Civil Rights Movements & the Law

"The American legal system is experiencing a period of extreme stress, if not crisis, as it seems to be losing its legitimacy with at least some segments of its constituency. Nowhere is this legitimacy deficit more apparent than in a portion of the African American community in the United States, as incidents of police killing black suspects - whether legally justified or not - have become almost routine. Regrettably, this legitimacy deficit has largely been documented through anecdotal evidence and a steady drumbeat of journalistic reports, not rigorous scientific research. This book offers an all-inclusive account of how and why African Americans differ in their willingness to ascribe legitimacy to legal institutions, as well as in their willingness to accept the policy decisions those institutions promulgate" --

The past has a future we never expect. Exterminate All the Brutes is a four-part HBO documentary series from filmmaker Raoul Peck that challenges how history is being written. Exterminate All the Brutes is currently airing on HBO Max. Q&A with Raoul Peck, Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz, and Mahmood Mamdani, moderated by Eugene Hernandez. Watch the official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g37YqLD0BSg&ab_channel=HBO Special thanks to HBO, Nancy Abraham, and Lisa Heller for their partnership on exploring the groundbreaking four-part film series that provides a visually arresting journey of European colonialism– from America to Africa and its impact on society into the darkest hours of humanity. More info: http://filmlinc.org Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=filmlincdotcom Like on Facebook: http://facebook.com/filmlinc Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/filmlinc Follow on Instagram: http://instagram.com/filmlinc

This Brief provides specific recommendations for police professionals to reduce the influence of implicit bias on police practice, which will improve both effectiveness (in a shift towards evidence-based, rather than bias-based) practices and police legitimacy. The author is donating her proceeds from this book to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (nleomf.org).

Behind the razor wire : portrait of a contemporary American prison system-book

"Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems - rather than humans - control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile"--Publisher's website.

Conversations about police reform in lawmaking and legal scholarship typically take a narrow view of the multiple, complex roles that policing plays in American society, focusing primarily on their techniques of crime control. This Article breaks from that tendency, engaging police reform from a sociological perspective that focuses instead on the noncriminal functions of policing. In particular, it examines the role of policing in the daily maintenance of racial residential segregation, one of the central strategies of American racial inequality. Unlike previous work that touches on these issues, this Article argues that police reformers and police leaders should adopt an anti-segregation approach to policing. It also offers legal frameworks and policy prescriptions that flow from an anti-segregation ethic in police governance.

PSA: EDUCATE YOURSELF ON SYSTEMATIC RACISM! With the Black Lives Matter movement growing across the country, many Americans still don't understand what systematic racism is. Systematic racism is when thousands of resumes are mailed to employers with identical information and black-sounding names are 50% less likely to get a call back. Systematic racism is when when black people are charged prices roughly $700 higher than white people when buying cars. Systematic racism is when black drivers are twice as likely to get pulled over by the police and black male teens are 21 times more likely to be killed by cops than their white counterparts. Systematic racism is when black people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people. The Black Lives Matter movement isn't just about lives. It's about education and opportunity for black lives. You can't say Black Lives Matter unless you sincerely want to dismantle all forms of systematic racism. And something is wrong when we continue to NOT do anything about it! This film "Racism Is Real - Systematic Racism Explained" should be required viewing for everyone. This film is systematic racism explained, but we need to TAKE ACTION. SIGN THE PLEDGE TO FIGHT RACISM http://www.bravenewfilms.org/racism Educators: use this film in your classroom! http://www.bravenewfilms.org/educators #BlackLivesMatter ABOUT BRAVE NEW FILMS Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films (BNF) are at the forefront of the fight to create a just America. Greenwald and BNF create free documentary films that inform the public, challenge corporate media, and motivate people to take action on social issues nationwide. Brave New Films’ investigative films have shined a light on the Trump administration, voter suppression, U.S. drone strikes, the prosecution of whistleblowers, and Wal Mart’s corporate practices. BNF's mission is to champion social justice issues by using a model of media, education, and grassroots volunteer involvement that inspires, empowers, motivates and teaches civic participation and makes a difference. #BraveNewFilms Wanna see more of BNF's free documentaries? SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/BNF-YouTube SIGN UP for email updates: http://bravenewfilms.org/signup Set up a free screening or house party for any of our films free: http://www.bravenewfilms.org/screenings Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/BraveNewFilms Instagram: http://www.Instagram.com/BraveNewFilms Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/BraveNewFilms DONATE: http://bit.ly/BNF-donate “Pandemic of Hate: Anti-Asian Racism During COVID-19” This documentary exposes how Trump’s bigotry is inciting violence against Asian-Americans and putting lives at risk. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtcBBqlRDW8&t=104s “Voting By Mail Is Patriotic: Trump Exposed” This documentary shines a light on Trump’s lies about voting by mail. Our military has been voting by mail safely and securely for 200 years! Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_g7Rn30e7s&t=35s “Suppressed: The Fight To Vote” This documentary takes a deep dive into how Brian Kemp STOLE the 2018 Georgia governor’s election through voter suppression. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03DGjnIkTdI&t=1458s “Trump Inc: Lining Their Pockets - White House For Sale” The documentary exposes Trump and his administration for profiting off the presidency. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgHrUAVraXg&t=112s “Sentencing Reform: Part 1 - The Power of Fear” This documentary investigates our racist criminal justice system and makes the case for why mass incarceration must come to an end. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Fotznf9lc&t=11s

From the Publisher: Amid rising public concern about the proliferation and privatization of prisons, and their promise of enormous profits, world-renowned author and activist Angela Y. Davis argues for the abolition of the prison system as the dominant way of responding to America's social ills. "In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison," Davis writes, "we should ask how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incarceration." Whereas Reagan-era politicians with "tough on crime" stances argued that imprisonment and longer sentences would keep communities free of crime, history has shown that the practice of mass incarceration during that period has had little or no effect on official crime rates: in fact, larger prison populations led not to safer communities but to even larger prison populations. As we make our way into the twenty-first century-two hundred years after the invention of the penitentiary-the question of prison abolition has acquired an unprecedented urgency. Backed by growing numbers of prisons and prisoners, Davis analyzes these institutions in the U.S., arguing that the very future of democracy depends on our ability to develop radical theories and practices that make it possible to plan and fight for a world beyond the prison industrial complex.

"In June 1951 five African Americans Harvey E. Beech James L. Lassiter J. Kenneth Lee Floyd B. McKissick and James R. Walker enrolled in classes at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill ("Carolina Law")."

The federal funding will support DNA evidence analysis, helping to overturn wrongful convictions and train future advocates in Arizona.

" 'If you want to understand the massive antiracist protests of 2020, put down the navel-gazing books about racial healing and read America on Fire.' -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Library Journal "Books and Authors to Know: Titles to Watch 2021" From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and "riots" that shatters our understanding of the post-civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had c lear precursors-and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions-explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fir e powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on Crime," sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions-that police violence invariably leads to community violence-continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation's enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality"--;What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Hinton shows that the events of 2020 had clear precursors-- and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. She takes us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992, charting the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton warns that rebellions will continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality. -- adapted from jacket

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity.

"Solutions to fix algorithmic bias could collide with law. Two scholars propose a solution."

"As the death penalty clings stubbornly to life in many states and dies off in others, this first-of-its kind ethnography of capital trials offers a fresh analysis of the inner workings of American death penalty. Sarah Beth Kaufman draws on years of ethnographic and documentary research, including hundreds of hours of courtroom observation in seven states, interviews with prosecutors, and analyses of newspaper coverage of death penalty cases. Her research exposes the logic of a system that is not explained by morality or justice and does not make sense fiscally, emotionally, or as a crime-control strategy, but instead depends on a series of social logics that go beyond the previously acknowledged problems with race and class discrimination. Taking readers inside capital courtrooms across the country, American Roulette contends that the ideals of criminal punishment have been replaced by logics of performance and politics. The result is a network that assembles the power to decide between life and death, all while suggesting that jurors take ultimate responsibility"--

I initially set out to assemble this booklet in an attempt to form something of a comprehensive history of Asian American civil rights, but soon realized that our history cannot be smartly categorized by ethnicity and then chronologically listed and detailed. Our history is full of overlaps and parallel struggles. Our history is not neat. And to so many Asian Americans coming of age today, it is unfamiliar.

"In a series of interviews given in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Angela Y. Davis explores how historical systems of oppression like slavery and lynching continue to influence and undermine democracy today. Davis builds on W.E.B. DuBois's view that when people were released from slavery in this country, they were denied the full privileges of other citizens. This denial of full rights and the creation of a U.S. prison system emerged as a way of maintaining dominance and control over entire populations. Davis explores the notion of "Abolition Democracy" as the democracy to come, a set of social relations free of oppression and injustice."--Jacket.

A Sergeant of the Beverly Hills Police Department tries to avoid video posts by playing copyrighted music. Discover more about his move here.

Education Week summarizes where state policymakers are attempting to censor the way teachers talk about racism and gender.

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

Authorities say the influencer died from an accidental overdose, but her family believes this could be another sad example of the dangers women face from men on dating apps

How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court--and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color. The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice. Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today's criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.

Various Tucson neighborhoods have rules saying non-white people can’t live there and one Midtown neighborhood association is getting rid of their rules.

The Florida St. Thomas University College of Law has recently rebranded to the Benjamin L. Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University in recognition of the prominent Black civil rights lawyer. Crump is a Florida State University College of Law graduate and has offices in California, Florida, and Washington, D.C. He is widely recognized […]

"Before the 1960s, the distinction between violent and nonviolent crime played hardly any role in the law. Since then, the number of crimes deemed violent has skyrocketed. David Alan Sklansky shows how shifting and inconsistent legal definitions of violence have fueled mass incarceration, protected abusive police, and undermined criminal justice"--

The latest Tweet by Reuters states, 'Whole Foods workers lose appeal over 'Black Lives Matter' masks ...' 🌎 Whole Foods Workers Lose Appeal over 'Black Lives Matter' Masks - Latest Tweet by Reuters.

Race, Slavery, & the Founders of Yale Law School An exhibition curated by Kathryn James and Fred Shapiro

"For a century, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought to keep Americans in touch with the founding values of the Constitution. As its centennial approached, the organization invited Ellis Cose to become its first ever writer-in-residence, serving as an "embedded journalist" with complete editorial independence. The result is Cose's groundbreaking Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU's 100-Year Fight for Rights in America, the most authoritative account ever of America's premier defender of civil liberties. A vivid work of history and journalism, Democracy, If We Can Keep It is not just the definitive story of the ACLU but also an essential account of America's rediscovery of rights it had granted but long denied. Cose's narrative begins with World War I and brings us to today, chronicling the ACLU's role through the horrors of 9/11, the saga of Edward Snowden, and the phenomenon of Donald Trump. A chronicle of America's most difficult ethical quandaries from the Red Scare, the Scottsboro Boys' trials, Japanese American internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam, Democracy, If We Can Keep It weaves these accounts into a deeper story of American freedom-one that is profoundly relevant to our present moment"--

Public colleges and universities that were forced to host white supremacists (who lacked any ties to the institution) are now looking at ways to restrict certain events, but to avoid doing so based

Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is a consortium of over ninety institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. These schools are focused …