Race and Representation in the United States: the Constitutional Validity of Majority–Minority Congressional Districts

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
ROBERT J. McKEEVER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
Congressional Districts ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Racial Lines

In an effort to maximize the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the United States House of Representatives, many state legislatures have consciously sought to create so-called “majority–minority” congressional districts. This involves carving out districts in which African Americans or Hispanics constitute more than 50 per cent of the voting age population. The expectation is that such districts will elect a minority member of the House, which in turn will lead to a Congress that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs and interests of America's two largest ethnic minorities. Indeed, this expectation has become an article of faith for the mainstream civil rights movement and its white sympathizers.However, like other forms of affirmative action, majority–minority districting sits rather uncomfortably alongside the Constitutional principle of race-neutrality. In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has declared that, by subordinating traditional districting principles to the overriding need to draw boundaries along racial lines, states have violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

scholarly journals Preparing for 2007: Legal and Legislative Issues Surrounding the Reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Political Empowerment

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

From Bondage to Citizenship: A Comparison of African American and Indian Lower-Caste Mobilization in Two Regions of Deep Inequality

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 770-809
Author(s):  
Narendra Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Social Classification ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Demographic Patterns

AbstractThe paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups’ mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi.

African American Civil Rights Movements to End Slavery, Racism and Oppression in the Post Slavery Era: A Critique of Booker T. Washington’s Integration Ideology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (Issue 3) ◽  
pp. 62-68
Author(s):  
Nancy Bwalya Lungu ◽  
Alice Dhliwayo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The Impact

The Transatlantic Slave trade began during the 15th century when Portugal and subsequently other European kingdoms were able to expand overseas and reach Africa. The Portuguese first began to kidnap people from the West Coast of Africa and took those that they enslaved to Europe. This saw a lot of African men and women transported to Europe and America to work on the huge plantations that the Whites owned. The transportation of these Africans exposed them to inhumane treatments which they faced even upon the arrival at their various destinations. The emancipation Proclamation signed on 1st January 1863 by the United States President Abraham Lincoln saw a legal stop to slave trade. However, the African Americans that had been taken to the United States and settled especially in the Southern region faced discrimination, segregation, violence and were denied civil rights through segregation laws such as the Jim Crow laws and lynching, based on the color of their skin. This forced them especially those that had acquired an education to rise up and speak against this treatment. They formed Civil Rights Movements to advocate for Black rights and equal treatment. These protracted movements, despite continued violence on Blacks, Culminated in Barack Obama being elected the first African American President of the United States of America. To cement the victory, he won a second term, which Donald Trump failed to obtain. This paper sought to critic the philosophies of Booker T. Washington in his civil rights movement, particularly his ideologies of integration, self-help, racial solidarity and accommodation as expressed in his speech, “the Atlanta Compromise,” and the impact this had on the political and civil rights arena for African Americans.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

Racial Realities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
The 1960S

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Martin Luther King

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.

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