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2. Racial Equality and the Law. The role of the law in the reduction of discrimination in hte United States.
A monumental investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow To Civil Rights spells out in compelling detail the political and social context within which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of their decisions for American race relations. In a highly provocative interpretation of the decision's connection to the civil rights movement, Klarman argues that Brown was more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. Brown unquestioningly had a significant impact--it brought race issues to public attention and it mobilized supporters of the ruling. It also, however, energized the opposition. In this authoritative account of constitutional law concerning race, Michael Klarman details, in the richest and most thorough discussion to date, how and whether Supreme Court decisions do, in fact, matter.
Written by a law professor at the University of Virginia, this book tells the story of the development of American constitutional law relevant to black civil rights from the late 19th century through the 1960s.It tells the story, in short, from Jim Crow to civil rights, and from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education.
This is a legal history.The focus is always on Supreme Court decisions.Klarman, however, goes out of his way to put the legal story into context.He has generally excellent discussions of the political, economic and social forces which influenced the changes in the law.He is so good, in fact, at putting the law into context that at times the book seems to be a general history on the subject of civil rights.It is not.The focus is always on the development of legal doctrine at the Supreme Court level.He does not, for example, make any effort to discuss in detail the legislative side of the story, except insofar as it needed for context to follow what the Supreme Court was doing.
An excellent aspect of the book is its matter-of-fact approach to how the Supreme Court makes decisions.There is, of course, a fierce and ongoing debate within American law between those who feel that the Court should simply follow the law, as intended by those who wrote it, and those who feel that the Constitution should evolve according to changing standards of right and wrong.Klarman does not take a position in this debate, at least not in this book.Instead, he tries to explain how the Court actually has made decisions, as a historical matter.
He sets forth a very sensible common sense analysis.In his view, both legal issues and personal preferences of the judges always enter into the decisions.If the law is clear, he says, the judges usually follow it.If the law is less clear, then the personal preferences of the judges inevitably enter into the equation far more.I think this analysis is by and large very sound.He also has a very sensible discussion of the nature of elite, educated opinion -- which judges represent -- as opposed to everyone's else's opinions.A point that I think he misses is that how far afield the Court is willing to roam is also a function of the Court's institutional self-confidence, which varies over time.When the Court has built up prestige for itself, as it did with Brown, it tends to be more self-confident about pushing the limits of the law.The prestige that the Court got from Brown, in my view, as a great deal to do with why the Court was willing to render the Roe v. Wade decision, which even its supporters now concede had little or no support in law or precedent.
The analysis here of how the Brown decision was rendered is very, very good, as is the discussion of the aftermath of the Brown decision. All in all, this book is a definitive history of a very important aspect of the Civil Rights revolution, the part which came from the Supreme Court.
Professor Klarman's book is a study of the interplay between Politics, Social Forces, and legal doctrine.He's searching for the links between political realities and legal rulings.How are they shaping each other?In studying the relations between the decisions of the US Supreme Court and the reality of White-Black relations in the American South, Klarman's conclusion is that the Supreme Court's opinions are very much shaped by the social and political realities.The effect of the Supreme Court's decision on the political landscape is more subtle.
Between the 1890s and the outbreak of the Second World War, the Court's rulings became slowly but steadily more pro-blacks.The earlier decisions were epitomized by the Plessey case, which held that states were allowed to discriminate in public transportation.Only one Justice, former slave-owner John Marshall Harlan had dissented, and argued that the "constitution is color-blind".But even Harlan did not doubt the propriety of segregation in education, and neither he nor any other Justice did much to prevent Lynching, voter intimidation, all-white-Juries and a variety of other discriminatory practices.
In this, the Justices were very much men of their time, an era of unquestioned white supremacy.America was a white man's land; with the Civil War receding into distant memory, White Northerners, who faced increasing immigration of blacks, Asians, and East Europeans, did not feel compelled to intervene on behalf of Southern Blacks.
But even if the Justices were inclined to combat Jim Crow (the popular name of the racist Southern regime), there was not much they could have done.Unlike the post-World War 2 era, the Federal government was not closely engaged within Southern states.Thus the Court's decisions had to be executed by Southern Judges, Politicians, and Policemen - the very leaders of Jim Crow.Furthermore, the legal segregation and discrimination were mostly formalities.Jim Crow kept Blacks "in their place" with the hanging rope and the burning cross, with economic sanctions and social intimidation.Whether their misery was legally sanctioned or not could not have made a large difference in the daily lives of Southern Blacks.
From the outbreak of the First World War to the outbreak of the second, race relations in America slowly improved, and the Judges' decisions became increasingly, albeit subtly, black-friendly.Beaten confessions were thrown out; patently racist disenfranchising laws were declared unconstitutional.The Justices for the first time inferred discrimination in Jury selection from the fact that Juries were, de facto, always white.
But the changes were slow.Only with the creation of Roosevelt's Court, with the appointment of new Justices such as Hugo Black and William Douglas, did the Court stridently strike against segregation and Jim Crow.The shift in the Court during and after the Second World War reflected the social changes in American society, which has become more egalitarian as the economic and political power of Blacks increased, as the nation was becoming more unified, and as revulsion of Fascism translated into widespread anti-racist views.The Cold War also played its part:When America competed for the alliance of Non-Western Countries, Jim Crow has become a liability and an embarrassment.
The New Deal Justices, and their successors, were strongly committed to destroying the racist policies of the South.They ruled against segregation in higher education, against all-white political primaries, against unfair police practices.And most famously, they hit the Apartheid's system's most cherished institution.The landmark case of "Brown vs. Board of Education" barred segregation in public schools.
Brown, Klarman argues, had a paradoxical effect:It made things better by first making them worse.Brown led to desegregation of the boarder South, but not in the Deep South.There, Brown's effect was to radicalize the white population.Before "Brown", Southerners were inclined to allow Jim Crow to be chipped away - the desegregation of higher education and public accommodation caused little or no fuss, and the opposition to voting rights was hardly insurmountable.Southern politicians in the pre-Brown era downplayed the racial element and focused on common 1940s and 1950s era issues:social programs and communist-baiting.
But after Brown, moderation in the South was dead.Rallying against the Northern intervention, moderate Southern politicians either lost their job (Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom) or transformed into fire-breathing segregationist demagogues (the infamous successor of Folsom, George Wallace, who had been a relative moderate in the 1940s and early 50s, as evidenced by his refusal to follow the Dixiecrats in 1948).Accommodation was out - resistance and rebellion became the rule for Southern whites.
The growing belligerency of Southerners played right into the hand of the new generation of social activists, led by Martin Luther King.With boycotts, "Freedom Rides", sit ins, and mass demonstrations, the protestors courted Southern violence.With the flames fanned by segregationist political leadership, Southerners lashed out against schoolchildren, white liberal college students, and ordinary middle class African Americans.The national opinion, formerly weary of forced desegregation, swung.Buoyed by public opinion, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson pushed through Congress a radical Civil Rights agenda.Now King and his supporters had the government on their side, and the opposition to desegregation crumbled.
Thus, Klarman argues, by striking at the heart of segregation, the Supreme Court's decision transformed the struggle for Civil Rights from a gradualist movement to a radical one.This is how, because of "Brown", Jim Crow came to an end:not in a whimper, but in a bang.
This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.
(1936), which dealt with confessions obtained using torture.
was always suspect, and a jury would almost always take a white sheriffs word over a black mans if he claimed he was tortured. Lynching and mob violence still permeated Southern Courts as well. Klarman maintains that there was a set of "unwritten laws" which governed the South despite the federal rulings of the Supreme Court.Klarman also contends that the Supreme Court even showed hesitance toward their professed principles. Despite passing this legislation, the Supreme Court did not always enforce their decisions. Despite obvious "miscarriages of justice," many felt that even the presence of these rulings-whether enforced or not-was a step in the right direction (although I think many African Americans would probably disagree with this).It is an argument of intention versus actuality.
He contends that Supreme Court justices are products of their time and rarely make groundbreaking decisions, instead he contends that justices are "a part of the society that they are trying to transform," and cannot truly step outside of that society.Rather, they can only "go with the flow." And this I believe to be his thesis. He cites public opinion at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education, and that those cases were not truly revolutionary because the "tide" of public opinion was moving in that direction.
decisions showed that change was possible, and thus were relevant, but not in a conventional sense. And I believe this to a story of wider historical analysis. Events such as the civil rights movement usually do not simply "occur," they have visible, sometimes intangible; antecedents that eventually help to birth a new consensuses.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history.
This work is full of interesting, insightful, and provocative ideas that will make readers rethink the impact of the Supreme Court's civil rights decisions.I predict that the revisionist arguments in this masterpiece will some day become the orthodoxy.This book will be read by many future generations of American history and law students.
This digital document is an article from Constitutional Commentary, published by Constitutional Commentary, Inc. on March 22, 2004. The length of the article is 11400 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
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In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carried out a plan devised by Mississippi’s foremost black lawyer of the time: Willis Mollison. Against staggering odds, and with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, he won. How Marshall and his allies were able to force the court to overturn state law and precedent, if only for a brief period, at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court is the subject of Jury Discrimination, a book that explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on America’s civil rights history.
Christopher Waldrep traces the origins of Americans’ ideas about trial by jury and provides the first detailed analysis of jury discrimination. Southerners’ determination to keep their juries entirely white played a crucial role in segregation, emboldening lynchers and vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan. As the postbellum Congress articulated ideals of national citizenship in civil rights legislation, most importantly the Fourteenth Amendment, factions within the U.S. Supreme Court battled over how to read the amendment: expansively, protecting a variety of rights against a host of enemies, or narrowly, guarding only against rare violations by state governments. The latter view prevailed, entombing the amendment in a narrow interpretation that persists to this day.
Although the high court clearly denounced the overt discrimination enacted by state legislatures, it set evidentiary rules that made discrimination by state officers and agents extremely difficult to prove. Had these rules been less onerous, Waldrep argues, countless black jurors could have been seated throughout the nation at precisely the moment when white legislators and jurists were making and enforcing segregation laws. Marshall and Mollison’s success in breaking through Mississippi law to get blacks admitted to juries suggests that legal reasoning plausibly founded on constitutional principle, as articulated by the Supreme Court, could trump even the most stubbornly prejudiced public opinion.
If Barrack Obama is elected President, the whole issue of majority minority districts that this book focuses on may seem to be very quaint, but right now the question of the legal controversies surrounding the creation of majority minority is one of the legal topics legislative redistricters and their lawyers must master. Reading this book is like attending a long seminar at a highly ranked law school on this subject.
The simple fact underlying this book is that in many areas of our country it is very difficult if not impossible for a candidate who is the choice of minority communities--often but not always a minority himself or herself--to get the votes of enough white voters to win an election. The author of this book repeatedly agrees with this truism, but also expresses concerns about the effects of grouping minority voters together to maximize their political clout.
I first read this book in 2001, when I was navigating my way through the political and legal landmines of redistricting state house seats for the majority minority city of Philadelphia.I found author Christopher M. Burke's interweaving of Supreme Court cases, law journal articles, and numerous books to be an extrememly valuable guide to understanding the somewhat conflicting case law, being able to explain it to others, and being able to act both legally and effectively to serve public interests.
Rereading this book recently, I am struck at the depth of the author's research and passsion for this rather obscure subject.This is not the book to read for an in-depth political look at majority minority districts, and it is not the book to read to gain insights into their changing nature, the changing nature of the Black Caucus in the U.S. Congress and other legislative bodies.Nor is it the book to read if one wants to compare the growth of black and Latino representation in Congress--both covered by the Voting Rights Act--with the growth in Congress and other legislative bodies of Asians, Jews, Americans of Italian descent, and women, none of whom are covered by the Voting Rights Act.
What this book does far better than any other that I have come across is to give the reader a well-sourced, well-researched sense of the debate over majority-minority districts.The politics of this issue are confused, because the ideological sympathies of the Democratic Party and the national political interests of the Republican Party on one side are engaged in battle with the ideological sympathies of the Republican Party and the national political interests of the Democratic Party on the other side.
To make sense of this confusion, the author wisely reframes this question as a contest between philosophical liberals--who may be politically liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican--and philopsophical communitarians, who also may be politically liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.Philosophical liberals are those focused on individual rights, while communitarians are those focused on group rights.
Justices and other actors have demonstrated an ability to strike both liberal and communitarian chords, the author makes clear.
The key case in majority minority jurisprudence, the author accurately states, is Shaw vs. Reno, 125 L.Ed 2nd 511,113 S.Ct.2816 (1993)(Shaw I). In this case, Justice O'Connor, writing for a divided Court, declined to ban the creation of majority-minority districts where alternatives existed, but banned redistricters from allowing a concern for the creation of majority minority districts to overshadow all other concerns. Majority minority districts could be created as part of drawing districts for incumbents, or as part of another general approach, but not as a goal in and of itself.
Districting, O'Connor said, "seeks to represent a plurality of values...."
She attacked geographically distant majority minority districts, warning of "an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid."
Half of this book focuses on Shaw vs. Reno and the subsequent cases that it controlled.Before reading Shaw vs. Reno and its progeny, it is good to read this book to gain a heightened awareness of the issues at stake.
Although the author has the law professor's habit of continually stating opposition views to whatever case he is discussing, he makes clear his symphathy is with the Shaw Court's views.But those read this book for the purpose of gaining a full understanding of the issues will benefit from his thorough treatment of the case law and the philosophies behind it, even if they disagree with his ultimate conclusions.
It is a short book that could have been shortened even more by more thorough editing.But the repetitions do serve the purpose of drilling in the author's key conclusions.
There are no natural redistricting plans waiting to found, he says. There is no redistricting plan than will be universally seen as fair, with all winners and no losers, he says.
Communities are created by redistricters and not discovered, he says.There are legitimate pros and cons for the creation of more majority districts, and pros and cons for not creating more minority districts, he says.The lawyers on all sides, he warns, are political actors.Those involved in the redistricting process, he says, have no choice but to fully study the issues and make and defend political decisions that are as wise as possible.
Each election, he warns, will bring new facts and new court decisions to the table.The process of creating political districts--majority minority or not--is an inherently temporary one.The issues will with be us for a long time.
One thing he does not consider in this 1999 book is what happens if the political dynamic changes so radically that African-American candidates start repeatedly carrying predominantly or overwhelmingly white districts.
He undoubtedly did not consider that because he did not consider it possible, although he notes that African American incumbents in Georgia, forced by the Supreme Court to run in predominantly white districts, were re-elected.
But he makes clear that the perceived need for majority minority districts is based on the peceived permanency of racially polarized voting patterns.The death of these racially polarized voting patterns--if it occurs under Obama or someone else and subsequent candidates--would obviously throw this whole issue into confusion and marginal significance.
With nearly 50 pages of footnotes, citations of 63 Law Review articles, 96 books, and 72 cases, the author cannot be faulted for laziness. His calls for intelligent and informed political involvement, and thinking through the elements of the issues that have deeply divided both political parties and the and federal courts, are well worth following.
Albion W. Tourgée is one of the unsung heroes of the early civil rights movement. Raised by abolitionists in Ohio, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and even though injured early in the war, returned after he recovered. A lawyer, he was one of the Northern Carpetbaggers that moved to the South after the war, becoming one of the leaders during Reconstruction, serving as a judge inGreensboro, North Carolina. His active stance for equal political and civil rights earned him the enmity of the Ku Klux Klan (and a mention in the Klan propaganda movie "Birth of a Nation").
His championship of civil rights, and active writing on the subject, brought him his greatest role, and greatest failure, that as lawyer for Homer Plessy. Several prominent black leaders in New Orleans wanted to challenge Louisiana's law requiring that railway companies had "to provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing separate coaches or compartments." Plessy was chosen as a plaintiff, and in Tourgée's brief, used the term "color blindness" as the standard that the court should use when making decisions regarding "separate but equal" treatment. He lost Plessy, and that loss was particularly devastating to him. He had cautioned the group that an adverse decision could set the civil rights movement back, and he was correct. Following that case, he was appointed U.S. consul to France, where he lived out his remaining days. What he didn't live to see was that the concept of "color blindness" would be the successful basis for overturning Jim Crow laws in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education.
"Color-Blind Justice" goes beyond the biography of Albion Tourgée and provides insights into the development of the pre and post Civil War Civil Rights movement. Without the commitment of men like Tourgée pushing for equal treatment under the law, and not accepting the "separate but equal" standard, we still could be fighting these same issues.
If you're interested in civil rights history, the Civil War or Reconstruction and you have never heard of Albion Tourgee, Mark Elliott's Color-Blind Justice is a must-read.
Even if you know a lot about this period and Tourgee is a familiar name, this book will tell you much that you don't know and may dispel some myths popularized in other, lesser histories of the period.
The book is deeply researched with lots of new details from the personal letters and papers of Tourgee, who in the post-Civil War period was nationally famous and had the ear of a striking number of important figures, including several U.S. presidents all the way up to Theodore Roosevelt.
Tourgee is a great character. He was born of humble beginnings in northeast Ohio in a Christian family that were early white abolitionists who originally hailed from Massachusetts. He was one of the first wounded in the Civil War, run over by wagon and paralyzed, but remarkably he returned to action before the war's end. These early experiences and influnces shaped a world view that he held tightly to throughout his life in the turbulent post-war political debate.
Deeply idealistic about the opportunity to remake a slavery-free south, Tourgee moves his family to North Carolina, one of the Radical Republican "carpetbaggers." But unlike many others who came from the north, Tourgee did not hope to profit or exploit the south for personal gain. He was inspired by the ideals of the Civil War as a fight for justice. He became a judge and a political leader, helping write much of the new North Carolina constitution. He adopted a mixed race child and hired blacks to work for his businesses.
This attracted the attention of the early Ku Klux Klan, but Tourgee bravely refused to relent in the face of threats. Fascinatingly, he crossed paths with a young Thomas Dixon, even advising the future Klan leader kindly about his writing, only to later see Dixon become a force for evil in the south and a propaganda whiz who clouded public opinion by repeatedly challenging Tourgee's work. The infamous "Birth of a Nation" film that glorified the Klan mocks Tourgee in its early frames.
Tourgee wrote in northern newspapers about the true nature of reconstruction, which had an undeservedly bad reputation in the north. After 16 years in North Carolina, he left discouraged and moved north. A novel based on his experience -- A Fool's Errand -- became a national best seller, dispelling many of the misconceptions about reconstruction, if only for a brief period.
Now famous, Tourgee wrote articles prolifically and became a strong voice for civil rights, even founding a mixed race organization that was the pre-cursor to the NAACP.
But there was little Tourgee could do to stem a political backlash, a national weariness of reconstruction and the problems of the south in the late 19th century. To his great frustration, northerner's largely stood by as the south reinstituted white supremecy through "Jim Crow" laws.
In a final effort to defy this trend, Tourgee led the charge to challenge a Louisana law that forced racial separation on trains in what became the famous "Dred Scott" case. Tourgee was the lead counsel arguing brilliantly before the U.S, Supreme Court that the idea of segregation was an absurd state policy in clear violation of the Constitution.
Dred Scott lost before the Supreme Court in a 7-1 decision that at the time was a devestating setback for civil rights. And a despondent Tourgee left the U.S. to live out his years and die and France. But over time the case became seen as one of the worst high court decisions of all time. Tourgee's arguments became the basis for challenges to segregation that ultimatley would triumph with Brown vs. Board of Education.
There are other biographies of Tourgee. What makes this one unique is the detailed analysis of the evolution of his thinking about race, politics and social issues. Elliott adeptly shows how practical and political considerations sometimes shaped Tourgee's opinions and at other times thwarted him when he stood on principle.
To understand the racial turmoil of the 20th century, and to better know nature of racial tension in America today, Tourgee's story is crucial and Elliott's book is instructive.
Michael J. Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, is one of the leading authorities on the history of civil rights law in the United States. In Unfinished Business, he illuminates the course of racial equality in America, revealing that we have made less progress than we like to think. Indeed, African Americans have had to fight for everything they have achieved.
Klarman highlights a variety of social and political factors that have influenced the path of racial progress--wars, migrations, urbanization, shifting political coalitions--and he looks in particular at the contributions of law and of court decisions to American equality.The author argues that court decisions tend to reflect the racial mores of the times, which is why the Supreme Court has not been a heroic defender of the rights of racial minorities. And even when the Court has promoted progressive racial change, its decisions have often been unenforced, in part because severely oppressed groups rarely have the resources necessary to force the issue. Klarman also sheds light on the North/South dynamic and how it has influenced racial progress, arguing that as southerners have become more anxious about outside challenges to their system of white supremacy, they have acted in ways that eventually undermined that system.For example, as southern slave owners demanded greater guarantees for slavery from the federal government, they alienated northerners, who came to fear a slave power conspiracy that would interfere with their liberties.
This digital document is an article from Stanford Law Review, published by Stanford Law School on March 1, 2005. The length of the article is 3637 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
This digital document is an article from Constitutional Commentary, published by Constitutional Commentary, Inc. on March 22, 2004. The length of the article is 4949 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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