Civil Rights Movements & the Law

The Freedom Libraries will be placed in the facilities' housing units for unfettered access to a 500-book collection donated by the non-profit organization.

"The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program unveils the almost forgotten philanthropic efforts of Julius Rosenwald, former president of Sears, Roebuck, Co. and an elite business man. Rosenwald simply desired to improve, "the well-being of mankind" through access to education.Many people are familiar with Mr. Rosenwald as the founder of the Julius Rosenwald Fund that established more than 5,300 rural schools in 15 Southern states during the period 1917-1938. However, there is another major piece of the puzzle, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program. That program established more than 10,000 school, college, and public libraries, funded library science programs that trained African American librarians, and made evident the need for libraries to be supported by local governments.The African American Struggle for Library Equality is the first comprehensive history of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program to be published. The book reveals a new understanding of library practices of the early 20th century. Through original research and use of existing literature, Aisha Johnson Jones exposes historic library practices that discriminated against blacks, and the necessary remedies the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program implemented to cure this injustice, which ultimately influenced other philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates (the Gates Foundation has a library program) as well as organizations like the American Library Association."--Publisher's website (viewed 2019 September 24).

"Although illegal, racial segregation was strictly enforced in a number of American states, and public libraries were not immune. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to African Americans, no books for them to read, and no furniture for them to use. It was these exact conditions that helped create Freedom Libraries. Over eighty of these parallel libraries appeared in the Deep South, staffed by civil rights voter registration workers. While the grassroots nature of the libraries meant they varied in size and quality, all of them created the first encounter many African Americans had with a library. Terror, bombings, and eventually murder would be visited on the Freedom Libraries--with people giving up their lives so others could read a library book. This book delves into how these libraries were the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and the remarkable courage of the people who used them"--Back cover.

"With journalistic skill, heart, and hope, Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history"--;"More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve the status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how, today, Tulsa combats its racist past while remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice.Requiem for the Massacre is a cultural excavation of Tulsa one hundred years after one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Young focuses on unearthing the narrative surrounding previously all-Black Greenwood district while challenging an apocryphal narrative that includes so-called Black Wall Street, Booker T. Washington, and Black exceptionalism. Young provides a firsthand account of the centennial events commemorating Tulsa's darkest day as the city attempts to reckon with its self-image, commercialization of its atrocity, and the aftermath of the massacre that shows how things have changed and how they have stayed woefully the same..." --

In eighteen oral histories, this volume tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror, and who have found themselves subject to rendition and torture, to workplace discrimination, bullying, or FBI surveillance and harassment. Includes: a sixteen-year-old Muslim American seized from her home by the FBI, and forced to wear a tracking bracelet for the next three years; a mother of a missing 9/11 first responder and her husband searching for their son, even as the media hounded them and portrayed their son as a possible terrorist in hiding; a Sikh man whose brother was the first reported hate murder victim after 9/11. -- Based on publisher's description and page 4 of cover.

Black Lives Matter Protesters are facing new issues after a court ruling against Deray Mckesson makes him liable for neglience during a demonstration.

"This book examines how deep structural racism embedded in the fabric of American society leads to worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy for people of color. By presenting evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, Dayna Bowen Matthew shows how racial inequality pervades American society and the multitude of ways that this undermines the health of minority populations. The author provides a path forward for overcoming these massive barriers to health and ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy. She encourages health providers to take a leading role in the fight to dismantle the structural inequities their patients face"--

Colleges across the country will be forced to stop considering race in admissions under Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling, ending affirmative action policies that date back decades.

"A field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States nd how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future"--;Monuments, museums, and everyday patriotic practices have made headlines for most of the twenty-first century, yet they are seldom look at together or understood explicitly as tools used by particular people in particular times and places to shape the culture in particular ways. Hass explore the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure: memorials in parks, museums visited by school kids, and routine practices of patriotism. She unearths legacies of white supremacy and traces movements to reevaluate and resist countless sites that have been doing this work, and asks that we look for sites that actually work to tell us who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs in the country. -- adapted from jacket

The Supreme Court killed affirmative action, but not for military academies or the legacy admissions that protect the ruling class.

"When we talk about racism, we often mean personal prejudice or institutional bias. Climate change isn't racist in that way. It is structurally racist, disproportionately caused by majority White people in majority White counties, with the damage unleashed overwhelmingly on people of colour. In this eye-opening book, writer and environmental activist Jeremy Williams takes us on a short, urgent journey across the globe--from Kenya to India, the USA to Australia--to understand how White privilege and climate change overlap. We'll look at the environmental facts, hear the experiences of the people most affected on our planet and learn from the activists leading the charge."--Back cover

Tou Thao is the last former Minneapolis police officer convicted in state court for his role in the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts. Doris Marie Provine's engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism--a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.

The ABA Journal is read by half of the nation's 1 million lawyers every month. It covers the trends, people and finances of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-a-vis employers. Along with the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization, American workers alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judgeshave dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor ofemployees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer.Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. As the employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas showin Unequal, though, our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favorsemployers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware ofhow the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination remains fairly common in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employmentdiscrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.

"On June 1, 1981, two young activists, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, were murdered in Seattle in what was made to appear like a gang slaying. But the victims' families and friends suspected they were considered a threat to the dictatorship of Phillippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his regime's relationship to the United States. But how could they prove it up against such powerful, and ruthless, adversaries? In SUMMARY EXECUTION attorney and author Michael Withey describes his ten-year battle for justice for Domingo and Viernes that he fought because "They killed my friends." Follow along as he embarks on a long and dangerous investigation and into the courtroom to obtain convictions of three hitmen, and then prove in U.S. federal court that Marcos was behind the assassinations. If so, it would be the first time in U.S. history that a foreign head of state would be held liable for the murder of American citizens on U.S. soil. However, to accomplish this Withey and his legal team, working with the victims' families and friends, would have to defeat concerted efforts by the murderers, and those who hired them, to cover-up their crimes and obstruct justice. Then they'd have to overcome numerous obstacles including exposing the perjured eyewitness testimony of an FBI informant, uncovering the brutal murder of an accomplice who was being sought to turn state's evidence, and working around the failure by local authorities to prosecute the Marcos operative who planned the murders.

A conservative activist who led the campaign against affirmative action in college admissions is suing two major law firms for fellowships that they offer to increase diversity in the legal profession.

""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"--

More than 70 years later, Lacks' family is finally being financially compensated for her involuntary contributions to medicine.

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.

President to sign proclamation on Tuesday for monuments across three sites honoring Black teen who was lynched in 1955

"The standard public debate over the Fourteenth Amendment goes something like this. Critics of the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment over the last several decades believe that the Court has used the Amendment's provisions for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" as open-ended vehicles for judicial policymaking, whether on abortion or gay marriage or a host of other issues. Indeed, it is difficult for someone sympathetic to the result in the 2015 gay marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges to read the Court's opinion and get the feeling that what the Court is doing is law. The case was decided under the rather nebulous concept "substantive due process," the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment's injunction that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law is not merely about process as its terms might suggest, but also about "substance"--Namely, that the clause protects unwritten, unenumerated fundamental rights or prohibits arbitrary and oppressive legislation"--

The Purpose The Mansfield Rule is a structured certification process designed to ensure all talent at participating law firms and legal departments have a fair and equal opportunity to advance into leadership. Mansfield is focused on broadening the talent pool for consideration, including those historically underrepresented in the legal profession, to facilitate transparent leadership pathways.  Read More...

When artist Richard Phillips carefully hangs watercolor paintings in his home, he becomes mentally transported into the nature scenes that appear on his canvas.

"The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971. Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated "the concentration camp law" and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America. Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist"--The publisher's description

Agents of change: Community efforts to overcome racial inequities is an editorial series created in collaboration with Report for America, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that highlights how local initiatives address racial inequalities through grassroots approaches.

America is in the midst of a police officer shortage. Agencies of all sizes are struggling to fill open positions.

"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"--

Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona (DPAA) is a non-profit educational organization working to inform the public about the injustices surrounding the death penalty and the criminal punishment system. DPAA consists of volunteers from around the State of Arizona organized into the Northern, Central, and Southern regions of the state.

"This authoritative overview of election redistricting at the congressional, state legislative, and local level provides offers an overview of redistricting for students and practitioners. The updated second edition pays special attention to the significant redistricting controversies of the last decade, from the Supreme Court to state courts"--