Former Director of the ACLU LGBT Project Matt Coles

To Win a Political Battle You Must Lead With Heart

Matt Coles teaches law at UC Law San Francisco. He was deputy national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 2010 to 2016 and ran the ACLU’s National LGBT Project before that. He served as legal advisor to Supervisor Harvey Milk and drafted what became San Francisco’s sexual orientation nondiscrimination law. Before sitting on a panel for the Zócalo event “When Does Protest Make a Difference?,” he joined us in the green room to discuss growing up as a political kid, winning gay marriage, and “Don’t Ask, …

August 30, 2024

Civil Rights Historian Daphne Chamberlain

Run to Your Passion

May 12, 2023

Daphne Chamberlain is an associate professor of history and the vice president for strategic initiatives and social justice at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Before serving as a …

Can a Historic L.A. Bar’s Queer History Still Demand Justice?

Photographs from the Black Cat Tell the Tale of a Movement’s Muddled Origins—And Where It Might Go

by Talib Jabbar | February 27, 2022

The round face of a cartoon cat—big eyes, earnest smile—still hangs off the front façade of the Black Cat in Silver Lake.

Today, it peers out from above the kind of …

Why Divestment Defeated Apartheid and How It Might Help Beat Climate Change

The Money Didn’t Matter. The Movement Did

by Zeb Larson | February 17, 2022

The environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben estimates that climate divestment—the movement to pressure universities, churches, and other institutions to stop investing in, and thus profiting from, carbon-emitting companies—has removed …

The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Legacy Reminds Us That Everyday People Can Effect Change—Even When the Nation Is Impossibly Divided

by Kate Clifford Larson | November 8, 2021

Though Black people represented 50 percent of Mississippi’s voting age population in 1964, Jim Crow literacy tests, poll taxes, violence, and intimidation had managed to all but silence their political …

The New Orleans Creoles Who Challenged Racism by Challenging Race Itself

Alongside Homer Plessy, Mixed-Race Activists Used a Unique Legal Arsenal to Attack White Supremacy

by Daniel Brook | March 8, 2020

It took years of research for me to track down a photograph of the mysterious New Orleanian E. Arnold Bertonneau. Born in 1834, this Civil War-era civil rights pioneer was …

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