Forthcoming

Across seven decades as a working reporter and over 10,000 columns filed, journalist Murray Kempton’s approach, from the ‘50s to his death in 1997, was always the same: stick up for the people and do so with uncommon style and grace. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, he reported for the New York Post, the New Republic, Newsday, and the New York Review of Books – among other publications – and was credited, by David Halberstam, for pioneering the genre of New Journalism.

Kempton elevated the art of reporting as both a stylist and a moralist, matching his attentiveness to wit and irony with what one critic called “a compassion that is sometimes unruly.” The scion of an aristocratic Southern family who rejected his staid upbringing to become a radical socialist, he was an eloquent defender of American communists during the McCarthy era and one of the first white reporters to make the Civil Rights Movement into a beat. And he was an indelible New York character, traveling across Manhattan by bike, even as an old man, a Walkman around his neck.

The Little Piece of the World That We Know: Selected Writings of Murray Kempton is the first collection of Kempton’s writing to appear in over a quarter-century. In collecting these pieces, historian Andrew Holter, with the collaboration of Kempton’s estate and the family of Barbara Epstein, his longtime companion, blows the dust off an illustrious body of work. The book puts one of the most revered, if too long unsung, American nonfiction writers of the 20th century into conversation with controversies of the 21st that he anticipated. These include the ascendancy of Donald Trump, whom Kempton took seriously in the 1980s; the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement; the disappearance of daily newspapers; and the crises of homelessness and mass incarceration.

Especially among reporters themselves, Kempton’s name is invoked with the kind of reverence reserved not merely for a master of the craft but for one of the profession’s virtuoso stylists and a paragon of journalistic integrity.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, community bail funds surged, as a form of protest and a focus of philanthropic energy. While they were hardly new, bail funds garnered attention as an effective and individual means of responding to the failures of the police and the courts and a way to channel outrage in a pandemic era. And these funds have made a difference – after months of uprisings, thousands of protesters and ordinary people were freed from jail as millions of dollars were donated to bail funds nationwide.

In Radical Acts of Justice: Shifting Power to the People, from Community Bail Funds to People’s Budgets, Jocelyn Simonson, who has written extensively about the ways that social movements shift our views of justice, looks at bail funds and other ground-up actions that are, one by one, effecting social change and contesting preconceived notions about freedom and safety. She explores the problematic idea that individuals who are prosecuted are not the people who matter when it comes to politics. Actions like bail funds, courtwatching, and people’s budgets give agency to these individuals and their families and loved ones, and force us to recognize the deep forms of violence in each and every corner of the carceral state.

By focusing on the reforms that shift power to the people who are most directly affected by the system, Radical Acts of Justice proposes that communal resistance within the system is a form of justice-making itself. The stories of grassroots activism that Jocelyn Simonson follows are a reminder of the power, and unpredictability, of planting many seeds. These forms of resistance open up transformational possibilities that would otherwise elude us and that can lead to change that is both urgent and necessary.

The untold saga of John Randolph’s 383 slaves, freed in his much-contested will of 1821, finally comes to light.

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves—and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen’s dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman’s Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.