Inherently Unequal

Inherently Unequal
Author: Lawrence Goldstone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-05-17
Genre:
ISBN:

...A potent and original examination of how the Supreme Court subverted justice and empowered the Jim Crow era.In the years following the Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery; the 14th conferred citizenship and equal protection under the law to white and black; and the 15th gave black American males the right to vote. In 1875, the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the nation's history granted all Americans "the full and equal enjoyment" of public accommodations. Just eight years later, the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, overturned the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional and, in the process, disemboweled the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Using court records and accounts of the period, Lawrence Goldstone chronicles how "by the dawn of the 20th century the U.S. had become the nation of Jim Crow laws, quasi-slavery, and precisely the same two-tiered system of justice that had existed in the slave era."The very human story of how and why this happened make Inherently Unequal as important as it is provocative. Examining both celebrated decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson and those often overlooked, Goldstone demonstrates how the Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the obvious reality of racism, defending instead the business establishment and status quo--thereby legalizing the brutal prejudice that came to define the Jim Crow era.

Divergent Social Worlds

Divergent Social Worlds
Author: Ruth D. Peterson
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2010-07-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610446771

More than half a century after the first Jim Crow laws were dismantled, the majority of urban neighborhoods in the United States remain segregated by race. The degree of social and economic advantage or disadvantage that each community experiences—particularly its crime rate—is most often a reflection of which group is in the majority. As Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo note in Divergent Social Worlds, "Race, place, and crime are still inextricably linked in the minds of the public." This book broadens the scope of single-city, black/white studies by using national data to compare local crime patterns in five racially distinct types of neighborhoods. Peterson and Krivo meticulously demonstrate how residential segregation creates and maintains inequality in neighborhood crime rates. Based on the authors' groundbreaking National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS), Divergent Social Worlds provides a more complete picture of the social conditions underlying neighborhood crime patterns than has ever before been drawn. The study includes economic, social, and local investment data for nearly nine thousand neighborhoods in eighty-seven cities, and the findings reveal a pattern across neighborhoods of racialized separation among unequal groups. Residential segregation reproduces existing privilege or disadvantage in neighborhoods—such as adequate or inadequate schools, political representation, and local business—increasing the potential for crime and instability in impoverished non-white areas yet providing few opportunities for residents to improve conditions or leave. And the numbers bear this out. Among urban residents, more than two-thirds of all whites, half of all African Americans, and one-third of Latinos live in segregated local neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of white neighborhoods have low poverty, but this is only true for one quarter of black, Latino, and minority areas. Of the five types of neighborhoods studied, African American communities experience violent crime on average at a rate five times that of their white counterparts, with violence rates for Latino, minority, and integrated neighborhoods falling between the two extremes. Divergent Social Worlds lays to rest the popular misconception that persistently high crime rates in impoverished, non-white neighborhoods are merely the result of individual pathologies or, worse, inherent group criminality. Yet Peterson and Krivo also show that the reality of crime inequality in urban neighborhoods is no less alarming. Separate, the book emphasizes, is inherently unequal. Divergent Social Worlds lays the groundwork for closing the gap—and for next steps among organizers, policymakers, and future researchers. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education
Author: James T. Patterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2001-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199880840

2004 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's unanimous decision to end segregation in public schools. Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!" Here, in a concise, moving narrative, Bancroft Prize-winning historian James T. Patterson takes readers through the dramatic case and its fifty-year aftermath. A wide range of characters animates the story, from the little-known African Americans who dared to challenge Jim Crow with lawsuits (at great personal cost); to Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Justice himself; to Earl Warren, who shepherded a fractured Court to a unanimous decision. Others include segregationist politicians like Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon; and controversial Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Most Americans still see Brown as a triumph--but was it? Patterson shrewdly explores the provocative questions that still swirl around the case. Could the Court--or President Eisenhower--have done more to ensure compliance with Brown? Did the decision touch off the modern civil rights movement? How useful are court-ordered busing and affirmative action against racial segregation? To what extent has racial mixing affected the academic achievement of black children? Where indeed do we go from here to realize the expectations of Marshall, Ellison, and others in 1954?

Is Separate Unequal?

Is Separate Unequal?
Author: Albert Leon Samuels
Publisher:
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN:

In this critique of the liberal perspective on desegregation, Samuels leads readers from the Brown decision to Green v. School Board of New Kent County and on to United States v. Fordice to show how the future of public black universities has been left uncertain at best. For Samuels, economic equality, not segregation, remains the primary obstacle to fully realized citizenship for African Americans. He argues that African Americans' pursuit of equality in higher education can be achieved without defunding programs at these schools and that their funding should be increased in recognition of their role in preserving African American culture.

The Failures Of Integration

The Failures Of Integration
Author: Sheryll Cashin
Publisher: Palabra
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781586483395

Argues that racial segregation is still prevalent in American society and a transformation is necessary to build democracy and eradicate racial barriers.

All Deliberate Speed

All Deliberate Speed
Author: Charles J. Ogletree
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393058970

A Harvard Law School professor examines the impact that Brown v. Board of Education has had on his family, citing historical figures, while revealing how the reforms promised by the case were systematically undermined.

Telling Memories Among Southern Women

Telling Memories Among Southern Women
Author: Susan Tucker
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2002-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807127995

In Telling Memories Among Southern Women, Susan Tucker presents a revealing collection of oral-history narratives that explore the complex, sometimes enigmatic bond between black female domestic workers and their white employers from the turn of the twentieth century to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Based on interviews with forty-two women of both races from the Deep South, these narratives express the full range of human emotions and successfully convey the ties that united—and the tensions and conflicts that separated—these two mutually dependent groups of women.

The Second

The Second
Author: Carol Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1635574269

From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception. In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans. From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished. Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

Unequal

Unequal
Author: Sandra F. Sperino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0190278404

It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-à-vis employers through the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization. American workers have also lost power in other ways. Those alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judges have dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor of employees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer. Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. The employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas show in Unequal that our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favors employers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware of how the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination still happens in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employment discrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.

For Equals Only

For Equals Only
Author: Tina Fernandes Botts
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498501249

This book philosophically explores how changing conceptions of race and equality have affected Supreme Court interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution over the years. In the years since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, in its decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause, the Supreme Court has switched from using a sociocultural concept of race to using a biological concept of race, and during the same time period has switched from using a social to a legal concept of equality. One result of these trends is the recent emergence of something called 'reverse discrimination.' Another result is that the Equal Protection Clause no longer specially protects racialized persons from racial discrimination, as it was originally intended to do. Using the tools of legal hermeneutics, critical philosophy of race, and critical race theory, key cases of racial discrimination in equal protection law are examined through a historical lens. The Supreme Court’s switch, over the years, from interpreting the Equal Protection Clause as specially protecting racialized persons from continued racial discrimination after the end of the institution of chattel slavery, to interpreting the Clause as protecting everyone from racial discrimination, is tracked alongside changing conceptions of race and equality. As the concept of race became biological, the concept of equality became legal, and the result was the elimination of remedying the negative effects of chattel slavery on the equality status of racialized persons from the Supreme Court’s list of priorities.