Justice Project

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

The brutal murder of 16-year-old Kelly Braden sends shock waves through a community - and an intellectually disabled man to jail. The only witness to Kelly's murder is the five-year-old cousin she was babysitting. The young girl names their neighbor, Jack Osgood, as the bat-wielding criminal. Two decades later, Osgood faces execution.

Seven years ago, Winston Melton was on top of the world: a privileged kid fresh off his first semester at Princeton. Life was perfect - until he was accused of the rape and murder of an ex-girlfriend. Years after his conviction, another death-row inmate has come forward with an 11th-hour confession, casting Win's conviction in a new light. But with the ink drying on his death sentence, time is running short.

When a devastating house fire kills three young children, Becky Whitlaw, grieving widow and mother, is the prime suspect. Inspectors of criminal arson cases determine the blaze was intentional, and Becky is charged and convicted. Twenty years later, she waits on death row. Attorney Dani Trumball lives in California and continues to work for the Help Innocent Prisoners Project - an organization where attorneys help innocent prisoners get justice.

Powell and Silverglate shine a light on the defects of the federal criminal-justice system: overzealous prosecutors, perjury traps, negligent judges, perverse limits on self-defense, vague and overabundant criminal statutes, insufficient requirements for criminal intent, and no accountability for prosecutors. Most important, they provide a much-needed blueprint for reforming the Department of Justice and the criminal-justice system, including actions an average citizen can take to help restore justice.

A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars—members of the Reparations Planning Committee—who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward.

In 2015, the historian Chris Momany helped discover a manuscript that had been forgotten in a storage closet at Adrian College in Michigan. He identified it as the journal of a nineteenth-century Christian abolitionist and missionary, David Ingraham. As Momany and a fellow historian Doug Strong pored over the diary, they realized that studying this document could open new conversations for twenty-first-century Christians to address the reality of racism today. They invited a multiracial team of fourteen scholars to join in, thus launching the Dialogue on Race and Faith Project.

To be a great leader, you must be able to unite people from all backgrounds with seemingly competing agendas to come together under a common cause. Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans and current president and CEO of the National Urban League, has been such a leader and shares the lessons he learned along a legendary journey of achievement.