An Emotional Craving

Lethal State ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 153-179
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
North Carolinians

As the death penalty was falling out of use in North Carolina, the civil rights movement was underway. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as practiced was unconstitutional. Politically conservative North Carolinians who viewed the Supreme Court as a weapon of liberal overreach reacted by reinstating the mandatory death penalty and ultimately adopting the bifurcated sentencing protocol now in use around the country. The renewed interest in the death penalty emerged from the tough-on-crime rhetoric adopted by conservatives and the Republican Party during and after the civil rights movement. North Carolina resumed executions in 1984.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Law School ◽  
Alma Mater ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Limited Basis ◽  
Legal Defense

The epilogue examines the legacy of the efforts by Julius Chambers and his firm through the mid-1970s. In 1984, Chambers, widely acknowledged as an exceptionally skilled civil rights litigator and legal strategist, succeeded Jack Greenberg as director-counsel of Legal Defense and Education Fund. From that post Chambers coordinated the legal struggle for civil rights for nine years, mostly attempting to fend off the increasingly reactionary policies of the Reagan administration and of the legal positions on race advanced by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In 1993, Chambers resigned as LDF director-counsel and returned to North Carolina, where he was installed as chancellor of his undergraduate alma mater, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Chambers retired in 2001and, after an absence of nearly twenty years, returned to Charlotte where he rejoined the firm on a limited basis. He meanwhile served the inaugural director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, housed within the UNC Law School. Chambers, whose efforts advanced federal civil rights law to its apogee in the early to mid-1970s and who thus stands out as the most important African American civil rights attorney in the generation following Thurgood Marshall, died on August 2, 2013.

The Economy of Literacy: How the Supreme Court Stalled the Civil Rights Movement

2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Prendergast
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Property Value ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
The University

According to critical race theorists, legal rights in this country have been compromised by the recognition of White identity as having property value. In this article,drawing on these analyses as well as the observations of literacy scholars questioning the outcomes of literacy and education, Catherine Prendergast argues that the designation of literacy and education as "rights" is more rhetorical than real. Prendergast pays close attention to the arguments and court proceedings of three U.S. Supreme Court cases in which the value of literacy and the reality of racial discrimination have both been contested. Through an analysis of these landmark cases —Brown v. Board of Education, Washington v. Davis, and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke—the author deconstructs "the lofty prose equating education with equal opportunity" to uncover the ideologies of literacy that informed these cases. According to Prendergast, "this rhetoric has laid the foundation for the recent legal challenges to affirmative action." She concludes by suggesting that these crucial court decisions have stalled the civil rights movement by perpetuating the economy of literacy as White property.

scholarly journals Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Congress Of Racial Equality ◽  
Contact Improvisation ◽  
White Males ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Face

On the morning of May 4, 1961, a brave and motley group of travelers—seven black males, three white males, and three white females, varying in age and professional standing but all trained in nonviolence—embarked on what they called the “Freedom Ride.” Designed by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the bus ride was meant to commemorate and further the organization's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a non-violent test of desegregation on interstate buses that quickly disintegrated in the face of staunch resistance. This time, riders would test the 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, which prohibited segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants of bus terminals (Branch 1989, 390). Departing from Washington, D.C., the Freedom Ride aimed to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Explaining that they were merely exercising rights granted by the Supreme Court but that they knew the dangers, CORE director James Farmer said, “We were prepared for the possibility of death” (Cozzens 1997). Riding the momentum of the student sit-ins, the civil rights movement had become for many a matter of “putting your body on the line” (Branch 1989, 392).

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