William Lloyd Garrison Archives

History

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

A brief genealogy of nonviolent resistance

November 18, 2025 • by Bennett Parten

In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., then only 30 years old and fresh off leading the Montgomery bus boycotts, traveled to India to pay homage to one of his heroes, the late Mahatma Gandhi. Over the course of five weeks, King met with Indian heads of state, spoke with some ...

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Interviews

Walking This Road Together

A conversation with historian Linda Hirshman about interracial alliances, social movements, and her new book, The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation

February 9, 2022 • by Linda Hirshman and Claire Potter

Linda Hirshman is a lawyer and cultural historian whose book The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation, is making its debut this week. Linda, a historian of social movements who is also the author of books about the feminist and gay rights ...

History

The Color of Abolition

Linda Hirshman introduces her new book on Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman

February 9, 2022 • by Linda Hirshman

I was looking for the mechanics of activism—the meetings, the speeches, the broadsides, the litigation—for my analysis. And Garrison and Douglass were both central to the mechanics of activism. Their alliance fueled critical years of the movement, and their breakup affected the direction of the movement profoundly. This was the ...

Race

Can I Get a Witness?

Until recently, Black testimony about racism had to be validated by whites. That’s changing

November 19, 2020 • by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

“I opened my phone and I started recording because I knew if I didn’t, no one would believe me.” So said Darnella Frazier, the 17-year old Minneapolis resident who took the footage of George Floyd’s killing that circulated around the world last summer. Frazier’s instinct to press record, something other witnesses ...

Activism

The New Abolitionists

And what they can learn from their predecessors

June 11, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

On the same weekend when hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of countless American cities, I saw a yard sign reading “Black Lives Matter!” in Genoa, New York -- which came as a real shock. Genoa is an overwhelmingly Republican town of 1,900 residents, with a tiny black ...

Feature

The Persons Among People in 1787

Why the U.S. Constitution contained within itself a promise that became a lie

October 12, 2018 • by Julie J. Miller

In the spring of 1787, a group of men met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to revise the Articles of Confederation and ended up drafting the United States Constitution. That convention dissolved itself about four months later, on September 17, when work, some said, was finished, and the paper signed at that ...