john conyers

August 17, 2017 - Law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell of Southern University discusses the connections between slavery and mass incarceration in the context of the planned Aug. 19 march in Washington, D.C. The gathering is calling for the 13th Amendment's enslavement clause to be amended to abolish legalized slavery in prisons.

July 12, 2017 - A perennial bill to create a national single-payer public health insurance program has record support in this Congress. Though none of the cosponsors are Republicans, they include a growing number of conservative Southern Democrats, signaling a shift in health care politics.

April 1, 2015 - Last week, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and several scholars gathered at Duke University to discuss reparations and the moral debt the U.S. owes to African Americans for centuries of oppression. While resistance to reparations is great, the panelists discussed why a serious consideration of them could transform the country.

March 20, 2015 - Passed after the infamous "Bloody Sunday" attack on civil rights protesters in Alabama in 1965, the Voting Rights Act successfully blocked hundreds of potentially discriminatory election changes -- until the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in 2013. There's an effort underway in Congress to fix the hobbled law, but what are its chances of passing?

March 20, 2015 - Fifty years after the Voting Rights Act was introduced in Congress with bipartisan support, House lawmakers are trying to restore a key part of the law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. Just one Southern Republican is on board so far: Rep. Carlos Curbelo of South Florida.

July 22, 2013 - Once accused of being a spy and held in solitary confinement by the Iranian government, Sarah Shourd is now a playwright who is using her work to shine a light on the notorious case of Herman Wallace of Louisiana's Angola 3 and the broader human rights issue of prolonged solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.