Moving Beyond Racial Fortuity

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Law School ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
The Face ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
School Issues ◽  
Primary Mission

Agospel Song Asks: “What do you do when you’ve done all you can and it feels like it’s never enough?” The answer, “Just stand,” seems so passive, but as interpreted by those who framed those words out of the difficulties of their own lives, it means to keep on, to not give up in the face of seemingly fruitless struggle. It draws on a necessary maxim of the oppressed: to “make a way out of no way.” Those of us who have labored for decades in racial-justice campaigns can identify with that gospel lyric, particularly civil rights lawyers whose primary mission was trying to desegregate school systems. The school issues of today grow out of societal conditions that affect educational efforts across the economic spectrum. They can’t all be laid at the doorsteps of Brown’s failure, but looking back over the decades, I wonder whether the long school desegregation effort was an unintended but nonetheless contributing cause of current statistical disparities that some critics angrily attribute to the continuing effects of racism. Others, not all of whom are white, assert with equal vehemence that blaming failure on racism is an excuse; that we need to get up off our dead asses, drop the welfare tit, stop having “illegitimate” babies, and find jobs like everybody else. More objective observers of black distress view the source as the lack of employment, the bedrock of survival and success in this society. In the post–World War II years, racial reformers felt that gaining racial equality would eliminate the barriers that underlay the economic disparities between blacks and others. While a powerful symbol, the call for equality was easier to make than for a great many blacks to realize. Just as the Brown decision in 1954 did not open up law-firm jobs when I graduated from law school in 1957, the hard-fought liti­gation to erode public manifestations of segregation meant little to those black people far less fortunate than I as they looked in vain for openings in schools, jobs, and housing.

scholarly journals Lawyers With Disabilities: L’Handicape C’est Nous

2008 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Disabled Persons ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
Physically Handicapped ◽  
Rights Issue

For having helped to make disability a twentieth-century civil rights issue in the United States, our profession deserves much credit. Lawyers have written, codified, and enforced several progressive initiatives. Inspired by the struggle for racial justice through law that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the disability rights movement was itself a civil rights inspiration even before the Brown decision, earning important early legislative advances for rehabilitation, vocational training, and integration of disabled persons in public life. The first national organization to focus on disability as such rather than one particular condition, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, took an early interest in fostering legal change and lobbied for employment-discrimination laws and new statutes to advance the interests of disabled Americans. The Rehabilitation Act of 19733 made federal law out of the radical yet sensible idea that societies construct disability at least as much as they reflect it and that prejudices and stereotypes, which are as potent as purely medical or anatomical facts, impede persons with disabilities.

Creating LDF South

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
To Come ◽  
Washington University

This chapter describes Chambers's creation of a black-led and racially integrated law firm, for all intents the first such institution in the United States. In 1967, Chambers recruited two junior attorneys to his office: Adam Stein, a white George Washington University Law School graduate who had interned with Chambers in the summer of 1965, and James Ferguson, an African American from Asheville, North Carolina, who had just graduated from Columbia Law School. The three would form the nucleus of a powerful civil rights law practice for years to come. In 1968, after recruiting a young white Legal Aid attorney, James Lanning, Chambers formally created Chambers, Stein, Ferguson & Lanning. In 1969, African American attorney Robert Belton, a North Carolina native who was LDF's leading Title VII litigator, also joined the firm. So highly reputed was Chambers as a civil rights litigator, and so central was his firm to the wider LDF campaign in these years, that the firm was informally acknowledged as "LDF South."

Power and Protection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie B. Green
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Sanitation Workers

Gender bound together labor and civil rights, serving as a key axis in the struggles for racial justice from World War II to the 1968 sanitation workers strike, including the tragic murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although the conflicts addressed in this essay are crucial to understanding the dramatic events of the later 1960s, they are usually obscured by national civil rights narratives that emphasize desegregation and voting rights, thereby pushing issues reflecting the intersection of labor, racial justice, and gender to the sidelines. This essay highlights conflicts ranging from the denial of World War II defense work, other than menial labor, to African American women to the support movement for the sanitation workers. In placing themselves quite literally on the front lines of that movement, women articulated their own interpretations of the strike’s slogan, “I am a man!” in relation to their own struggles as working women, mothers, and community activists.

Julius Chambers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
High Water ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Legal Defense

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. After blazing a unique path through the world of higher education, including becoming the first black student ever to be editor-in-chief of the law review at a historically white southern law school, Chambers was selected as the initial intern for NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s civil rights internship program. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked closely with LDF in forwarding the strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, with Chambers arguing and ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Aided by a small group of white and black attorneys and support staff which he gathered together in a truly integrated law firm, and undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its high-water mark. This book connects the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, the authors reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.

Growing Up in the Age of Roosevelt

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
William vanden Heuvel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Boarding House ◽  
The Law ◽  
Full Force

This chapter tells the story of Ambassador vanden Heuvel's boyhood and family life in Rochester, New York. The son of immigrants, he grew up in the boarding house run by his Belgian mother, Alberta. His Dutch father, Joost, was a labourer in a local factory. He describes the vibrant life of his close family and immigrant neighbourhood in the years before World War II. A precocious personality, he showed a passion for politics at a young age, handing out fliers for FDR and meeting Eleanor Roosevelt. He excelled in school, graduating high school at 15 and gaining a place at Deep Springs College in California. From there he enrolled at Cornell University and Cornell Law School, where he was editor of the Law Review. Upon graduation, he joined the law firm of General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan and enlisted in the Air Force as the Korean War was in full force.

A Powerful Weapon

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-128
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
The North ◽  
Brown Decision

Chapter 3 highlights a resurgence of northern Black support for school integration alongside the expanding civil rights movement. The outbreak of World War II created economic opportunities that drew Black migrants North in a second wave and sparked more militant civil rights activism. NAACP leaders persuaded northern Black communities to reject school segregation. By citing anti-discrimination legislation and organizing petitions and boycotts, these activists won the formal desegregation of public schools in the North between 1940 and 1954. A potent combination of civil rights activism, the decline of scientific racism, and the emergence of the Cold War pushed school integration to the forefront of national politics. Following the Brown decision, northern Blacks demanded school integration. The process was contentious, especially when districts closed Black schools and fired Black teachers. By 1965, many Black northerners expressed frustration with school integration and what they viewed as its failure to improve the quality of education for Black youth.

Brown as Landmark: An Assessment

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Balance Model ◽  
New York University ◽  
Improved Performance ◽  
Brown Decision

Planning For The Future requires an accurate assessment of what Brown accomplished either directly and indirectly, and what it failed to do. Such a critique is difficult because Brown has become a legal land­mark, an American icon embraced as a symbol of the nation’s ability to condemn racial segregation and put the unhappy past behind us. Indeed, the Brown decision has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause. Certainly, few veterans of the efforts to implement Brown through the racial-balance model are objective about the obstacles they faced. A typical response when confronted with their meager progress might be: “Sure, school integration has not worked because real integration has not been tried.” And despite its short-lived effectiveness in desegregating public schools, no one will deny the statistics of improved performance by some of the minority students who attended desegregated schools and their often-positive anecdotes of achievements under fire. The general view remains that Brown was the primary force and provided a vital inspirational spark in the post–World War II civil rights movement. Defenders maintain that Brown served as an important encouragement for the Montgomery bus boycotters, and that it served as a key symbol of cultural advancement for the nation. Even my progres­sive law students accept the view that Brown achieved more than it did. When I shared my alternative Brown decision (see chapter 3) with my constitutional law class, most students resisted the notion that affirming and enforcing “separate but equal” would have led to more progress than occurred under Brown. Nonetheless, my New York University colleague Paulette Caldwell and I both teach against the view of Brown as the icon of equality. At a dinner honoring Professor Caldwell, one of her students, Stacie Hendrix, told the gathering that she had viewed Brown v. Board of Education as a symbolic victory intended to change the state of race relations in America.

THINKING AND NOT THINKING ABOUT RACE IN THE UNITED STATES

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-446
Author(s):  
DAVID FARBER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Society

John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Richard King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2004)Since June 1964, all three branches of the federal government have supported the goal of racial justice in the United States. John Skrentny, in The Minority Rights Revolution, explains how that goal and related ones have been implemented over the last sixty years. He argues that key policy developments since that time were driven less by mass movements and much more by elite “meaning entrepreneurs.” Well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, in the immediate post-World War II years, a bevy of transatlantic intellectuals responded to Nazi race policy by seeking a universalist vision that would unite humanity. Richard King, in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, explores how intellectuals pursued that anti-racist universalist vision and then how African and African-American intellectuals in the 1960s, in particular, rejected universalism and began, instead, to pursue racial justice through cultural particularism. King's traditional intellectual history, when combined with Skrentny's sociological analysis of how elites managed ideas to pursue specific policies, reveals how American society, in pursuit of racial justice, moved from the simple stated ideals of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—equal opportunity and access—to the complexities of affirmative action and an embrace of “diversity” in American life.

scholarly journals Systemic Racism, Police Brutality of Black People, and the Use of Violence in Quelling Peaceful Protests in America

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-262
Author(s):  
Williams C. Iheme
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Sustainable Solutions ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Face ◽  
Initial Inability

The Trump Administration and its mantra to ‘Make America Great Again’ has been calibrated with racism and severe oppression against Black people in America who still bear the deep marks of slavery. After the official abolition of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, the initial inability of Black people to own land, coupled with the various Jim Crow laws rendered the acquired freedom nearly insignificant in the face of poverty and hopelessness. Although the age-long struggles for civil rights and equal treatments have caused the acquisition of more black-letter rights, the systemic racism that still perverts the American justice system has largely disabled these rights: the result is that Black people continue to exist at the periphery of American economy and politics. Using a functional approach and other types of approach to legal and sociological reasoning, this article examines the supportive roles of Corporate America, Mainstream Media, and White Supremacists in winnowing the systemic oppression that manifests largely through police brutality. The article argues that some of the sustainable solutions against these injustices must be tackled from the roots and not through window-dressing legislation, which often harbor the narrow interests of Corporate America.

The School Desegregation Era

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Law School ◽  
General Counsel ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
Brown Decision

Yale Law School Professor Alexander Bickel was a major consti­tutional scholar of his time. When, in 1970, he questioned the long-term viability of the Brown decision in a highly praised book, civil rights lawyers and liberal scholars were annoyed. Few of us at that time had any doubts that we would eventually prevail in eradicating segrega­tion “root and branch” from the public schools. Now, more than three decades later, Professor Bickel’s prediction, heavily criticized at the time, has become an unhappy but all too accurate reality. In this chapter I will examine the resistance by whites and the rigidity by civil rights lawyers and leaders that combined to transform Bickel’s prediction into prophesy. Even the optimists among us had continuing reasons to regret the “all deliberate speed” standard for implementing Brown I. The Supreme Court insisted in Brown II that its unique-compliance formula was intended to do no more than allow time for the necessary adminis­trative changes that transformation to a desegregated school system required. After a decade of experience with the standard, Judge Robert L. Carter, former NAACP General Counsel, surmised that the formula actually permitted movement toward compliance on terms that the white South could accept.1 Until Brown II, Carter said, constitutional rights had been defined as personal and present, but under the guise of judicial statesmanship, “the Warren Court sacri­ficed individual and immediate vindication of the newly discovered right of blacks to a desegregated education in favor of a remedy more palatable to whites.” Carter suggests that the Court failed to realize the depth or nature of the problem, and by attempting to regulate the pace of desegrega­tion so as to convey a show of compassion and understanding for the white South, it not only failed to develop a willingness to comply, but instead aroused the hope that resistance to the constitutional imper­ative would succeed. As had happened so frequently before, southern politicians began waving the Confederate flag and equating the Brown decision with a Supreme Court-led attack on states’ rights. Highway billboards called for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and candidates were elected to office on campaigns based on little more than shouting “Never.”

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