotionally. Although Jenkins did not talk publicly about her sixty-three-year relationship, she opened up to Wald, offering insight into how a "private" Black woman in the public eye negotiated sexuality in an era before gay and lesbian liberation movements. Throughout her career, her innovative music found its way into thousands of community centers, classrooms, and concert venues, and her "call-and-response" method has influenced and empowered generations of children and adults.

A beautifully written tribute to Ella Jenkins's legacy, this biography illustrates her impact on children's music and expands our understanding of folk music's relationship with social justice. Jenkins used music to build a new world in which children--and adults--are encouraged to listen to each other's distinct rhythms.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226824819?ic_referral=bmSR2AOAlFDeEZ1wX1aEp2kp_4d2xBao2NEYOHesSsswMwuQAUiIN9ZW4m-jAY-JGSYj_hVAgbODBH_DsxDeouQAYf9yAF8uttMMnwanc9ZcIAZAcnGSOWEzDNypSNw-tn_7JA

Gayle F. Wald is professor of American Studies at George Washington University. She is the author of three previous books, including Shout, Sister, Shout! the acclaimed biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and It's Been Beautiful, a study of the groundbreaking Black Power TV program Soul! 

Wald is in conversation with Emmy-winning journalist Michel Martin, host of "Morning Edition." Previously, she was the weekend host of All Things Considered and host of the Consider This Saturday podcast.  Martin currently serves as a contributor for PBS’s Amanpour & Company. Her previous credits include ABC News, Nightline, as well as covering politics for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Martin has been honored by numerous organizations, including the Candace Award for Communications from The National Coalition of 100 Black Women. Martin graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College at Harvard University in 1980 and earned a Master of Arts from the Wesley Theological Seminary in 2016. In 2019, Martin was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in journalism.

*recorded 4/27/2025

What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot's characters in Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done?

To answer this question, Hensley shows that nineteenth-century writers and artists devised new ways to understand action--and hope. They rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. They turned away from logical proofs and direct argumentation and instead called on aesthetic technologies like sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches, and vast, multiplot novels, finding scope for action not at the level of the theme or the thesis but in gestures and details. Ranging from J. M. W. Turner's painterly technique to Emily Brontë's dreamlike fragments (and reading along the way works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Berryman, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti), Hensley's study makes an important contribution to Victorian studies and the environmental humanities.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226838069?ic_referral=RPUhJp6TXeENGRFnCBOicU2QVBIA_lV3mb880PLWpKQwMzB6pV-LVTj6RDZn8J-6Q2-S6MyXVMtb-iRATM70b0xvLXtiIUH0DBmigD-5HZJfDmIp0LJ5wQ4BHSOJXL4EriWUGM8

Nathan K. Hensley is associate professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty and coeditor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. He was born in Fresno, California and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Hensley is in conversation with Rabih Alameddine. Alameddine is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, most recently The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press, 2021), winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize in 2022. He is also the author of The Angel of History (Grove Press, 2016), winner of the Lambda Literary Award 2017; An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); Koolaids (Picador, 1999); and a collection of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Harold Washington Literary Award in 2018, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2019, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and recently, a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University and the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. Alameddine is currently the Lannan Foundation Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.

*recorded 4/27/2025

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as "baptism on repeat." Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life's fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: "not dying, but molting." 

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Dear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility. Exploring relationships between modernism, motherhood, poetry, and privilege, the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious, funny, and wry, Julie Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now, imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. As we struggle to marry creative independence with our communal obligations, the questions in these poems are more urgent than ever. Stevens, a proxy for beauty, inventiveness, and legitimacy, becomes an audience for the ennui, anxiety, and politics of care that characterize another kind of writer's life today.

Julie Choffel is an assistant professor in English at the University of Connecticut, Hartford. She is the author of The Hello Delay. 

Bravo and Choffel will be in conversation with María Fernanda (she/hers), the founder of a poetry garden, the series where Black poets and gardeners discuss historic connections to gardens. Awarded The Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing, her poetry appears in Cheryl Clarke's born in a bed of good lessons inspired by Lucille Clifton, Cave Canem's Dogbytes, and elsewhere. Learn more about her poetry and workshops at mariafernandapoet.com.

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/bravo-choffel

*recorded 4/26/2025

Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature's pharmacy to heal themselves. Doctors by Nature reveals what researchers are now learning about the medical wonders of the animal world. In this visionary book, Jaap de Roode argues that we have underestimated the healing potential of nature for too long and shows how the study of self-medicating animals could impact the practice of human medicine.

Drawing on illuminating interviews with leading scientists from around the globe as well as his own pioneering research on monarch butterflies, de Roode demonstrates how animals of all kinds--from ants to apes, from bees to bears, and from cats to caterpillars--use various forms of medicine to treat their own ailments and those of their relatives. We meet apes that swallow leaves to dislodge worms, sparrows that use cigarette butts to repel parasites, and bees that incorporate sticky resin into their hives to combat pathogens. De Roode asks whether these astonishing behaviors are learned or innate and explains why, now more than ever, we need to apply the lessons from medicating animals--it can pave the way for healthier livestock, more sustainable habitats for wild pollinators, and a host of other benefits.

Doctors by Nature takes readers into a realm often thought to be the exclusive domain of humans, exploring how scientists are turning to the medical knowledge of the animal kingdom to improve agriculture, create better lives for our pets, and develop new pharmaceutical drugs.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691239248?ic_referral=EYd1VegJA5Zdajd1gDdt2K_dTfBy3EddmqdUyLY03qgwM3JNXi6QrKGgWyTM9yoQHRGfSUHM70vQBgS2T-WveamX1Hkwm170jcUTMdYui_-yGNXF869VZLtfm_dXbHn9V7nDFg

Jaap de Roode is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology at Emory University, where he is director of the Infectious Diseases across Scales Training Program, which trains graduate students in interdisciplinary science to study and control infectious disease.

*recorded 4/25/2025

For many decades, a sacred myth has ruled the minds of policymakers and business leaders: free markets, untouched by the soiled hands of government, bring us prosperity and stability. But it's wrong. American policy makers, on the right and the left, have spent much of the past century actively shaping our markets for social and political goals. Their work behind the scenes and out of the headlines has served as a kind of "marketcraft," resembling the statecraft of international relations.

Economist and writer Chris Hughes takes us on a journey through the modern history of American capitalism, relating the captivating stories of the most effective marketcrafters and the ones who bungled the job. He reveals how both Republicans and Democrats have consistently attempted to organize markets for social and political reasons, like avoiding gasoline shortages, reducing inflation, fostering the American aviation and semiconductor industries, fighting climate change, and supporting financial innovation.

In recent decades, the art of marketcraft has been lost to history, replaced by the myth that markets work best when they are unfettered and free. Hughes argues that by rediscovering the triumphs and failures of past marketcrafters, we can shape future markets, such as those in artificial intelligence and clean power production, to be innovative, stable, and inclusive. Groundbreaking, timely, and illuminating, this is a must-read for anyone interested in economic policy, financial markets, and the future of the American economy.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668050170?ic_referral=H1ydKIk19VF5RGz9zwmwR34qAyHufLIGkXfOOUTMsFMwM7ZliSQr8KDZWONCDmiZtxbv5iBgL4Hn9i5ZnPUmHmk5JoSeBtQFp7piuU6N2kMY-nLQpDQvF6MLjTMqdZuYf9f6vA

Chris Hughes is an economist and author who now serves as Chair of the Economic Security Project, a leading nonprofit advocating for economic power for all Americans. His writing has been published by The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. Hughes was a cofounder of Facebook and is a frequent guest on television and radio. He is the author of Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn and Marketcrafters. He lives in New York City with his family.

Hughes is in conversation with Zachary D. Carter, a columnist at Slate, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes —a New York Times bestseller that won the Arthur Ross Book Award and the Sydney Hillman Book Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets, and he has served as a judge on the Pulitzer Prize biography committee. He lives in Maryland with his wife, two children, and a blind dog.

*recorded 4/23/2025

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA's most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world.

Following an early career marked by exciting escapades as a key World War II spy under General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, Wisner quickly rose through the postwar intelligence ranks to lead a newly created top-secret unit tasked--under little oversight--with overseeing massive propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, and guerrilla operations all over the world, including such daring initiatives as the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala.

But simultaneously, Wisner faced a demon few at the time understood: bipolar disorder. When this debilitating disease resulted in his breakdown and transfer to a mental hospital, the repercussions were felt throughout Washington's highest levels of power.

Waller's sensitive and exhaustively researched biography is the riveting story of both Frank Wisner as a national figure who inspired a cadre of future CIA secret warriors, and also an intimate and empathetic portrait of a man whose harrowing struggle with bipolar disorder makes his impressive accomplishments on the world stage even more remarkable.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593184424?ic_referral=c8_7HEw0TLkvS1YkMOzZSZo5Jb3Ff1WHnNHPG5Ao1lYwM33Iay31B-j2x8CFqZJXSC4p4RnPa8BBs3kOZFj9ZCUUNHATJt3lqlgTsch-aZ54nZlx-DLz5r7__J9ZgzBWxhRWcg

Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He has authored seven books on the military and intelligence, including the New York Times bestseller Wild Bill Donovan. Waller lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Judy.

*recorded 4/11/2025

For decades America's colleges and universities have been working to increase racial diversity. But they have been using the wrong approach, as Richard Kahlenberg persuasively shows in his highly personal and deeply researched book. Kahlenberg makes the definitive case that class disadvantage, rather than race, should be the determining factor for how a broader array of people "get in."

While elite universities claim to be on the side of social justice, the dirty secret of higher education is that the perennial focus on racial diversity has provided cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. By fixing the class bias in college admissions we can begin to rectify America's skyrocketing economic inequality and class antagonism, giving more people a better place at the table as they move through life and more opportunity to "swim in the river of power."

Kahlenberg has long worked with prominent civil rights leaders on housing and school integration. But his recognition of class inequality in American higher education led to his making a controversial decision to go over to the "other side" and provide research and testimony in cases that helped lead to the controversial Supreme Court decision of 2023 that ended racial preferences. That conservative ruling could, Kahlenberg shows, paradoxically have a progressive policy outcome by cutting a new path for economic and racial diversity alike - and greater fairness. 

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781541704237?ic_referral=-8_G6GAm721Mb-krDQLK2HB0G-FU-Lsma2yEhT9XOQcwM90_NOJj4JBjP5YeaEFPESEr1q5t9jEpUxOtuMKc6rj2CNBiDHmegrDTGlwscldulh69C9lmFlkE8SSnDzUpqFAg6l8

Richard D. Kahlenberg is director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and teaches at George Washington University. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of 18 other books, most recently Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See. He lives in Rockville, Maryland. 

Kahlenberg is in conversation with John C. Brittain. Brittain joined the faculty of the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, in 2009, as a tenured professor of law, and served as Acting Dean from 2018 to 2019. Prior to joining UDC Law, he served as Dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of law at Texas Southern University in Houston, as a tenured law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law for twenty-two years, and as Chief Counsel and Senior Deputy Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., a public interest law organization founded by President John F. Kennedy to enlist private lawyers in taking pro bono cases in civil rights.

*recorded 4/26/2025