Download or read book The Constitution and Race written by Donald E. Lively and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1992-02-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race, as this book demonstrates, has been a factor in the Constitution's framing, ratification, and development. Examined specifically and in detail are: * the accommodation of slavery to create a viable republic; * the Union's experience with and eventual undoing by slavery; * reconstruction of the nation pursuant to seminal principles of racial equality; * persisting efforts to limit or defeat constitutional provisions for equality and opportunity; * the desegregation mandate and its devolution; and * modern problems in accounting for a legacy of racial discrimination and disadvantage. The Constitution is the overarching statement of popular will and consent and thus an especially apt prism through which to discern racial truths and the context and values that influence them. Constitutional law affords a particularly useful departure point for acquiring perspective upon moral reality and legal possibility. This book is rich in its analysis of the Supreme Court's response to society's ambiguities, concerns, and conscience in the matters of race. In examining problems and issues which historically have engendered dispute and division, it suggests a potentially consensual basis of ascertaining the Constitution's still unfinished business. The nation's enduring ambivalence and the price it pays in less than consistent constitutional interpretations on racial questions is both enlightening and disturbing. The questions, of course, are at the heart of a democracy and involve personhood, citizenship, liberty, and equality. The Constitution and Race will be valuable to political scientists, historians, sociologists, lawyers, and students.
Download or read book Slavery and Its Consequences written by Robert A. Goldwin and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1988 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the institution of slavery and how it relates to the Constitution.
Download or read book Promises to Keep written by Donald G. Nieman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely considered the first history of US Constitutionalism that places African Americans at the center, Promises to Keep is a compelling overview of how conflict over African Americans' place in American society has shaped the Constitution, law, and our understanding of citizenship and rights. Both authoritative and accessible, this revised and expanded second edition incorporates key insights from the last three decades of scholarship and makes sense of recent developments in civil rights, from the War on Drugs to the rise of Black Lives Matter. Promises to Keep shows how African Americans have played a critical role in transforming the Constitution from a bulwark of slavery to a document that is truer to the nation's promise of equality. The book begins by examining debates about race from the Revolutionary Era at the Constitutional Convention and covers the establishment of civil rights protections during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow backlash, and the evolution of the civil rights movement, from the formation of the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People to legal victories and massive organized protests. Comprehensive in scope, this book moves from debates over slavery at the nation's founding to contemporary discussions of affirmative action, voting rights, mass incarceration, and police brutality. In the process, it provides readers with a historical perspective critical to understanding some of today's most important social and political issues.
Download or read book Black Resistance White Law written by Mary Frances Berry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-02-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the government has used the Constitution to deny black Americans their legal rights From the arrival of the first twenty slaves in Jamestown to the Howard Beach Incident of 1986, Yusef Hawkins, and Rodney King, federal law enforcement has pleaded lack of authority against white violence while endorsing surveillance of black rebels and using “constitutional” military force against them. In this groundbreaking study, constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry analyzes the reasons why millions of African Americans whose lives have improved enormously, both socially and economically, are still at risk of police abuse and largely unprotected from bias crimes.
Download or read book The Color Blind Constitution written by Andrew Kull and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1840 to 1960 the profoundest claim of Americans who fought the institution of segregation was that the government had no business sorting citizens by the color of their skin. During these years the moral and political attractiveness of the antidiscrimination principle made it the ultimate legal objective of the American civil rights movement. Yet, in the contemporary debate over the politics and constitutional law of race, the vital theme of antidiscrimination has been largely suppressed. Thus a strong line of argument laying down one theoretical basis for the constitutional protection of civil rights has been lost. Andrew Kull provides us with the previously unwritten history of the color-blind idea. From the arguments of Wendell Phillips and the Garrisonian abolitionists, through the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy, civil rights advocates have consistently attempted to locate the antidiscrimination principle in the Constitution. The real alternative, embraced by the Supreme Court in 1896, was a constitutional guarantee of reasonable classification. The government, it said, had the power to classify persons by race so long as it acted reasonably; the judiciary would decide what was reasonable. In our own time, in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions that followed, the Court nearly avowed the rule of color blindness that civil rights lawyers continued to assert; instead, it veered off for political and tactical reasons, deciding racial cases without stating constitutional principle. The impoverishment of the antidiscrimination theme in the Court's decision prefigured the affirmative action shift in the civil rights agenda. The social upheaval of the 1960s put the color-blind Constitution out of reach for a quartercentury or more; but for the hard choices still to be made in racial policy, the colorblind tradition of civil rights retains both historical and practical significance.
Download or read book Recapturing the Constitution written by Stephen B. Presser and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 1994-10-06 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presser makes a compelling case that the original understanding of the Constitution was that religion, morality, and law were inextricably connected.--Forrest McDonald
Download or read book States Laws on Race and Color and Appendices written by Pauli Murray and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the laws of each state regarding civil rights, segregation, interracial marriage and other issues.
Download or read book Race Law and American Society written by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2007 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the obstacles to equality under law, black Americans have set a determined path to make the words of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence a reality for themselves and others. This book is an introduction to race and law in America. It is designed as a tool to the understanding of the role of race in American society through the prism of legal cases brought by and against blacks. The analysis will include American colonial laws, landmark Supreme Court cases of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as relevant recent decisions. In examining these cases the reader will discern the great impact civil rights cases have had on American society as well as the effect our society has had on the legal system. It will provide the reader with a foundation for present day discourse involving pressing issues of race in American society.
Download or read book Race Distinctions in American Law written by Gilbert Thomas Stephenson and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author presents a comprehensive discussion of laws that distinguished persons on the basis of race. He examines the Constitution, statutes, and judicial decisions of the United States and of the states and the territories between 1865 and 1910. In his summary he presents the view that the welfare of both races requires the recognition of race distinctions and the obliteration of race discriminations.
Download or read book The Constitution and American Racism written by David P. Madden and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racism has permeated the workings of the U.S. Constitution since ratification. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, supporters of slavery ensured it was protected by rule of law. The federal government upheld slavery until it was abolished by the Civil War; then supported the South's Jim Crow power structure. From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era until today, veneration of the Constitution has not prevented lynching, segregation, voter intimidation or police brutality against people of color. The Electoral College--a Constitutional accommodation for slaveholding aristocrats who feared popular government--has twice in 20 years given the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote. This book describes how pernicious flaws in the Constitution, included to legalize profiting from human bondage, perpetuate systemic racism, economic inequality and the subversion of democracy.
Download or read book The Constitution Race and Renewed Relevance of Original Intent written by Donald E. Lively and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Lively brings a perspective upon constitutional fundamentals and racial reality that is both historical and forward-looking. It reflects a convergence of understandings and insights from a range of experience as a legal academic, historian, business developer, and community service organizer. He is the author of 12 books and over 50 articles, many of which relate to the interaction between the Constitution and political and social factors and circumstances. He has lectured both domestically and internationally. Three of his books have won national book awards. Lively writes in a style that captures complex and sophisticated subject matter and reduces it to accessible and understandable terms. It is extensively annotated to authoritative sources, transcends any ideological agenda, and introduces principles that make original constitutional premises relevant to evolving conditions. Among other things, he demonstrates how the nation's founding premises that were compromised by racism and its incidents have become relevant to reckoning with their legacy. This publication is particularly relevant at a time when racial dynamics are in flux and the law, particularly interpretation of the law, has become largely static. Accounting for the nation's legacy of discrimination has been sporadic and uneven. Reparations have been provided for the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but denied for African-Americans whose experience for most of the nation's history was defined by slavery and pervasive discrimination. Although the Supreme Court has acknowledged this legacy of societal discrimination, it has precluded generalized remediation pursuant to concern with negative collateral consequences. This book provides significant insights that increasingly will reflect understanding of racial reality in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates first a legacy of constitutional outcomes that, at their best, have been promising and profound in their symbolism but ultimately underachieving. The book also evidences that, for the first time in the nation's history, market forces are aligning in favor of diversity and multicultural competence. Along with changing demographics and globalization, these factors provide a powerful new force for reckoning with the nation's legacy of racial discrimination. Modern constitutional doctrine, which largely precludes raceconscious reckoning with this reality, constrain the market (both the public and private sector) from generating innovative and effective solutions. Lively maintains that by allowing more flexibility and being more deferential to innovation and experimentation, the Court can facilitate reckoning with historical reality and square the law in a way that is consistent with and even restores founding principles and also reflects how the future is evolving. Based upon its fidelity to original intent and responsiveness to changing societal conditions, this model offers a rare convergence of appeal to those who respectively advocate a more restrained and more active judiciary. This book is relevant to a variety of audiences including academics, students, and persons in both the public and private sector who seek a comprehensive yet accessible narrative and analysis upon the historical interaction between law and race and its likely evolution.
Download or read book Black Resistance White Law written by Mary Frances Berry and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1995-02-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated for the 1990s, this indictment of use of the Constitution to maintain a status quo discusses injustices ranging from the arrival of the first twenty slaves in Jamestown to the Rodney King beating
Download or read book On Account of Race written by Lawrence Goldstone and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award An award–winning constitutional law historian examines case–based evidence of the court's longstanding racial bias (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that prejudice has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal government. One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today. Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and what seemed to be the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so a half million African Americans across the South who had risked their lives and property to be allowed to cast ballots were stricken from voting rolls by white supremacists. This vacuum allowed for the rise of Jim Crow. None of this was done in the shadows—those determined to wrest the vote from black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution. On Account of Race tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away. It is a warning that the right to vote is fragile and must be carefully guarded and actively preserved lest American democracy perish.
Download or read book The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America written by Richard Rothstein and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Download or read book Vindicating the Founders written by Thomas G. West and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-11-28 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This controversial, convincing, and highly original book is important reading for everyone concerned about the origins, present, and future of the American experiment in self-government.
Download or read book Race and Liberty in America written by Jonathan Bean and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2009-07-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of civil rights in the United States is usually analyzed and interpreted through the lenses of modern conservatism and progressive liberalism. In Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, author Jonathan Bean argues that the historical record does not conveniently fit into either of these categories and that knowledge of the American classical liberal tradition is required to gain a more accurate understanding of the past, present, and future of civil liberties in the nation. By assembling and contextualizing classic documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school assignment by race, Bean demonstrates that classical liberalism differs from progressive liberalism in emphasizing individual freedom, Christianity, the racial neutrality of the Constitution, complete color-blindness, and free-market capitalism. A comprehensive and vital resource for scholars and students of civil liberties, Race and Liberty in America presents a wealth of primary sources that trace the evolution of civil rights throughout U.S. history.
Download or read book Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional written by Mark Golub and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some, the idea of a color-blind constitution signals a commonsense ideal of equality and a new "post-racial" American era. For others, it supplies a narrow constitutional vision, which serves to disqualify many of the tools needed to combat persistent racial inequality in the United States. Rather than taking a position either for or against color-blindness, Mark Golub takes issue with the blindness/consciousness dichotomy itself. This book demonstrates howcolor-blind constitutionalism conceals its own race-conscious political commitments in defense of existing racial hierarchy, and renders the pursuit of racial justice as a constitutionally impermissible goal.
