Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
An award–winning constitutional law historian examines case–based evidence of the court's longstanding racial bias (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that prejudice has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal government.
One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet,...

A thrilling and incisive examination of the post-Reconstruction era struggle for and suppression of African American voting rights in the United States.

Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction era raised a new question to those in power in the US: Should African Americans, so many of them former slaves, be granted the right to vote?In a bitter partisan fight over the legislature and Constitution, the answer eventually became yes,...

In another unrelenting look at the iniquities of the American justice system, Lawrence Goldstone, acclaimed author of Unpunished Murder, Stolen Justice, and Separate No More, examines the history of racism against Japanese Americans, exploring the territory of citizenship and touching on fears of non-white immigration to the US — with hauntingly contemporary echoes.

On December 7, 1941 — "a date which will live in infamy"

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"On Easter Sunday of 1873, just eight years after the Civil War ended, a band of white supremacists marched into Grant Parish, Louisiana, and massacred over one hundred unarmed African Americans. The court case that followed would reach the highest court in the land. Yet, following one of the most ghastly and barbaric incidents of mass murder in American history, not a single person was convicted. The opinion issued by the Supreme Court in US v. Cruikshank...

An evocative chronicle of the battle that led to America's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling shares insights into the abuses of the "separate but equal" system and how such courageous activists as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois helped end legal segregation.

"The pioneers of early flight performed death-defying feats and broke new technological ground as they took to the skies to thrill crowds and advance the boundaries of human innovation"--Provided by publisher.

Between 1865 and 1870, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S., the 14th conferred citizenship and equal protection under the law to all Americans, white or black, and the 15th gave black American males the right to vote. In 1875 the far reaching Civil Rights Act granted all Americans regardless of color "the full and equal enjoyment" of public conveyances and places of amusement. Yet eight years later, in 1883, the Supreme Court, by an 8-1...