Civil Rights Movements & the Law

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

New York City has agreed to pay more than $13 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accuses the city’s police department of using unlawful tactics against protesters following the death of George Floyd, according to a proposed settlement filed in a Manhattan federal court Wednesday.

An Oklahoma judge dismissed the reparations lawsuit filed by the last three known survivors of the Tulsa race massacre on Friday, court records show.

Affirmative action has long been controversial. Proponents say it’s a way to address historical discrimination. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in two cases to strike down race as a factor in admissions processes.The decision's impact will be tough to measure in nine states, including Arizona, that already bar public universities from considering race in admissions.Since 2010, Arizona hasn’t allowed public universities to consider race. But private universities were still able to, to an extent.

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.

This article was updated on June 29 at 4:09 p.m.In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday.

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

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

"The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? Cedric Johnson argues that this shortcoming was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality"--

"Race, Ethnicity, and the COVID-19 Pandemic is an extensive examination of the causes and consequences of the global pandemic on racial and ethnic minorities, offering analysis of the causes of the unique experiences of Black, Indigenous and Latin communities in the US and the world from multiple social sciences perspectives"--;"To understand racial disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths, we must first understand how they are linked to racial inequality. In the United States, the material advantages afforded by whiteness lead to lower rates of infections and deaths from COVID-19 when compared to the rates among Black, Latino, and Native American populations. Most experts point to differences in population density, underlying health conditions, and proportions of essential workers as the primary determinants in the levels of COVID-19 deaths. The national response to the pandemic has laid bare the fundamentals of a racialized social structure. Assembled by a prestigious group of sociologists, this volume examines how particularly during the first year of COVID-19, the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic led to different and poorer outcomes for Black, Latino, and Native American populations. While color-blindness shaped national discussions on essential workers, charity, and differential mortality, minorities were overwhelmingly affected. The essays in this collection provide a mix of critical examination of the progress and direction of our COVID-19 response, personal accounts of the stark difference in care and outcomes for minorities throughout the United States, and offer recommendations to create a foundation for future response and research during the critical early days"--

"Examines how different institutions--Hollywood, universities, corporations, and law enforcement--have sought to be inclusive of Muslims in an era of rampant Islamophobia"--

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."-

"Asian American Histories of the United States illuminates how an over-century-long history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the United States is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century"--;"Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare. Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the 21st century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early 21st century." -- Publisher's website

"Tells the stories of those who suffered during the worst social and political failure in the continent's history-the War on Drugs-and what we can do to right the wrongs of the past"--

When a trial lawyer stands before a jury to argue a case about a Black victim killed by a white person, how should the lawyer best argue the case? Critical race theorists (CRTs) are pessimistic that a white jury can set aside its own racism in judging the Black victims’ actions, and are skeptical of a jury’s ability to fairly judge a white actor’s motives. Before the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery killings, there was strong evidence (The Innocence Project) that the CRTs were right. After all, the prosecutors in the Ahmaud Arbery case were so convinced that a white jury in a Georgia county would not convict white vigilantes, that they initially didn’t even charge the killers with a crime. However, then, back-to-back, in both cases, prosecutors prosecuted, and the jury returned guilty verdicts. They convicted Derrick Chauvin of murder. They convicted Travis and Gregory McMichael and “Roddie” William Bryant of murder. This book examines the how and why of these verdicts and asks whether they hold lessons vital to withstanding CRT challenges to the American justice system.

"Surviving prison as an innocent person is a surrealistic nightmare no one wants to experience or even think about. But it can happen to you. Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. With You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent, he offers up-close accounts of the cases he's fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions. Putting readers at the defense table, this book forces us to consider how any of us might be swept up in the system, whether we hired a bad lawyer, bear a slight resemblance to someone else in the world, or aren't good with awkward silence. The stories of Brooks's cases and clients paint the picture of a broken justice system, one where innocence is no protection from incarceration or even the death penalty. Simultaneously relatable and disturbing, You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand how injustice is served by our system"--

"The objective of this edited volume is to shed light upon K-12 perspectives of various school stakeholders in the current unique context of increasing political polarization and heightened teacher and student activism. It is grounded in academic freedom case law and the majority of opinion of the Supreme Court in the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) that held that certain forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment. Justice Fortas wrote in the majority opinion that "it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." This volume is timely and instructive, as protections afforded by the First Amendment are a topic of enduring concern, with such freedoms requiring vigilant advocacy and protection from each generation. Paulo Freire stated, "Citizenship is not obtained by chance: It is a construction that, never finished, demands we fight for it" (1998, p. 90). There is confusion and much debate in and outside of schools about how and when these and other rights described in the First Amendment may or may not be limited, and the time is now to clarify the place of such rights in public education. At the Schoolhouse Gate is divided into three sections: Foundations, Case Studies of Rights in Schools, and Choices to Act. The "Foundations" section presents the case law pertaining to the rights of both teachers and students, setting the tone for what presently is permissible and chronicling the ongoing struggle with defining rights and responsibilities in schools. In "Case Studies of Rights in Schools," various authors examine teacher and student interactions with rights and responsibilities in schools, including the interest of students in participating with their teachers in the democratic experiment of schooling, the promise of student-led conferences, a new teacher's success with democratizing her classroom, and student views of news and technology. "Choices to Act" includes a portrait of teacher activism during the Oklahoma Walkout, a general counsel's advice to teachers for availing themselves of their rights, a story of a civic education curriculum generating student agency, and vignettes of two public high school students who took action in their schools and communities"--

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition—of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society—this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more. Contributors include Che Gossett, Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Toshio Meronek, and more.

In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist commitments and ambiguities and to highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street. Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the place of Arab Jews in Arab and Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the countries in which they live wage wars in the lands of their ancestors. This work opens up new possibilities for placing grounded perspectives at the center of gender, Middle East, American, and ethnic studies. -- From publisher.;Rabab Abdulhadi is associate professor of ethnic studies/race and resistance studies and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at San Francisco State University. She is a coauthor of Mobilizing Democracy. Her articles have appeared in Gender and Society, Radical History Review, Peace Review, Journal of Women's History, Ms. Magazine, the Guardian, and Palestine Focus, as well as Arab-language newspapers and magazines.;Evelyn Alsultany is assistant professor in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, and The Arab Diaspora. She is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media Post 9/11.;Nadine Naber is assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies, Journal of Ethnic Studies, and Journal of Cultural Dynamics. She is a coeditor of Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 and author of Articulating Arabness. --Book Jacket.

'Prison and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration' explores how incarceration undermines the health of people currently and formerly in prison. The book uses years of empirical research to show the intricate web of pathways through which mass incarceration also weakens the health and well-being of families, communities, and health care systems.

The emerging culture war over the holiday is misguided. In reality, Juneteenth celebrates one of the greatest triumphs of America and its founding principles.

From the National Archives and Records Administration: Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan announced earlier today [June 17]that the National Archives plans to place the Emancipation Proclamation on permanent display in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. “When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he […]

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have played a vital role in shaping America as we know it, contributing to every facet of industry, including higher education. Since 1990, the U.S. has used the month of May to recognize and celebrate Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The Department of Distinctive Collections (DDC) celebrates […]

The Justice Department on Friday issued a scathing assessment of Minneapolis police, alleging that racial discrimination and excessive force went unchecked before George Floyd's killing because of inadequate oversight and an unwieldy process for investigating complaints. Here are six key points from the report.

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.

New York state tried to limit writings and artistic works from prisoners — illustrating a growing issue across the country.

The Supreme Court has ruled against Alabama's defense of an electoral map drawn by the state's Republican-dominated legislature. Black voters had challenged the law as racially discriminatory.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered Alabama officials to redraw the state’s congressional map to allow an additional Black majority district to account for the fact that the state is 27% Black.