Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

"In Mighty Justice, trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree recounts her inspiring life story that speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times. From the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, to the segregated courtrooms of the nation's capital; from the male stronghold of the army where she broke gender and color barriers to the pulpits of churches where women had waited for years for the right to minister--in all these places, Roundtree sought justice. At a time when African American attorneys had to leave the courthouses to use the bathroom, Roundtree took on Washington's white legal establishment and prevailed, winning a 1955 landmark bus desegregation case that would help to dismantle the practice of "separate but equal" and shatter Jim Crow laws. Later, she led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry in the AME Church in 1961, merging her law practice with her ministry to fight for families and children being destroyed by urban violence."--Amazon.com.

"The fascinating biography of Eunice Hunton Carter, a social-justice and civil rights trailblazer and the only woman prosecutor on the Luciano trial. Eunice Hunton Carter rose to public prominence in 1936 as both the only woman and the only person of color on Thomas Dewey's famous gangbuster team that prosecuted mobster Lucky Luciano. But her life before and after the trial remains relatively unknown. In this definitive biography on this trailblazing social justice activist, authors Marilyn S. Greenwald and Yun Li tell the story of this unknown but critical pioneer in the struggle for racial and gender equality in the 20th century. Working harder than most men because of her race and gender, Greenwald and Li reflect on Carter's lifelong commitment to her adopted home of Harlem, where she was viewed as a role model, arts patron, and community organizer, and later as a legal advisor to the United Nations, the National Council of Negro Women, and several other national and global organ izations. Greenwald and Li show that Carter worked harder than most men because of her race and gender. They reflect on her lifelong commitment to her adopted home of Harlem, where she was viewed as a role model, arts patron, and community organizer, and later as a legal advisor to the United Nations, the National Council of Negro Women, and several other national and global organizations. Carter was both a witness and participant in many pivotal events of the early and mid 20th century, including the Harlem riot of 1935 and the social scene during the Harlem Renaissance. Using transcripts, letters, and other primary and secondary sources from several archives in the United States and Canada, the authors paint a colorful portrait of how Eunice continued the legacy of the Carter family that valued education, perseverance, and hard work: a grandfather who was a slave that bought his freedom and became a successful businessman in a small colony of former slaves in Ontario, Canada; a fathe r who nearly single-handedly integrated the nation's YMCAs in the Jim Crow South; and a mother who provided aid to black soldiers in France during World War I, and who became a leader in several global and domestic racial equality causes. Carter's inspirational multi-decade career working in an environment of bias, segregation and patriarchy in Depression-era America helped pave the way for those who came after her"--

"This book revolves around a deceptively simple question: What do we mean when we say that something is an issue of civil rights? Americans use the term all the time. We have government agencies dedicated to protecting civil rights. We know the heroic struggle for racial equality of the 1960s as the civil rights movement. We're now supposedly in a postcivil rights era - even as we're constantly on the watch for new civil rights movements. We identify certain people as civil rights icons. We declare public officials good or bad on civil rights. All of this assumes "civil rights" includes certain things and not others. But look up the term in a dictionary or legal reference work and you'll find a mix of abstractions and stilted legalisms, none of which captures the depth and complexity of meaning that is conveyed with its invocation and none of which hints at historic and ongoing struggles over its contents"--

This highly-readable primer on Critical Race Theory (CRT) examines the theory's basic commitments, strengths, and weaknesses. In addition to serving as a primary text for graduate and undergraduate Critical Race Theory seminars or courses on Race and the Law, it can also be assigned in courses on Antidiscrimination Law, Civil Rights, and Law and Society. The book can be used by any reader seeking to understand the relationship between constructions of race and the law. The text consists of four Parts. Part I provides a history of CRT. Part II introduces and explores several core concepts in the theory--including institutional/structural racism, implicit bias, microaggressions, racial privilege, the relationship between race and class, and intersectionality. Part III builds on Part II's discussion of intersectionality by exploring the intersection of race with a variety of other characteristics--including sexuality and gender identity, religion, and ability. Part IV analyzes several contemporary issues to which CRT speaks--including racial disparities in health, affirmative action, the criminal justice system, the welfare state, and education.

Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois is the story of Martha A. Mills, who worked to bring justice to a place where injustice thrived. In this compelling and fascinating account, Mills describes her journey to Mississippi as a young civil rights lawyer in the late 1960s after joining the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She boldly challenged the racial status quo and racial barriers in the south, risking her personal safety in the process. Yet she looked racist judges, lawyers, lawmen, and Ku Kluxers in the eye--never backing down, in court or out. Mills's work as a civil rights activist continued through to her work as a judge in Cook County, Illinois.

""Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer's Life in the Battle for Change" combines Michael Tigar's wry legal and societal observations with his analysis of landmark civil rights and international justice cases on which he, as an attorney, worked . The result is a narrative that blends law, history, and progressive politics"--

"The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a road map for how to achieve this lofty goal; it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path towards the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967). Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a simple school desegregation case in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for ending state imposed racial segregation of the schools in the Deep South. Author Brian Landsberg began his career as a young attorney working for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1964, the year after the lawsuit was filed that would lead to the Lee decision. As someone personally involved in the legal struggle for civil rights, Landsberg writes with first-hand knowledge of the case. His carefully researched study of this important case argues that private plaintiffs, the United States executive branch, the federal courts, and eventually Congress each played important roles in transforming the South from the most segregated to the least segregated region of the United States. The Lee case played a central role in dismantling Alabama's official racial caste system, and the decision became the model both for other statewide school desegregation cases and for cases challenging conditions in prisons and institutions for mentally ill people. Revolution by Law gives readers a deep understanding of the methods used by the federal government to desegregate the schools of the Deep South"--

"This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear. Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time. Covering topics as varied as "the commonality of pain," "when lawyers are heroes," and the concept of an "equality dividend" that is due to people of color for helping America brand itself internationally as a country of diversity and acceptance, Ifill, Lynch, Stevenson, and Thompson also explore topics such as "when did 'public' become a dirty word" (hint, it has something to do with serving people of color), "you know what Jeff Sessions is going to say," and "what it means to be a civil rights lawyer in the age of Trump." Building on Stevenson's hugely successful Just Mercy, Lynch's national platform at the Justice Department, Ifill's role as one of the leading defenders of civil rights in the country, and the occasion of Thompson's launch of a new center on race, inequality, and the law at the NYU School of Law, A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America's perpetual fault line."--Amazon.com.