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RFK Human Rights Book Club
For the past four years, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights has hosted quarterly virtual book club conversations to engage our members, amplify social justice activists, authors, and journalists, and provide a deep dive into our work. Register for our upcoming gatherings below, or watch recordings of our past events.
Upcoming Conversations
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RFKHR Book Club: ‘Conscience Incorporated,’ by Michael Posner
Amid growing international concerns about income inequality, labor abuses, racial injustice, and disinformation online, Conscience Incorporated examines the gaps in current corporate social responsibility measures and what more needs to be done to address these challenges.
Past Conversations
The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America
RFK Human Rights’ November 14 book club conversation featured Clara Bingham, author of The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America. Through the captivating individual voices of the people who lived it, The Movement takes the audience through a decade of public and private protest, organizing and agitating that expanded the potential for generations of women.
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
The August 27, 2024 book club conversation featured the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Book and Journalism Award’s Honorable Mention, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan. A Fever in the Heartland is a historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
The July 23, 2024 book club featured the recipient of the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley and was moderated by historian and author Ted Widmer. This work spans two hundred years―from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the COVID-19 pandemic―highlighting the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party
“Retribution” has been Donald Trump’s rallying cry throughout his 2024 presidential campaign. According to author and political journalist Jonathan Karl, that rhetoric is disturbingly similar to past regimes. “The dictatorial assaults on human rights that we’ve seen throughout history and around the world are often rooted in the very language we hear from Donald Trump,” Karl said.
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and The Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
According to author and scholar Kate Crawford, the term “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent,” Crawford said. “[There is an] enormous environmental footprint – the minerals, the energy, the water – that drives AI. This is the opposite of artificiality. It’s profound materiality.” During Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ virtual book club on November 7, 2023, Crawford highlighted the tangible consequences of AI, including environmental ramifications, exploitation of underpaid laborers, and discrimination within the criminal justice system.
The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ virtual book club on July 18, 2023 focused on stories and storytelling – the stories that shape our understanding of the past and our hope for the future. “The most powerful aspect of any society is storytelling,” said Dr. Peniel Joseph, historian, professor, and the recipient of RFKHR’s 2023 Book Award for his latest work, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.
America on Fire
Yale professor of Law Elizabeth Hinton has advocated for structural transformation as a more effective solution to violent crimes and improving America’s race-relations. “More police and more prisons doesn’t work to keep people safer,” Hinton said while discussing her book, America on Fire in the September 2022 book club.
The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results
Compassionate leadership, effective listening, trust and creating an atmosphere of psychological safety in the workplace were the main highlights of the June 2022 book club. The conversation, moderated by Jeffrey Siminoff, Senior Vice President of Workplace Dignity at RFKHR, focused on the book, The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results, written by RFKHR Board Member Donato Tramuto.
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory,
Surprisingly, it was a box of letters he inherited from his Hungarian grandfather that inspired Claudio Saunt to write about Native American dispossession. Saunt, who won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award for Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, said reading the letters, which provided a firsthand account of the experience of Jews in Hungary during World War II, made him want to explore the issue of deportation more broadly and led him, quite literally, to the Trail of Tears.
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