Research & Publications

In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, which eroded the ability for immigrants from China, India, Japan, and Korea from owning land. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach championed a similar bill just a few months ago.

The 2024 legislative session is over, and it continued the turbulent trends of past years. Once again civil liberties were targeted, while we strove to advance our rights by supporting positive legislation. Here’s how things shook out:

Hercules Finley said his ministry took him to every prison in Kansas. Those experiences convinced him that his work needed to begin earlier and upstream.

SB 233, an extreme bill restricting medical freedom and targeting trans youth, passed both Kansas chambers last month. Learn how you can protect medical freedom and the rights of trans youth by stopping it.

In 2011, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said, “Certainly, the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that is what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey, we have things called legislatures and they enact things called laws.”

Under the Kansas Constitution, women had limited voting rights. Women could vote in school elections. But full suffrage for women here in Kansas took focused work from real visionaries.

Though his martyrdom lives on, justice has eluded the Rev. James Reeb. A monument to his life stands in front of the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Ala., marking the day the Wichita native left his wife and children in Boston to attempt to march to Montgomery for voting rights and beaten to death with a club for his participation.

In the 2021 hybrid documentary/scripted feature based on Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, Princeton Prof. Imani Perry connected several historical dots over the span of centuries.