Book Details
Orange Code:91513
Paperback:412 pages
Publications:
Categories:
Sections:
1. Setting the Stage: Baltimore and the NAACP2. "No Star Performance": The Office in the 1940s3. "You Did All You Could . . .": Routine Work in the 1940s4. "A Negro on Trial for His Life": Criminal Law and Race Discrimination5. The "Increasing Power" of Private Discrimination6. "A Carefully Planned Program": Attacking Restrictive Covenants7. "Interference with the Effective Choice of the Voters": Challenging the White Primary8. "Passing Through a Transition": Education Cases, 1939—19459. To "Determine the Future Course of Litigation": Making the Record on Segregated Universities10. "Replete with Road Markings": The Supreme Court Deals with Segregated Universities11. A Direct Challenge of the Segregation Statutes": Making the Record in Brown12. "Behind This Are Certain Facts of Life": The Law in Brown13. "Boldness Is Essential But Wisdom Indispensable": Inside the Supreme Court14. "Quietly Ignoring Facts": Examining History15. "When They Produce Reasons for Delay": Devising the Remedy16. To "Open the Doors of All Schools": Passive Resistance to Brown, 1955— 196117. "Civil Rights . . . Civil Wrongs": Massive Resistance to Brown, 1955— 196118. The "Battle Between the Sovereigns": Violent Resistance to Brown, 1955— 196119. "An Act to Make It Difficult . . . to Assert the Constitutional Rights of Negroes": The Attack on the Lawyers, 1955-196120. "A Mortal Blow from Which They Will Never Recover": The Attack on the NAACP, 1955-196121. "I'd Kind of Outlived My Usefulness": The Changing Context of Civil Rights Litigation
Description:
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From the 1930s to the early 1960s civil rights law was made primarily through constitutional litigation. Before Rosa Parks could ignite a Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Supreme Court had to strike down the Alabama law which made segregated bus service required by law; before Martin Luther King could march on Selma to register voters, the Supreme Court had to find unconstitutional the Southern Democratic Party's exclusion of African-Americans; and before the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court had to strike down the laws allowing for the segregation of public graduate schools, colleges, high schools, and grade schools.
Making Civil Rights Law provides a chronological narrative history of the legal struggle, led by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that preceded the political battles for civil rights. Drawing on interviews with Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers, as well as new information about the private deliberations of the Supreme Court, Tushnet tells the dramatic story of how the NAACP Legal Defense Fund led the Court to use the Constitution as an instrument of liberty and justice for all African-Americans. He also offers new insights into how the justices argued among themselves about the historic changes they were to make in American society.
Making Civil Rights Law provides an overall picture of the forces involved in civil rights litigation, bringing clarity to the legal reasoning that animated this "Constitutional revolution", and showing how the slow development of doctrine and precedent reflected the overall legal strategy of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.
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