The Struggle for Black Equality is a dramatic, memorable history of the civil rights movement. Harvard Sitkoff offers both a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of civil rights organizations and a compelling analysis of the continuing problems plaguing many African Americans. With a new foreword and afterword, and an up-to-date bibliography, this anniversary edition highlights the continuing significance of the movement for black equality and justice.

Race, Law, and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the U.S. examines how the American legal system has legitimized and institutionalized racism, from slavery to Jim Crow segregation to the modern-day era of mass incarceration. This book, the first of its kind, has evolved from the author’s own experiences of both teaching race and the law for many years and practicing Civil Rights Law for over two decades. The text employs a novel interdisciplinary approach through primary source materials; archival records, photographs, and maps; and statutes and cases, to show how the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of the U.S. have deployed the law for racial control and to foster systemic racism in the areas of education, property and housing, criminal system, and voting rights. This study of race and law provides the historical and contemporary meaning of race and racism and explores the difference between justice and law; identifies the role of race and racism in early U.S. history and in the nation’s governing documents; explains how the legal system has historically limited access to citizenship, education, property and housing, and voting rights for African Americans; describes the epidemic of mass incarceration, its stakeholders and its collateral consequences; and, most importantly, guides students to be compassionate lawyers, committed to creating a more just and merciful society. Benefits for instructors and students: The text, based on the curriculum of a race law course that has been taught for over 10 years, examines and connects historical and contemporary legal issues in the areas of education, property and housing, the criminal legal system, and voting rights Rich primary historical materials provide deep exploration of the connection of the law and racism, from past to present A wide variety of photographs, maps, and illustrations provide real examples and context Detailed background stories put cases and excerpts in vivid context The text includes explanations of the origin of race and the different manifestations of racism The author’s riveting writing style will be of high interest to students A bibliography provides an overview of the challenges faced by African Americans during the struggles for voting rights—from slavery, to post-reconstruction and Jim Crow restrictions, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to U.S. Supreme Court cases and constitutional constraints The text features a full treatment of the origin, the legal history of affirmative action, and the 2023 affirmative action decision of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Harvard University

In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town.

"The Struggle for Black Equality "is an arresting history of the civil-rights movement--from the pathbreaking Supreme Court decision of 1954, "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas," through the growth of strife and conflict in the 1960s to the major issues of the 1990s. harvard Sitkoff offers not only a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of the civils-rights organization--SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC, and others--but a superb study of the continuing problems plaguing the African-American population: the future that in 1980 seemed to hold much promise for a better way of life has by the early1990s hardly lived up to expectations. Jim Crow has gone, but, forty years after "Brown," poverty, big-city slums, white backlash, politically and socially conservativepolicies, and prolonged recession have made economic progress for the vast majority of blacks an elusive, perhaps ever more distant goal. All Americans who strove and suffered to make democracy real come vividly to life in these compelling pages.

Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law and a writer on matters of race and civil rights, says with frank clarity what few will admit - integration hasn't worked and possibly never will. Equally, he casts doubt on the solution that many African Americans and mainstream whites have advocated: total separation of the races. This book presents Brooks's strategy for a middle way between the increasingly unworkable extremes of integration and separation.

A rich and innovative look at the rise and demise of a unique vision for racial equality in nineteenth-century Africa.

A condensed and accessible intellectual history that traces the genesis of the ideas that have built into the #BlackLivesMatter movement in a bid to help us make sense of the emotions, demands, and arguments of present-day activists and public thinkers. Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and incendiary campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that "Black Lives Matter" comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity--and not just equal rights--of black people. In this updated edition, The Making of Black Lives Matter presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and expands on the movement's relevancy. This edition includes a new introduction that explores how the movement's core ideas have been challenged, re-affirmed, and re-imagined during the white nationalism of the Trump years, as well as a new chapter that examines the ideas and importance of Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka as significant participants in the Black Power Movement and Black Arts Movement, respectively. Drawing on the work of these revolutionary black public intellectuals, as well as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law enforcement. He also illuminates the crucial difference between the problem signaled by the social media hashtag and how we think that we ought to address the problem. As Lebron states, police body cameras, or even the exhortation for civil rights mean nothing in the absence of equality and dignity. To upset dominant practices of abuse, oppression, and disregard, we must reach instead for radical sensibility. Radical sensibility requires that we become cognizant of the history of black thought and activism in order to make sense of the emotions, demands, and argument of present-day activists and public thinkers. Only in this way can we truly embrace and pursue the idea of racial progress in America.

Civil War officer, Reconstruction "carpetbagger," best-selling novelist, and relentless champion of equal rights, Albion Tourgee battled his entire life for racial justice. Now, in this engaging biography, Mark Elliott offers an insightful portrait of a fearless lawyer, jurist, and writer, who fought for equality long after most Americans had abandoned the ideals of Reconstruction. Elliott provides a fascinating account of Tourgee's life, from his childhood in the Western Reserve region of Ohio (then a hotbed of abolitionism), to his years as a North Carolina judge during Reconstruction, to his memorable role as lead plaintiff's counsel in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Tourgee's brief coined the phrase that justice should be "color-blind," and his career was one long campaign to made good on that belief. A redoubtable lawyer and an accomplished jurist, Tourgee wrote fifteen political novels, eight books of historical and social criticism, and several hundred newspaper and magazine articles that all told represent a mountain of dissent against the prevailing tide of racial oppression. Through the lens of Tourgee's life, Elliott illuminates the war of ideas about race that raged through the United States in the nineteenth century, from the heated debate over slavery before the Civil War, through the conflict over aid to freedmen during Reconstruction, to the backlash toward the end of the century, when Tourgee saw his country retreat from the goals of equality and freedom and utterly repudiate the work of Reconstruction. A poignant and inspiring study in courage and conviction, Color Blind Justice offers us an unforgettable portrayal of Albion Tourgee and the principles to which he dedicated his life. Finalist, 2007 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship

Now in paper, this volume is the first set of annotated oral interviews from the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement to be undertaken by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Interviewees recount their struggles against discrimination both in and outside of the workplace, showing how collective action, whether through unions, the Movement, or networks of workplace activists, sought to gain access to better jobs, municipal services, housing, and less restrictive voter registration. This is a powerful work that reconsiders the links of the labor movement to the struggle for civil rights.