Black or White?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz
Keyword(s):  
School Board ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
The Core ◽  
Filipino Students ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Southern Society

This chapter explores the experiences of Asian Americans with school segregation in the South. While southern society typically grouped Asian Americans under “colored” and prevented them from attending white schools, Asians often fought this racial classification by stressing their “non-black” status in their communities, local courts, and federal courts. The experiences of the Chinese community of Macon, Georgia with fighting plans to segregate their children from whites in the 1880s, the challenges to easy racial classification presented by a group of Filipino students to a Kentucky school board in 1904, and Gong Lum’s unsuccessful 1927 fight against school segregation in Mississippi form the core of this chapter.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Joshua Teplitsky
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
The Core ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Life Politics

This introductory chapter provides a background of David Oppenheim and his Jewish library. At the core of Oppenheim's identity and activity as a rabbi, intellectual, and communal leader stood his library. His library gained renown among Jewish colleagues and Christian contemporaries. It thus informed the decisions of local courts and distant decisors. He possessed highbrow scholarly material alongside popular pamphlets and broadsides, and he preserved diplomatic exchanges and communal ordinances in manuscript—an archive of contemporary Jewish life. Oppenheim's intellectual authority made him a much-sought-after source for endorsements for newly written books. This book then tells the story of premodern Jewish life, politics, and intellectual culture through an exploration of a book collection, the man who assembled it, and the circles of individuals who brought it into being and made use of it.

Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariela J. Gross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Southeastern United States ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Construction Of Whiteness

These two fascinating articles seek to fill an important lacuna in the burgeoning literature on the legal construction of whiteness. While LatCrit theorists in the legal academy have urged civil rights scholars and race critics to transcend the “black-white paradigm” of U.S. race studies, the majority of legal histories of whiteness have focused on two sets of cases: trials in the southeastern United States in which local courts tried to draw the line between “white” and “negro”; and cases about immigration and naturalization in which Federal courts determined whether particular foreign immigrants were suitably “white” for citizenship. Likewise, although there have been several important social and cultural histories of Texas Mexicans and whiteness in the last fifteen years, they have not considered the legal realm. The time is ripe for attention to the legal history of Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles in Texas, especially as they illuminate the shifting racial identity of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.

Introduction

Deference ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Gary Lawson ◽  
Guy I. Seidman
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Real World ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
The Core ◽  
Legal Contexts ◽  
The Many

Deference is a concept and practice fundamental to any real-world legal system. It lies at the core of every system of precedent, appellate review, federalism, and separation of powers. Notwithstanding its importance, deference has not heretofore been systematically analyzed, apart from its applications in specific settings. Until 1999, “deference” did not even merit an entry in Black’s Law Dictionary. This book aims to start a conversation about the concept and practice of deference. It hopes to bring the concept of deference to the forefront of legal discussion; to identify, catalogue, and analyze at least the chief among its many manifestations and applications; to set forth the many and varied rationales that can be and have been offered in support of (some species of) deference in different legal contexts; and thereby to provide a vocabulary and conceptual framework that can be employed in future discussions. The book’s methodology is descriptive and inductive: It identifies the actual practices that US federal courts identify as instances of deference and builds its account from that material. Subsequent chapters explore whether and how a definition and vocabulary derived in that manner can be applied in wider contexts.

Searching for Effective Schools in the Post-Brown Era

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
Effective Schools ◽  
School Board ◽  
Law School ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Effective Schooling ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
The University

In 1980 I Had Resigned My Faculty Position at the Harvard University Law School in order to accept the deanship at the University of Oregon’s law school. Following the public announcement, I received an urgent request from Ron Herndon, a militant black leader in Portland, Oregon. Herndon explained that the school board there was resisting the black community’s efforts to interpret Brown as requiring improve­ments in the mainly black schools rather than integrating them under a plan blacks feared would close many of them and reassign their children to white schools where they did not wish them to go. Herndon urged me to speak for the black community’s position at an upcoming school board meeting. I wondered about the propriety of myself—the new and, probably of some significance, the first black dean of the state’s only public law school—appearing on one side of a heated racial debate. I decided that, appropriate or not, I would appear, and did so. My defense of the black communities’ position gave pause to the school board’s members and much satisfaction to the black community. It was a reprise of my hear­ings in southern courtrooms years before, more theater than substance, but perhaps of some value. While the school board’s meeting was covered on television and in the local papers, I don’t recall that anyone at the law school ever mentioned my appearance. The more telling point is that as a veteran of the efforts to implement the Brown decision, I found myself opposing the school board’s efforts to use Brownprecisely as I had urged beforedozens of courts several years earlier. Now, tardily, having abandonedmy integrationist idealism, I recognized my obligation to supportblack parents’ efforts to provide effective schooling for their children.Where, I wondered, had Brownor our understanding and expectations for Browngotten derailed? Disenchantment with desegregation as a means of solving educational inequalities led to alternative means of achieving effective schooling for those not able to escape to the suburbs or enroll inexpensive private schools. Two major directions are worth examining. One is the effort, now three decades old, to eliminate or reduce the serious disparities in funding school districts within a particular state.

“Obsessed” with Segregating Mexican Students

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. García
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
School Board ◽  
Racial Composition ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Attrition Rates ◽  
School Officials ◽  
Mexican Students ◽  
Mexican Children ◽  
Time Period

This chapter presents a close examination of the publicly documented blueprints for school segregation from 1934 to 1939, as Oxnard school officials formalized a school-within-a-school model of separating Mexican children from Whites. Considering the school board meeting minutes during this six-year period, this chapter follows the trustees' incessant tinkering with classroom racial composition and social interaction practices within schools. It shows how they adjusted residential enrollment boundaries between schools and swiftly accommodated White parents' demands for segregation. These board actions facilitated racially disproportionate attrition rates for Mexican students before high school. Thus, though they attempted to portray themselves as dutiful administrators without any particular agenda, their documented segregation plans during this six-year time period reveal the racism of their actions.

The community of Ursula Franklin Academy: Ursula as friend and inspiration

2018 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. xxv-xxviii
Author(s):  
Seth Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
School Board ◽  
Real World ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Integrated Technology ◽  
The Core ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Toronto District School Board

Founded in 1995, Ursula Franklin Academy is a Toronto District School Board secondary school that specializes in integrated technology and academics for the real world. Ursula herself was actively involved in the planning of the school, and her values and activism continue to shape our program and community. One of the core structural elements that emerged from the early planning phases was The Wednesday Program, a place where teachers and students can design and deliver unique, locally developed curriculum. Though we no longer have Ursula with us, we work in her memory to best prepare students for the personal and global challenges they face, towards a world with social and environmental justice.

scholarly journals Degrees of Deference: Applying vs. Adopting Another Sovereign's Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Clermont
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
State Courts ◽  
State Law ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Local Rule ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
The Status ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Voluntary Adoption

103 Cornell L. Rev. 243 (2018)Familiar to all Federal Courts enthusiasts is the Erie distinction between federal actors’ obligatory application of state law and their voluntary adoption of state law as federal law. This Article’s thesis is that this significant distinction holds in all other situations where a sovereign employs another’s law: not only in the analogous reverse-Erie resolution of federal law’s constraint on state actors, but also in the horizontal choice-of-law setting and even in connection with the status of international law. Application and adoption are different avenues by which to approach a pluralist world. Application involves the recognition of the other sovereign’s law properly governing by its own force, while adoption follows from voluntary consultation of the other’s law while formulating the local rule of decision in pursuit of fairness, convenience, or other local policies. The applying/adopting distinction can be difficult to draw, but draw it we must because many binary practical consequences turn on it. Those consequences range beyond the federalist implications for federal and state courts to the modifiability of the sovereign’s law and the availability of original and appellate jurisdiction in the local courts.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Omi
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
American Population ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
The Social ◽  
Current Context ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Given the exponential growth and increased visibility of the Asian American population in the U.S., how are they positioned in the prevailing framework of racial classification and racial meanings? I argue that the current context for racially positioning Asian Americans is the increased scholarly attention being paid to the concept of “whiteness.” Just as previous “outsiders” (e.g., Irish, Jews) have been incorporated into popular understandings of who is white, there is increasing speculation in the contemporary social science literature that Asian Americans are following a similar trajectory of inclusion. The social and cultural indicators evoked to advance such an argument are discussed and subject to alternative interpretation.

A Separate Peace? The Politics of Localized Law in the Post-Revolutionary Era

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (03) ◽  
pp. 788-817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica K. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Legal History ◽  
White Women ◽  
State Law ◽  
The South ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Southern Society

Law is often seen as peripheral to Southern life before the Civil War, and the South as an outlier in the American legal history of that era. InThe People and Their Peace(2009), Laura Edwards demonstrates the profoundly legal nature of Southern society and takes an important step toward integrating the legal history of the South with that of the nation. Edwards identifies two dueling legal cultures in North and South Carolina between 1787 and 1840—the law of local courts, which she terms localized law, and the state law of professionalized lawyers and reformers. She argues that white women, slaves, and the poor fared better in localized law—which was based on notions of popular sovereignty and the flexible rubric of restoring “the peace”—than in state courts, which were steeped in a national culture of individual rights that led to more restrictive results. This essay questions Edwards's dichotomy between local law and state law and her depiction of the popular content of localized law, while building on Edwards's innovations to suggest a new direction for Southern legal history.

Connecting Public School Segregation with Urban Renewal and Interstate Highway Planning: The Case of Birmingham, Alabama

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 256-280
Author(s):  
Rebecca Retzlaff
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Highway Design ◽  
Interstate Highways ◽  
Interstate Highway ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Highway Planning ◽  
American Schools

This article analyzes the connection between public school segregation and Urban Renewal and interstate highway construction in Birmingham, Alabama. It analyzes the routes of the interstate highways, the locations of Urban Renewal areas, and their impact on segregated schools and school zones. This article argues that interstate highways and Urban Renewal were used to preserve segregated schools. It also argues that activists for White schools were able to affect interstate highway design while activists for African American schools were not. Also, Urban Renewal funds were used to build new segregated schools and neighborhoods in order to reinforce patterns of segregation.

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