Arcadia Public Library

When Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. She quickly realized that even with the best intentions, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; prosecuted differently; judged differently. She witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it. In exploring...

"Seldom does a book have the impact of The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been the winner of numerous awards and has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It has been cited in judicial decisions, read in countless faith-based and secular book clubs, and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads. Most important, it has inspired artists, philanthropists, policymakers, community leaders, and a...

"The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration."-- "Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves...

"How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court―and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color."--Amazon.

"We are better than this" has been the rallying cry since Donald Trump was elected. But as New York Times-bestselling author Mychal Denzel Smith shows, Americans are too comfortable imagining our greatness. We like to believe in the rightness of our path and the inevitability of choosing our better angels. But historically, we've only come close to living up to the ideals we profess after we've been dragged, kicking and screaming, toward justice....

"They didn't know who they had. So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one's life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam's seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we're all "born on purpose, with a purpose." Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being "run over by...

"The wrenching, and inspiring, story of a fourteen-year-old sentenced to life in prison, of the extraordinary relationship that developed between him and the woman he shot, and of his release after twenty-six years of imprisonment through the efforts of America's greatest contemporary legal activist, Bryan Stevenson. Here is the story of a poor black kid from the toughest neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, who at age eleven began "jacking" (stealing)...

" ... Reconstruction of the ... life of a wrongfully convicted man whose story becomes an historic portrait of the Jim Crow South"--

"On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, 'I can't breathe,' became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately...

On August 14, 2014, five days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown ignited race riots throughout the city of Ferguson, Missouri, the nation found an unlikely hero in Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol. Charged with the Herculean task of restoring peace between a hostile African American community and the local police, Johnson, a 30-year law enforcement veteran and an African American, did the unthinkable; he took off his bullet-proof...