The U S Supreme Court And Racial Minorities

The U.S. Supreme Court and Racial Minorities offers an in-depth, chronologically arranged look at the record of the U.S. Supreme Court on racial minorities over the course of its first two centuries. It does not pose the anachronistic standard, “Did the Supreme Court get it right?” but rather, “How did the Supreme Court compare to other branches of the federal government at the time?” Have these Justices, prevented against removal from office by discontented voters (in contrast to the President and the members of Congress), done any better than the elected branches of government at protecting racial minorities in America?

"Must reading for anyone who seeks a better understanding of the U.S. Supreme Court's role in race relations policy." —Choice "Beware! Those committed to the Supreme Court as the ultimate defender of minority rights should not read Race Against the Court. Through a systematic peeling away of antimajoritarian myth, Spann reveals why the measure of relief the Court grants victims of racial injustice is determined less by the character of harm suffered by blacks than the degree of disadvantage the relief sought will impose on whites. A truly pathbreaking work." —Derrick Bell As persuasive as it is bold. Race Against The Court stands as a necessary warning to a generation of progressives who have come to depend on the Supreme Court of the perils of such dependency. It joins with Bruce Ackerman's We, the People and John Brigham's Cult of the Court as the best in contemporary work on the Supreme Court. —Austin Sarat, William Nelson,Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College The controversies surrounding the nominations, confirmations, and rejections of recent Supreme Court justices, and the increasingly conservative nature of the Court, have focused attention on the Supreme Court as never before. Although the Supreme Court is commonly understood to be the guardian of minority rights against the tyranny of the majority, Race Against The Court argues that the Court has never successfully performed this function. Rather the actual function of the Court has been to perpetuate the subordination of racial minorities by operating as an undetected agent of majoritarian preferences in the political preferences. In this provocative, controversial, and timely work, Girardeau Spann illustrates how the selection process for Supreme Court justices ensures that they will share the political preferences of the elite majority that runs the nation. Customary safeguards that are designed to protect the judicial process from majoritarian predispositions, Spann contends, cannot successfully insulate judicial decisionmaking from the pervasive societal pressures that exist to discount racial minority interests. The case most often cited as the icon of Court sensitivity to minority rights, Brown v. Board of Education, has more recently served to lull minorities into believing that efforts at political self-determination are futile, fostering a seductive dependence and overreliance on the Court as the caretaker of minority rights. Race Against The Court demonstrates how the Court has centralized the law of affirmative action in a way that stymies minority efforts for meaningful political and economic gain and how it has legitimated the legal status quo in a way that causes minorities never even to question the inevitability of their subordinate social status. Spann contends that racial minorities would be better off seeking to advance their interests in the pluralist political process and proposes a novel strategy for minorities to pursue in order to extricate themselves from the seemingly inescapable grasp of Supreme Court protection. Certain to generate lively, heated debate, Race Against The Court exposes the veiled majoritarianism of the Supreme Court and the dangers of allowing the Court to formulate our national racial policy.

In the first comprehensive accounting of the U.S. Supreme CourtÕs race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice. The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice. From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the CourtÕs race recordÑa legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the CourtÕs race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving AmericaÕs racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justicesÕ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the countryÕs promise of equal rights for all.

The debate over race in this country has of late converged on the contentious issue of affirmative action. Although the Supreme Court once supported the concept of racial affirmative action, in recent years a majority of the Court has consistently opposed various affirmative action programs. The Law of Affirmative Action provides a comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of the Supreme Court's involvement with the racial affirmative action issue over the last quarter century. Starting with the 1974 DeFunis v. Odegaard decision and the 1978 Bakke decision, which marked the beginnings of the Court's entanglement with affirmative action, Girardeau Spann examines every major Supreme Court affirmative action decision, showing how the controversy the Court initially left unresolved in DeFunis has persisted through the Court's 1998-99 term. Including nearly thirty principal cases, covering equal protection, voting rights, Title VII, and education, The Law of Affirmative Action is the only work to treat the Court decisions on racial affirmative action so closely, tracing the votes of each justice who has participated in the decisions. Indispensable for students and scholars, this timely volume elucidates reasons for the 180 degree turn in opinion on an issue so central to the debate on race in America today.

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.

Intended for use with the authors’ forthcoming casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law, Seventh Edition (forthcoming 2024), Race, Racism, and American Law: Leading Cases and Materials includes significant historical and contemporary cases and materials edited with an aim to foreground the most relevant sections and passages to illustrate the crucial role of race in the formation of US law. This new edition of Derrick Bell’s groundbreaking textbook Race, Racism, and American Law, like prior versions, eschews a traditional casebook format. The locus of analysis in this text is the struggle for racial justice, and its underlying history and political context as reflected in the ongoing contestation over law, legal reform, and transformation. As such the supplement includes but is not limited to Supreme Court cases. We follow Bell’s model of locating all edited cases and materials in the supplement, reserving the book’s text to provide historical and political context for significant cases or legislative actions, along with hypothetical questions, comments, and other tools of analysis. Professors and students will benefit from: Both legal and non-legal primary source material.Leading Cases and Materials includes selected historical and contemporary cases, legislation, and other legal materials that foreground the crucial role of race and racism, and the struggle for racial justice, within and through US law. A carefully selected compilation of United States Supreme Court Cases. Each case is chosen to guide readers through elements of US jurisprudence which reflect both reform and retrenchment of societal inequity as it relates to the question of race. Cases range from significant 18th century cases such as Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) (indigenous people cannot transfer full title to land) to contemporary civil rights decisions such as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) (further limiting the reach of the Voting Rights Act) and Comcast v. National Association of African American Owned Media (2020) (limiting protections against racial discrimination in contracting). Doctrinally and theoretically significant cases from lower federal courts and state courts. Cases from lower courts are selected to provide critical race insights into how judicial institutions outside the US Supreme Court shape doctrine and debates over race and racial inequality. Cases range from Acre v. Douglass (9th Cir. 2015) (ban on teaching of Mexican American studies found unconstitutional) to Lobato v. Taylor (Colo. 2003) (speculator attempts to divest Mexican American landowners with defective title derived from Mexico). Significant legislative and executive legal documents. This supplement includes materials going beyond traditional edited cases, reflecting the insight that a critical race analysis necessitates a grasp of law beyond the courts. Additional materials range from the United States Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015) to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. Benefits for instructors and students: Provokes discussion on contemporary and historical legal controversies cases and materials edited to address issues the lens of critical race theory’s conceptual framework

The U.S. Supreme Court and the Congressional Black Caucus disagree over how best to protect minority voting rights

Few individuals have had as great an impact on the law--both its practice and its history--as A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, he has distinguished himself over the decades both as a professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, and as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals. But Judge Higginbotham is perhaps best known as an authority on racism in America: not the least important achievement of his long career has been In the Matter of Color, the first volume in a monumental history of race and the American legal process. Published in 1978, this brilliant book has been hailed as the definitive account of racism, slavery, and the law in colonial America. Now, after twenty years, comes the long-awaited sequel. In Shades of Freedom, Higginbotham provides a magisterial account of the interaction between the law and racial oppression in America from colonial times to the present, demonstrating how the one agent that should have guaranteed equal treatment before the law--the judicial system--instead played a dominant role in enforcing the inferior position of blacks. The issue of racial inferiority is central to this volume, as Higginbotham documents how early white perceptions of black inferiority slowly became codified into law. Perhaps the most powerful and insightful writing centers on a pair of famous Supreme Court cases, which Higginbotham uses to portray race relations at two vital moments in our history. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 declared that a slave who had escaped to free territory must be returned to his slave owner. Chief Justice Roger Taney, in his notorious opinion for the majority, stated that blacks were "so inferior that they had no right which the white man was bound to respect." For Higginbotham, Taney's decision reflects the extreme state that race relations had reached just before the Civil War. And after the War and Reconstruction, Higginbotham reveals, the Courts showed a pervasive reluctance (if not hostility) toward the goal of full and equal justice for African Americans, and this was particularly true of the Supreme Court. And in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which Higginbotham terms "one of the most catastrophic racial decisions ever rendered," the Court held that full equality--in schooling or housing, for instance--was unnecessary as long as there were "separate but equal" facilities. Higginbotham also documents the eloquent voices that opposed the openly racist workings of the judicial system, from Reconstruction Congressman John R. Lynch to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan to W. E. B. Du Bois, and he shows that, ironically, it was the conservative Supreme Court of the 1930s that began the attack on school segregation, and overturned the convictions of African Americans in the famous Scottsboro case. But today racial bias still dominates the nation, Higginbotham concludes, as he shows how in six recent court cases the public perception of black inferiority continues to persist. In Shades of Freedom, a noted scholar and celebrated jurist offers a work of magnificent scope, insight, and passion. Ranging from the earliest colonial times to the present, it is a superb work of history--and a mirror to the American soul.