People
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Elizabeth K. Hinton
Tags Share The 2022 RFK Book Award winners were “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” by Heather McGhee and “America on Fire” by Elizabeth Hinton. “America on Fire” presents a new framework for understanding our nation’s broken criminal legal system, tracing the untold history of police violence…
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Claudio Saunt
Tags Share Claudio Saunt received the 2021 RFK Book Award for Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud…
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Jonathan Metzl
Tags Share Jonathan Metzl received the 2020 RFK Book Award for Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. With the rise of the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump, many middle- and lower-income white Americans threw their support behind conservative politicians who pledged to make life great…
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Shane Bauer
Tags Share Shane Bauer received the 2019 RFK Book Award for American Prison. In 2014, award-winning journalist Shane Bauer went undercover as an entry-level guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an expose…
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Timothy B. Tyson
Tags Share Timothy B. Tyson received the 2018 RFK Book Award for The Blood of Emmett Till. In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public…
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Peter Edelman
Tags Share Peter Edelman received the 2018 RFK Book Award for Not a Crime to Be Poor. As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws…
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Matthew Desmond
Tags Share Matthew Desmond received the 2017 RFK Book Award for Evicted. In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding…
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David Maraniss
Tags Share David Maraniss received the 2016 RFK Book Award for Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story. It’s 1963 and Detroit is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; influential labor leader Walter Reuther; Motown’s founder Berry…
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Miriam Pawel
Tags Share Miriam Pawel received the 2015 RFK Book Award for The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, a biography of the United Farm Workers leader who transformed the landscape of labor rights in America and who forged a lasting partnership with Robert F. Kennedy. Miriam Pawel is an author, journalist and independent scholar who has spent…
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Andrew Maraniss
Tags Share Andrew Maraniss received the 2015 RFK Book Award for Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South. This fast-paced, richly detailed biography, based on more than eighty interviews, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we’ve come…
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Thomas Healy
Tags Share Thomas Healy received the 2014 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for The Great Dissent, a history of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s landmark dissent in Abrams v. United States, which gave rise to the robust First Amendment that Americans know today. Thomas Healy is a professor of law at Seton Hall…
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John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
Tags Share John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell received the 2014 RFK Book Award for March: Book One. Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to the halls of…
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