Barbara Bush Changed With Her Country
The former first lady was notably eager to learn about people she didn’t understand—and recognize she might have been wrong about them.
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'When Times Get Tough, People Make Tough Choices'
An emotional film gets up close and personal with a family torn apart by recidivism.
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Steve Schapiro How Martin Luther King Jr. Recruited John Lewis
The Georgia congressman on what it was like to know the iconic activist
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AP ‘Martin Luther King Jr.’s Unfinished Work on Earth Must Truly Be Our Own’
Five days after King was assassinated, his “spiritual mentor” Benjamin Mays delivered a eulogy for his former student.
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Bettmann / Getty The Riots That Followed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, one day before his assassination. After this champion of nonviolent protest was murdered, riots broke out in more than 100 cities across the U.S.
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Bettmann / Getty How the Civil-Rights Movement Aimed to End Poverty
“A Freedom Budget for All Americans” proposed spending billions of federal dollars to provide jobs and basic welfare to all citizens.
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Jim Peppler / Alabama Department of Archives and … Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call For a Poor People’s Campaign
In early 1968, the activist planned a massive protest in the nation’s capital.
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Three Lions / Getty The Crisis in America’s Cities
Martin Luther King Jr. on what sparked the violent urban riots of the “long hot summer” of 1967
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Jill Freedman / Getty America’s Moral Malady
The nation’s problem isn’t that we don’t have enough money. It’s that we don’t have the moral capacity to face what ails society.
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Steve Schapiro / Corbis / Getty Read Martin Luther King Jr. on White America’s Delusions
In 1967, the civil-rights leader foresaw that white resistance to racial equality would stiffen as activists’ economic agenda grew more ambitious.
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Radio Atlantic: King Remembered
Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, and then America created a version of him that it could love.
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The Hopeful Face of Middle America
Youth across America’s heartland express their hopes, fears, and desires for the future of the nation.
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Reuters / Tami Chappell One of the Biggest and Most Boring Cyberattacks Against an American City Yet
A recent ransomware attack on Atlanta’s computer systems is disruptive, but so ordinary.
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Kevin Mazur / Getty Today's Rebels Are Model Children
The young protesters now on the march are responsible and mature—and they’re asking adults to grow up.
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Kiichiro Sato / AP Chicago’s Awful Divide
Americans are flocking to big cities to find good jobs—opportunities that remain disproportionately out of reach for the poorest residents already living there.
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Joshua Roberts / Reuters The Supreme Court's Choice on Partisan Gerrymandering
Two cases offer very different solutions to a perennial problem of politicians attempting to cement themselves in power.
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Paul Sancya / AP The Problems at Michigan State Went Far Beyond Larry Nassar
Allegations of sexual harassment against the dean who supervised Nassar reveal why decades of complaints weren't dealt with more aggressively.
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Katie Martin / The Atlantic Our Back Pages: The Atlantic and Civil Rights
In preparing this special issue on Dr. King and his legacy, we scoured the magazine’s pages looking for articles that might give historical context to the struggle for which he lived and died.
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Bettman / Getty ‘Let My People Vote’
In June 1965, the Voting Rights Act languished in the House Rules Committee after passage in the Senate. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this letter to the New York Amsterdam News urging its passage as the first step in ensuring access to the ballot.
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Why Are So Many Women Dying From Pregnancy in D.C.?
The maternity care desert in the capital is a microcosm of a national crisis.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters The People Trump's War on Drugs Will Actually Punish
His campaign, backed by the Justice Department, only reinforces a law-enforcement paradigm that puts people of color in prison.
