Civil Rights Movements & the Law

Carla Hayden, the first African American to hold the post, was fired over diversity initiatives.

May is Jewish American Heritage Month. Join ARL in honoring this community by viewing our round-up of events, blog posts, and resources from our member libraries. Events | Blog...

ARL shines a spotlight on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander heritage during the month of May. View our round-up of events, blogs, and other resources. Events | Blog...

"Sarah Lewis deciphers the hugely popular nineteenth-century images that failed to dislodge Americans' faith in the mythical white homeland of the Caucasus. Actual Caucasians little resemble race science's ideals of whiteness, so Americans learned to manipulate their visual regime-and visual media-to suppress evidence of race's incoherence."--;"In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive 'Caucasian' for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it." --

"Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother's stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother's health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. "Tell them about Papa Renty," she would say. It was her mother's last wish. Thus begins one woman's remarkable commitment to document that story. Her discovery of an eighteenth-century daguerreotype, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read "Renty, Congo." All at once, Lanier knew she was staring at the ancestor her mother told her so much about-Papa Renty. In a compelling story covering more than a decade of her own research, Lanier takes us on her quest to prove her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty's that pits her in a legal battle against one of the most powerful institutions in the country, Harvard University. The question is, who has claim to the stories, artifacts, and remnants of America's stained history-the institutions who acquired and housed them for generations, or the descendants who have survived? From These Roots is not only a historical record of one woman's lineage but a call to justice that fights for all those demanding to reclaim, honor, and lay to rest the remains of mishandled lives and memories"--

"A history of post-Brown school desegregation in Detroit, with a focus on Milliken v. Bradley"--

"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place"--Provided by publisher.

Three former Memphis officers have been acquitted of all state charges, including second-degree murder, in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols after he ran away from a traffic stop.

A new policy in Hennepin County, Minnesota, that allows prosecutors to consider racial identity in plea deals has led to a probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.

BOSTON, MA – April 30, 2025 - To honor Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, the Boston Public Library (BPL) is…

The attrition rate for associates in law firms was 20% in 2024, up from 18% in 2023 but still lower than the historic high of 26% in 2021, according to the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education.

Actions attack funding and accreditation but also seek to increase affordability and retention at Black colleges

Grijalva, who earned a sociology degree from the U of A in 1987, was a steadfast champion of the university’s land-grant mission and a testament to what it means to be a Wildcat for Life.

The president's contention that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional is considered a fringe view because the Supreme Court ruled to the contrary 127 years ago.

Racist covenants once impacted where minority families in Tucson could live.

Longtime Tucson Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva, who inspired generations of environmental and inner-city activists in a political career that spanned more than a half-century, died Thursday morning.

Grijalva spent half a century in public service and represented Arizona in Congress for more than two decades.

As ABC15 honors Black History Month, we are taking you inside the African American Museum of Southern Arizona, located on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson.

The bill would make it illegal for a city to spend less on its police force than it did in the year prior. But no Arizona cities have reduced their police budgets since the 2008 recession.

This semester, 12 clinical law students, representing six law schools, participated in our Spring 2024 Movement Lawyering Clinical Cohort. Through the work in the cohort, their skills were used to advance the campaigns of four of our beloved movement partners. The cohort's reach extended from the Northeast to the Midwest and down to the South, showcasing the broad impact of our collective work. The students' work and research shared the common theme of "Ending Criminalization and Building Thriving Black Communities Our Way."

"Collins views American society as being trapped in the so-called prisoner's dilemma. According to this classic piece of game theory, two prisoners whose interests would normally be aligned are put in a situation that compels them to betray their solidarity with each other. As Collins tells it, all of us are prisoners, and if we banded together we could create policies that would lead to a better, happier world. But those leading the Anti-Civil Rights Movement, such as Edward Blum, have repeatedly found ways to split coalitions-to pit marginalized groups against each others-whenever those coalitions have threatened the power of conservative elites to set the political and legal agenda. One of the central tools in the conservative arsenal has been affirmative action, which has had a long history of dividing the Asian American and Black American communities, going back to the anti-busing sentiment among Chinese Americans in San Francisco in the early 1970s. In 2013, the same year he helped gut the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County v. Holder case, Blum created the Students for Fair Admissions and brought a suit against Harvard University for discriminating against Asian Americans-the latest in a long string of prisoner dilemmas designed to undermine social progress. Collins's groundbreaking work is a field guide to the personalities, funding, and dilemmas that characterize the war between the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Civil Rights Movement-between the forces represented, respectively, by Thurgood Marshall and the one who replaced him on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. Reading this book helps readers better understand the battles that have been fought in the past, but also where the next fight might take place, and what might be necessary in order to win"--

"A powerful and needed collection of essays by accomplished women writers on violence and injustice toward Black men. The catalyst for a national conversation, this book shines a new light on the dangers Black men face daily, and the emotional toll anti-Black violence takes on the women who love them, casting a vision for future activism"--

"Narratives written by enslaved Africans in America are few in number. Some are transformative, like that of Harriet Jacobs; others are lesser, like the brief one attributed to Harriet's brother, John S. Jacobs. The revelation, here, of a much longer, richer, and more radical version of John's story, is a major historical event. His work is all the more significant for having been written and published in Australia, outside the sanitizing and bowdlerizing influence of the American Abolitionist movement. Jacobs's full account is a startling and clear expression of the true thoughts, words, and wide-ranging experiences of a man once enslaved"--

"In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing this throughline from the eighteenth century to the present, Brown demonstrates that engaging with legal culture in its many forms-including its conventions, paradoxes, and contradictions-is paramount to understanding Black writing. Brown begins by examining petitions submitted by free and enslaved Blacks to colonial and early republic legislatures. A virtually unexplored archive, these petitions aimed to demonstrate the autonomy and competence of their authors. Brown also examines early slave autobiographies such as Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Mary Prince's History, which were both written in the form of legal petitions. These works invoke scenes of Black competence and of Black madness, repeatedly and simultaneously. Early Black writings reflect how a Black Atlantic world, organized by slavery, refused to acknowledge Black competence. By including scenes of Black madness, these narratives critique the violence of the law and predict the failure of future legal counterparts, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, to remedy injustice. Later chapters examine the works of more contemporary writers, such as Sutton E. Griggs, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones, and explore varied topics from American exceptionalism to the legal trope of "colorblindness." In chronicling these interactions with jurisprudential logics, See Justice Done reveals the tensions between US law and Black experiences of both its possibilities and its perils"--

"The president's power to pardon federal crimes is immense, with roots in ancient notions of mercy and amnesty. However, this power, seemingly boundless under the Constitution, lacks clear constraints, inviting concerns about abuse. Recent discussions in the U.S. Supreme Court have raised alarms about the potential for presidential abuse of pardons, highlighting the need for accountability within the pardon system to uphold the foundational premise that no one is above the law."--

"In her work as an appellate judge, Justice Ginsburg translated this devotion into a jurisprudence focused on 'We the People,' substantively and procedurally. Substantively, Justice Ginsburg insisted that faithfully employed, the words of the Constitution supported an expansive understanding of who was included in 'We the People,' despite the framers' narrow understanding of the phrase when it appeared in the preamble to the Constitution. Expressed also as a jurisprudence of equality and opportunity, Justice Ginsburg believed that the phrase promised equal dignity for people despite their gender, gender identity, race, or disability. Procedurally, 'We the People' shaped Justice Ginsburg's approach to the process of deciding cases, guiding every step of her judicial process-the way she read the Constitution and statutes, approached voting issues, and analyzed the demands of the separation of powers, for example. While the substantive contours of 'We the People' have received the most attention, the full sweep of her jurisprudence appears also in the process she used in analyzing all issues. Justice Ginsburg's jurisprudence of 'We the People' became the ordering principle of this book, explaining both the book's title and its topics. Instead of a general survey of Justice Ginsburg's work, the book tells the story of an advocate and a jurist committed to increasing in material ways the bundle of rights we all carry around with us as Americans. As Linda Greenhouse explained in the Foreword, the story begins with Justice Ginsburg's commitment to an America that enables people with diverse experiences to live together in civic harmony. Justice Ginsburg believed that because the American experience involved living in community, the religious expression of some of us had to yield when the expression oppressed others of us in ways endangering that harmony"--

"Asian Americans have become the love-hate subject of the American psyche: at times celebrated as the model minority, at other times hated as foreigners. Wen Liu examines contemporary Asian American identity formation while placing it within a historical and ongoing narrative of racial injury. The flexible racial status of Asian Americans oscillates between oppression by the white majority and offers to assimilate into its ranks. Identity emerges from the tensions produced between those two poles. Liu dismisses the idea of Asian Americans as a coherent racial population. Instead, she examines them as a raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized group producing varying physical and imaginary boundaries of nation, geography, and citizenship. Her analysis reveals repeated norms and acts that capture Asian Americanness as part of a racial imagination that buttresses capitalism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and the US empire. An innovative challenge to persistent myths, Feeling Asian American ranges from the wartime origins of Asian American psychology to anti-Asian attacks to present Asian Americanness as a complex political assemblage"--

"In Critical Wage Theory, Ruben J. Garcia argues forcefully that we must center the minimum wage as a tool for fighting structural racism. Employing the lessons of critical race theory to show how low minimum wages and underenforcement of workplace laws have always been features of our racially stratified society, Garcia explains why we must follow the leadership of social movements by treating increases in minimum wage levels and enforcement as matters of racial justice. Offering solutions that would benefit all workers, especially the immigrants and people of color most often made victims of wage theft"--

"Andrew Kahrl's enraging national assessment of legal and financial dispossession proves that African Americans property owners have long been beset by racist practices, invisible obstacles, and hidden traps that leave them vulnerable to economic predation. Kahrl focuses specially on how property taxes have been used to swindle African Americans out of their land, with the cooperation of public officials and courts. These racist regimes fund and reinforce inequity, with blacks paying more in taxes than whites as they lose tremendous inheritable wealth to whites. There is something more fundamental than the "forty acres" of settlement lore: the taxes on them" --