Dreamland Burning

Dreamland Burning
Author: Jennifer Latham
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0316384941

A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.

Reconstructing the Dreamland

Reconstructing the Dreamland
Author: Alfred L. Brophy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2003-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190289694

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was the country's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. Thirty city blocks were burned to the ground, perhaps 150 died, and the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma, was turned to rubble. Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Brophy shines his lights on mob violence and racism run amok, both on the night of the riot and the following morning. Equally important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted looting, shootings, and the burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it by deputizing white citizens haphazardly, giving out guns and badges, or sending men to arm themselves. Likewise, the National Guard acted unconstitutionally, arresting every black resident they found, leaving property vulnerable to the white mob. Brophy's stark narrative concludes with a discussion of reparations for victims of the riot through lawsuits and legislative action. That case has implications for other reparations movements, including reparations for slavery. "Recovers a largely forgotten history of black activism in one of the grimmest periods of race relations.... Linking history with advocacy, Brophy also offers a reasoned defense of reparations for the riot's victims."--Washington Post Book World

Tulsa Race Riot

Tulsa Race Riot
Author: Oklahoma Commission to Riot of 1921
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2001-02-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781530785001

The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was the worst civil disturbance since the Civil War. On May 21, 1921, a group of white Oklahomans attacked the prosperous African American community, called the Greenwood District or "the Black Wall Street" in Tulsa, OK over the alleged assault of a white woman by a black man. 24 hours later more than 800 people were admitted to local hospitals, 10,000 residents were homeless, and 35 city blocks were reduced to rubble. The monetary cost of the riot was later estimated to be 26 million dollars. This report examines the events leading up to the riot, the riot itself, and the consideration of reparations for the victims.

Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea

Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea
Author: Joshua Horwitz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2009-04-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472033700

"Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea recasts the gun debate by showing its importance to the future of democracy and the modern regulatory state. Until now, gun rights advocates had effectively co-opted the language of liberty and democracy and made it their own. This book is an important first step in demonstrating how reasonable gun control is essential to the survival of democracy and ordered liberty." ---Saul Cornell, Ohio State University When gun enthusiasts talk about constitutional liberties guaranteed by the Second Amendment, they are referring to freedom in a general sense, but they also have something more specific in mind---freedom from government oppression. They argue that the only way to keep federal authority in check is to arm individual citizens who can, if necessary, defend themselves from an aggressive government. In the past decade, this view of the proper relationship between government and individual rights and the insistence on a role for private violence in a democracy has been co-opted by the conservative movement. As a result, it has spread beyond extreme militia groups to influence state and national policy. In Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea, Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson set the record straight. They challenge the proposition that more guns equal more freedom and expose Insurrectionism as a true threat to freedom in the United States today. Joshua Horwitz received a law degree from George Washington University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Casey Anderson holds a law degree from Georgetown University and is currently a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C.

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State
Author: Megan Ming Francis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107037107

This book extends what we know about the development of civil rights and the role of the NAACP in American politics. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, secured the support of Congress, and won a landmark criminal procedure case in front of the Supreme Court.

When Law Fails

When Law Fails
Author: Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814762255

Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of our legal system. The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both address the questions and point the way toward further discussion. When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in the law’s ability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself. Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to begin to fix our broken legal system. Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak, Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.