Civil Rights Legislation Research Articles

Less Is More: A Cross-Generational Analysis of the Nature and Role of Racial Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century

After landmark Civil Rights legislation was implemented, scholars provided evidence that the nature and structure of whites’ racial attitudes changed from the Jim Crow era. They devised survey questions to capture newer, more acceptable forms of racial animus. One scale that came out of this effort and that receives the most empirical attention today is the racial resentment scale. Given the vast changes the American racial landscape has undergone since that scale was originally developed, we question whether this set of measures is related to racial attitudes in the same way across generational cohorts. We show two key findings: younger whites are not bringing about any meaningful change in the aggregate levels of racial resentment. Second, and more importantly, we show that while younger whites appear to have lower levels of racial resentment, these survey items are more strongly related to old-fashioned antiblack affect among younger whites. Thus, when it comes to millennials’ racial attitudes, “less is more.”

Federalism Re-Constructed: The Eleventh Amendment's Illogical Impact on Congress' Power

The Constitution is designed to protect individual liberty and equality by diffusing power among the three branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments, and by providing a minimum level of protection for individual rights. Yet, the Supreme Court seems to think that federalism is about protecting states as states rather than balancing governmental power to protect individuals. In the name of federalism, the Supreme Court has been paring away at Congress' power to enact civil rights legislation. In doing so, it has transformed the Fourteenth Amendment into a vehicle for protecting states rights rather than a vehicle for protecting individual rights. This paper analyzes this process and the institutional competence and separation of powers problems that have resulted. It proposes that the Court give effect to Congress' powers to deter potential constitutional violations by states under the Fourteenth Amendment and to keep in mind that federalism's purpose should be to maximize equality and liberty.

Tod G.HamiltonImmigration and the Remaking of Black AmericaNew York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2019. 314 p. $35.00 (paper).

Since 1965, when the Hart-Cellar Act eliminated the national origins quota system, Blacks from the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa have experienced an easier time migrating to the United States. The last three decades of the twentieth century saw significant immigrant flows from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and other English-speaking Caribbean nations. Since 2000, more than half of black immigrants have come from African countries. By 2014, the number of black immigrants reached 4 million, 9.2 percent of the black population; more change is likely since 16 percent of black children now have immigrant parents. But Tod Hamilton, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton, does more than simply depict this compositional change. He directly addresses a controversial question surrounding this influx: why do black immigrants have better occupational, educational, and health outcomes than black Americans? Some have offered a “cultural” explanation for this differential: black Americans have a weaker work ethic than black immigrants. Others point to differential discrimination, and to the selectivity that comes with migration. Hamilton sets out to provide a methodologically and theoretically sophisticated answer to this question. First, he does note that migrants, whether international or internal, are a self-selected group. An extreme example can be found in Nigerian immigrants, 63 percent of whom had at least a bachelor's degree in 2014. And when Hamilton compares black immigrants to black American movers (those who live in a state different than that of their birth), he finds that socioeconomic differentials are significantly reduced, although not totally eliminated. He then looks at the possible impact of the time period when most black immigrants arrived in the United States: post-1965, after major civil-rights legislation had begun reducing the effects of institutionalized racism in schools, housing, and the workplace. When looking at 1910–1940 data for New York City, which had numerous black immigrants from the Caribbean at the time, Hamilton found little evidence that immigrants differed from the city's black population in measures of social well-being. These differentials come to the surface during the post-1965 period. Recent black immigrants never experienced the harsh racist system that many black Americans experienced: inferior education, segregated living arrangements, predatory policing, the consequences of which still affect black Americans’ life-chances. Also, recent black immigrants picked certain areas of the country in which to settle—they are 30 percent of the black population in the Northeast—and their economic and educational opportunities differ from black Americans accordingly. Through his systematic study of how race, migration, and nativity interact in black Americans lives, Hamilton has produced a more nuanced understanding of the achievement gaps existing between black immigrants and black Americans. His framework, based on careful choice of comparison groups, also provides a blueprint for research that might better understand the general achievement gap between black and white Americans.

Memories of an Imperial City: Race, Gender, and Birmingham, Alabama

AbstractSeptember 15, 2013, marked the 50thanniversary of the 16thStreet Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. The bombing remains one of the most infamous events in the history of white supremacist violence in the United States. While conventional accounts of the event and its aftermath often consider the legal restructuring of the US state following the passage of subsequent Civil Rights legislation, little has been written about the transnational significance of Birmingham in shaping the character of US power abroad. This article argues that memorialisation and cultural architecture of Birmingham represent a significant crucible forging a particular style of liberal empire. Tracing a cultural genealogy of Birmingham through the writings of former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and famed scholar‐activist Angela Davis, I demonstrate how Birmingham, as a site of historic black struggle, has been remembered alongside the place‐making of empire.

Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri

Reviewed by: Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri Cheryl R. Hopson (bio) Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. By Rebecca Tuuri. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 338. $90.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $22.99 ebook) Rebecca Tuuri's Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle does some heavy lifting. [End Page 377] Strategic Sisterhood is the first of its kind to provide a thoroughgoing, compelling, and materially grounded overview of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an umbrella organization founded by humanitarian and educator Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The organization is still in existence today, with scholar and former president of Bennet College, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, as its seventh president. Drawing on archival research, traditional scholarship, interviews, photographs, and the memoirs of its leaders, specifically that of the council's fourth and longest running president, Dr. Dorothy Height, whose presidency spanned the years 1957 to 1998, Tuuri attempts to disrupt and simultaneously amend "influential histories of the postwar Black freedom struggle," that obfuscate or outright ignore the contributions of "Black middle-class women such as those of the NCNW" (p. 1). Her argument in Strategic Sisterhood is against metanarratives suggesting "the council shrunk from real activism in hopes of preserving their respectability" and status within and beyond the United States. Tuuri asserts that in drawing on its "positions of power" as a politically and socially (and, in its first twenty-five years, integrationist) council of respectable women, the NCNW aided more radical causes, were the "backbone" of the modern civil rights movement, and participated behind the scenes in and informed important civil rights legislation (p. 2). Divided into eight chapters, Strategic Sisterhood includes an introduction, conclusion, appendices, in-depth notes, an index of names and sources, and a substantial and interdisciplinary bibliography. Each of the book's eight chapter details some aspect of the NCNW's history since its founding, and the council's work on behalf of the Black Freedom Struggle. In the opening chapter entitled, "Maneuvering for the Movement: The World of Broker Politics," Tuuri quotes Bethune as stating, "If I should tap you with one finger, you may not even know that you have been touched. If I use two fingers, you may know that you were tapped. But if I bring all the fingers of my hand into a fist, I can give a mighty blow" (p. 14). Throughout this and chapters to [End Page 378] follow, Tuuri highlights the great work the council did with respect to anti-poverty measures in the U.S. and in parts of Africa (i.e. establishment of Head Start centers in Mississippi, housing projects funded by the government, important civil rights legislation such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, etc.), as well as highlights the ways the council used this anti-poverty work, and respectability politics, to grow in power and prestige. Between the mid-1960s and into the 1970s, the NCNW collaborated with private and government sectors in an effort to consolidate power, adopt to a steadily changing political climate, and to secure necessary and basic human rights and needs for the poor generally, and for Black people specifically. Accessible if overlong, Strategic Sisterhood enhances knowledge of the link between the NCNW and the Black Freedom Struggle, and of post-WWII politics, and the measures women, Black women in particular, had to go through to access and maintain power. Additionally, the book establishes the interrelationship between Black clubwomen and U.S. Black feminism. Strategic Sisterhood thus pairs well with Kimberly Springers' Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (2005). Cheryl R. Hopson CHERYL R. HOPSON is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Western Kentucky University. She has published essays on Black feminist sisterhood, Alice and Rebecca Walker, generational Black feminist mothering, and on the novel The Color Purple. A poet as well as a scholar, Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Fragile (2017) and Black Notes (2013). Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Political Economy and Working Law

ABSTRACTLauren B. Edelman’s Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) offers an empirically supported theory of legal endogeneity, explaining how managerialized ideas of compliance with employment discrimination legislation diffuse in organizational fields and shape judicial doctrine. Managerialization and legal endogeneity explain how and why equality-promoting civil rights legislation may do little to reduce workplace inequalities. This essay places Edelman’s theory within a broader terrain of opportunities and limits of law for promoting egalitarian change. Managerialization is not always detrimental to enhancing workplace race and gender equality. However, typically reinforcing logics of market capitalism and liberal legality often make it so, while blocking reforms countering judicial deference to managerialized compliance.

Legislators' Response to Changes in the Electorate: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

Between 1940 and 1970 more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This paper shows that the Great Migration and support for civil rights are causally linked. Predicting Black inflows with a version of the shift-share instrument, we find that the Great Migration increased support for the Democratic Party and encouraged pro-civil rights activism in northern and western counties. These effects were driven by both Black and white voters, and were stronger in counties with a lower history of discrimination and with a larger working class and unionized white population. Mirroring the changes in the electorate, non-southern Congress members became more likely to promote civil rights legislation. Yet, these average effects mask heterogeneity in the behavior of legislators, who grew increasingly polarized along party lines on racial issues. Overall, our findings indicate that the Great Migration promoted Black political empowerment outside the South. They also suggest that, under certain conditions, cross-race coalitions can be major drivers of social and political change.

The Shadow of Selma ed. by Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano

Reviewed by: The Shadow of Selma ed. by Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano Sheena Harris The Shadow of Selma. Edited by Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2018. Pp. x, 299. $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-5669-2.) The release of Ava DuVernay's 2014 movie Selma galvanized the nation as it watched the events of the past flash across the big screen. Moviegoers witnessed the trials-turned-victories of decades of activism. The film served as a sobering reminder of the beauty and burden of racial politics and voting rights, as well as of the brutality of the civil rights movement. Despite the relatively small geographical space that the city of Selma, Alabama, occupies, its place in history captures the full stage. Since the release of Selma, film critics, academics, and laymen have had their fair share of praise and criticism of the film. [End Page 509] The Shadow of Selma is a well-researched and balanced work on the film, the city, and the key players of the civil rights movement. Editors Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano provide a comprehensive analysis of both the film and the activities surrounding the events of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. They look beyond the lens of accommodation and further complicate the discussion of class, religion, geography, media, and popular culture. The bulk of the volume is concentrated on the actual city of Selma and the voting rights campaign, where the rising tide of protest manifested itself the most. This small southern city and the relatively short Edmund Pettus Bridge are used to discuss the often disjointed acts of resistance performed by black people during the height of the civil rights movement. This vantage highlights the shifts in community development during this period and demonstrates how the movement in Selma existed on different planes, had various leaders, took on multiple forms, and was inextricably tied to the larger narrative of the civil rights movement. The Shadow of Selma is separated into three parts. The first section, "Selma and the Voting Rights Act," is composed of six chapters covering grassroots activism, the historical significance of the bridge, the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson, white backlash, and international influence on the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Part 2, "Media and Memory," focuses on the use of domestic and international images to tell a larger story of struggle. The authors draw on a wide range of sources, from newspaper clippings to popularized images of the era, and discuss the imagery used in the film Selma. Finally, Part 3 of the volume, "The Myth of a Color-Blind America," provides statistical data and court records to explore the overt attempts made in the present era to minimize the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act. The history of mass resistance in the twentieth century is oftentimes blanketed with tales of great white heroes and black and brown victims. The Shadow of Selma stresses that black southern leaders had agency and challenged Jim Crow in the 1960s. The authors argue that the numerous laws passed during this period were a response to elevated forms of resistance and the interpretations of mass media, and not simply because of the president. The Shadow of Selma also addresses many dated beliefs about the civil rights movement and the influence of grassroots organizers, Martin Luther King Jr., and white demagogues on the proposed civil rights legislation. In many ways, this collection stresses the fact that despite the criticism that organizers received—even from members of their own race—they continued to use their bodies to demonstrate their discontent with inequality in America. Many fought back in silence, while others engaged in legal battles, sit-ins, public rallies, and printed publications. Although many forms of resistance and protest could be found throughout the black community, some have argued that the overabundance of strife within the movement contributed to its presumed decline. Yet many contributors to The Shadow of Selma stress that it was not failure in the traditional sense of the word, but instead that the movement led to a revolution, years in the making. The most...

Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics by J. Brooks Flippen

Reviewed by: Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics by J. Brooks Flippen Daniel K. Williams Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics. By J. Brooks Flippen. Jess and Betty Jo Hay Series. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. vi, 527. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-1514-9.) J. Brooks Flippen's definitive biography of James Claude "Jim" Wright Jr., the Texas Democratic congressman who served as Speaker of the House in the late 1980s before he was toppled by Newt Gingrich, offers a detailed, thoroughly researched account of a lost political species: the moderate southern Democrat. For three decades, Wright, an admirer of both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, served as a bridge between his conservative, increasingly Republican constituents in Fort Worth, Texas, and the national Democratic Party, whose liberal principles of equality and commitment to social welfare Wright continued to champion even after conservative "Boll Weevil" Democrats converted to the party of Ronald Reagan (p. 104). Flippen's book, which is based on extensive archival research and interviews with many of Wright's associates (and with Wright himself before his death in 2015), sheds important light not only on Wright's own achievements but also on the era of centrist liberalism of which Wright and other moderate southern Democrats were a part. Although Wright began his political career in the 1940s with a reputation as a progressive, he quickly learned to moderate his inclinations toward large government social programs and racial integration when they conflicted with the conservative leanings of his constituents. For thirty years, from the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower to that of Reagan, Wright practiced the politics of compromise, using his growing influence in Congress to pass centrist legislation on health care, civil rights, and the environment. His skill at channeling federal money to his district while simultaneously calling for fiscal responsibility warded off conservative challengers at home, and his ability to shepherd Great Society legislation through Congress (albeit at times in watered-down form) pacified northern liberals in his congressional caucus. His record on civil rights was mixed, reflecting the conflict between his liberal inclinations and conservative constituency. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in general, he supported moderate civil rights legislation, but only after it had been weakened by conservative amendments. On the environment, he was more progressive, but still not [End Page 508] sufficiently opposed to Texas oil interests to earn the support of national environmental activists. By the 1970s, Wright's cultural conservatism was out of step with the liberal wing of his party. He supported the Vietnam War long after it had become unpopular with progressives and took moderately conservative stances on abortion and school prayer. In the 1980s, when Wright had reached the top echelons of congressional Democratic leadership, some liberal Democrats in Congress treated him as an opponent and tried unsuccessfully to block him from becoming Speaker of the House. But if Wright found the Democratic Party's cultural move to the left discomforting, he considered the rightward shift of the Republican Party under Reagan far more objectionable. As Speaker, Wright tried—often unsuccessfully—to block Reagan's cuts to social programs and to counter Reagan's defense spending increases with tax hikes. Even as the parties shifted around him, Wright remained a southern liberal in the mold of the early 1960s: a man who believed in expanded government programs and a strong social safety net coupled with balanced budgets, moderate social conservatism, and a strong defense. At the end of the 1980s, Wright saw this dream collapse. After giving his life to congressional service—and sacrificing his first marriage, his extracurricular activities, and, to a certain extent, his health for the sake of his political career—he had to leave Congress in disgrace because of allegations of financial improprieties that he believed were unfair and politically motivated. Worse, the politics of moderation, civility, and consensus that Wright had pursued for decades disappeared, as did the centrist southern wing of the Democratic Party. Since 1997, Wright's Fort Worth district has been represented in...

William D. Green, Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865–1912. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. 392. $32.95 (cloth).

William D. Green, Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865–1912. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. 392. $32.95 (cloth).

Partisan Ambivalence, Partisan Intensity, and Racial Attitudes: The Impact of Shifting Policy Positions on Partisan Evaluations in the 1960s

The concept of ambivalence is important to the study of political psychology and behavior. We examine the causes of partisan ambivalence following the passage of major civil rights legislation to test our argument that the correlates of ambivalence will change following the alteration of long-standing party positions on a highly salient issue. We find support for this hypothesis for White Southerners during this time period—Indeed, our results demonstrate that the strength of one’s partisan attachment is unrelated to partisan evaluations for such individuals immediately following the passage of major civil rights legislation, but is again a predictor by the early 1970s.

Martin Luther King Jr. And Pretext Stops (and Arrests): Reflections on How Far We Have Not Come Fifty Years Later

By January, 1956, the Montgomery Bus boycott was in full-swing. Black citizens in Montgomery, Alabama were refusing to ride the city’s private buses to protest racially segregated seating. On the afternoon of January 26, 1956, twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. had finished his day of work at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. On his drive home, King stopped his vehicle to offer a ride to a group of bus boycotters standing at a downtown car-pool location. After the boycotters entered King’s car, two motorcycle policemen pulled-in behind King’s vehicle. While everyone in King’s car tried to remain calm, the police continued to follow King’s car. At the next car-pool location, when some of King’s passengers began to exit, one of the policemen pulled next to King’s window, stating: “‘Get out, King. You’re under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone.’” While stunned by the police action, King did not protest. He was arrested and taken to the Montgomery City Jail, where he was processed, fingerprinted and jailed with other black prisoners. It has been nearly sixty years since Martin Luther King, Jr. was subjected to this arbitrary and discriminatory police practice. Surely, things have changed in America. After the demise of the Jim Crow system, the enactment of federal and civil rights legislation protecting blacks from discriminatory application of state and local laws, and several decades of Supreme Court rulings enforcing the rights of black citizens, it would seem that law enforcement officials can no longer perform this type of arbitrary and bigoted policing. Although much has changed in America, investigatory or pretext stops unfortunately remain ubiquitous. As in King’s case, these stops are not aimed at enforcing the traffic code. Rather, police who conduct investigatory stops are a fishing expedition to look for evidence of criminal conduct. Various types of law enforcement agencies utilize pretext stops; and high-ranking police officials endorse pretext stops as a crime control measure. Indeed, two decades ago, investigatory stops were given a major boost when the federal government actively encouraged state and local police departments to use traffic laws as a basis for stopping cars suspected of drug smuggling. From one perspective, the use of pretext stops in the War on Drugs specifically, and to fight crime generally, raises no legal alarm. For most white Americans, modern application of this practice may seem annoying, but it is worth the cost in the fight against crime. A motorist is stopped by the police. The officer then questions the motorist about his or her travel plans (and if there are passengers, they are also questioned). Finally, a traffic summons or ticket may be issued. While bothersome, this practice, viewed in the aggregate, does not amount to a constitutional crisis. Moreover, on a rare occasion, criminality is exposed as a result of the stop. Black Americans, however, have a distinctly different perception of the situation. For King, the pretext stop was much more than a “stop.” The upshot was a frightening ride to jail; at one point during the ride, King believed the police were going to lynch him. Today, the modern pretext stop is on display when a black motorist is seen standing on the side of a highway or city street while police (typically white officers) search his vehicle. Study after study has demonstrated that African-Americans are targeted for pretext stops at a rate greater than white Americans. For blacks, particularly black men, a pretext stop is unequivocal notice of their inferior status in America. As Don Jackson, a former police officer, put it not too long ago: “The black American finds that the most prominent reminder of his second-class citizenship are the police.” The authors in this symposium were asked to consider how far America has come in the fifty years after the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Of course, America has made substantial progress on several fronts that would have pleased Dr. King had he lived to see them. Many aspects of our criminal justice system, however, would have deeply disappointed King. We are confident that the continued and widespread use of pretext stops and their attended consequences would have offended King. Looking forward, America can honor Dr. King by ending pretext stops. This article was presented at “MLK 50: Where Do We Go From Here?,” a symposium co-sponsored by the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law and the National Civil Rights Museum, on April 2-4, 2018. It will be published in the forthcoming Volume 49 of the University Memphis Law Review.

“Another Victory for the Forces of Democracy”: The 1949 New Jersey Civil Rights Act

ABSTRACT In the middle decades of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Jersey, like those in neighboring northeastern states, suffered pervasive discrimination in public accommodations, employment, housing, and education. This was true despite the fact that New Jersey lacked the state-mandated segregation common south of the Mason-Dixon line, and also that state civil rights laws in force since the 1870s ostensibly barred most such discrimination. Beginning in the late 1930s, activists in the NAACP and allied organizations began a concerted effort to overturn segregation throughout the state. Inspired by the nation's battle against tyranny abroad during World War II and prompted by fair employment measures enacted by New York and the federal government, these advocates pressed for truly effective civil rights legislation. Supportive state officials (notably Governor Alfred Driscoll), after desegregating public schools via the new state constitution of 1947, enacted a sweeping civil rights bill in 1949 banning discrimination in public accommodations and gave enforcement power to a potent state agency. This opened hotels, restaurants, and other amenities to minorities so effectively that New Jersey's actions provided a model later followed by Pennsylvania, New York, and other neighboring states.

State Civil Rights Remedies for Gender Violence: A Tool for Accountability

This article focuses attention on state civil rights remedies that provide a civil cause of action against those who commit acts of gender-based violence and frame the harm as a violation of the survivor’s civil rights. Though many of these laws long have been on the books, they are not widely used. The #MeToo movement has rightly focused public attention on the ways gender violence persists, and on the gaps in legal remedies for survivors. At the same time that law and policy-makers work to enact new laws to fill gaps, existing laws should be invoked to promote accountability and provide redress for survivors. State civil rights remedies do just that. In 1994, after four years of hearings, Congress enacted a civil rights remedy as part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) (“VAWA Civil Rights Remedy”), which provided a private right of action against an individual who committed an act of gender violence. The law was modeled after other federal civil rights legislation and authorized a survivor of gender-motivated violence to bring a civil cause of action against the individual who committed the harm. The Supreme Court, in United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000), struck down the federal law as an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’ Commerce Clause powers and of Congress’ enforcement powers under the Fourteenth Amendment. While the law provided redress for survivors during the six years it was in effect, both pre-existing and later-enacted state and local remedies also provide a private right of action for gender violence as a civil rights violation. This article reviews those state statutes and the associated case law interpreting them. It demonstrates that those state laws can more widely be used by those who seek to hold those who commit acts of gender violence accountable. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when high-profile and high-net-worth individuals are being held to account, and when reports of sexual violence that occur outside traditional employment settings are capturing public attention, those laws may be of increased utility. Trends in employment in which fewer workers are employed in settings covered by traditional federal and state anti-discrimination laws expose the gaps in existing civil rights frameworks and render additional remedies all the more important. The state laws reviewed here have not been the focus of much advocacy, scholarship, or litigation. This article advances an additional and under-utilized theory of recovery for gender violence survivors that offers a useful tool for accountability, redress and equality.

All Means All: Connecting Federal Education Policy and Local Implementation Practice Through Evidence and Equity

AbstractThis article discusses equity-based inclusive education and federal policy drivers that can be used to make positive sustainable change in state, district, and local practice to improve the academic, social, and behavioral outcomes for all students including students with extensive support needs and those with labels of intellectual and developmental disabilities. Educational policies addressed include the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA), Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and civil rights legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The policy domain feature of the Schoolwide Integrated Framework for Transformation (SWIFT) model is examined regarding how it was implemented in districts and schools, working toward the goal of providing an equity-based inclusive education for all students. Translating federal education policy into state, district, and local practice requires leadership and political courage to align federal, state, and district policy with the vision and values of equity-based, inclusive education.

White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami's Virginia Key by Gregory W. Bush

Reviewed by: White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami's Virginia Key by Gregory W. Bush Charissa Threat White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami's Virginia Key. By Gregory W. Bush. ( Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xiv, 336. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6264-8.) In White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami's Virginia Key, Gregory W. Bush investigates the history of Virginia Key Beach Park as a lens to explore the civil rights struggles of African Americans in Miami, Florida, and to examine how and why public spaces and access to them are a civil right. According to Bush, this book is a "hybrid" that follows two points of inquiry through seven chapters and an afterword (p. xi). The first is a historical analysis where Bush evokes the long civil rights narratives of historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Since the early twentieth century, black Miamians had struggled for access to the coast; they were successful in the waning days of World War II, when the direct-action protests of local black people led to the opening of the segregated Virginia Key Beach for black beachgoers. For the next two decades, African Americans looked to Virginia Key Beach as a triumph of the civil rights fight and used it as a gathering location for leisure, celebrating, and building community solidarity. With the passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, however, Virginia Key's meaning to African Americans changed, as many began to view the beach as a relic representing a painful past of second-class citizenship. In the mythic post–civil rights period of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the importance of Virginia Key to community solidarity diminished and its significance to the civil rights' struggle lessened, and the beach suffered from ongoing threats of commercialization until, according to Bush, activists began to use extensive oral histories to reclaim the space and history of Virginia Key Beach for the community. The author's second point of inquiry, woven throughout the book, is personal memory or civic engagement. Bush layers his historical analysis of Virginia Key Beach with his argument that a connection to the natural world is not only necessary but also vital to the growth and health of communities. Poor land management, racism, politics, global capitalism, and even the silencing of local voices are at the heart of the economic and environmental injustices suffered by ordinary people and local communities in Miami and elsewhere. [End Page 220] Land, according to Bush, "is the ultimate resource that social power depends on" (p. 256). Challenging injustices, then, requires increased public engagement by ordinary people and is accomplished in a variety of ways. For Bush, reclaiming the history of Virginia Key Beach and staking a claim to public spaces are two of the best ways to build solidarity among a diverse group of people and to ensure equity for all community members. For scholars seeking a solid history that traces the importance of public spaces to civil rights struggles in the South, Bush's narrative offers a welcome addition to literature on public accommodation and transportation challenges. Bush reminds us that leisure and public spaces served and continue to serve important purposes in the fight for racial equality. The history of Virginia Key Beach not only reveals the fraught history of African Americans in Miami but also serves as a lesson in the complex history of civil rights in the late twentieth century. If the narrative falls short, it is when the author focuses on his second point of inquiry on civic engagement in the recent past. Although Bush's source material in this area is vast, his argument for establishing a connection with the natural world and his descriptions of his own experiences with disputes over land management in Miami sometimes detract from understanding the evolution and importance of Virginia Key Beach in the long civil rights history of Miami. Charissa Threat Spelman College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler's Life in West Virginia Politics by Carter Taylor Seaton

Reviewed by: The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler's Life in West Virginia Politics by Carter Taylor Seaton Mark Myers The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler's Life in West Virginia Politics. By Carter Taylor Seaton. (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 427.) In her fascinating work, The Rebel in the Red Jeep, Carter Taylor Seaton recounts the life and times of Ken Hechler, former West Virginia congressman and secretary of state. Seaton begins her work by placing Hechler within the context of "great man" theory, which argues that specific people influenced [End Page 133] the course of history. Seaton recognizes that historians have largely discounted this theory, yet does argue that Hechler is a "great man" in the history of the country, even if specific events did influence the course of his career (1). The major themes of the biography are rebellion and the importance of personal politics throughout his career. Seaton approaches Hechler's life both chronologically and thematically, examining his early life chronologically, while dealing with his career in Congress issue by issue. This approach provides a logical cohesiveness to the biography. In the chapters on Hechler's formative years, Seaton does an excellent job in connecting his upbringing and education to his future political style. Hechler's parents taught him lessons of responsibility and frugality, while also contributing to his low self-esteem, which only improved as he entered college and graduate school, ultimately earning a PhD from Columbia. It was also at Swarthmore, where Hechler attended as an undergraduate, that he became especially interested in politicians who put the public interest before personal gain. The lessons he learned from his upbringing and education clearly influenced the trajectory of his political career. Seaton also does an excellent job in explaining how important Hechler's work in the Truman White House was to his future political career. Hechler served as a researcher and speech writer for Truman and took away the importance of personal politics from his time working for the president. This connection can be clearly seen in his various campaigns, but especially his first campaign for Congress in 1958. As a candidate who would not toe the party line, Hechler had to find a way to overcome the Democratic party machine and a popular Republican congressman in West Virginia. He did so through this form of personal politics learned during his service under President Truman, as especially shown by his efforts to connect with voters through his use of his personal vehicle, eventually a red jeep, as his campaign office, which allowed him to stay on the trail consistently. This effort to get to know the electorate paid off in his ultimate successful election to Congress. Seaton points out that Hechler was particularly successful in reaching voters who normally did not vote. The two strongest aspects of the biography are the thematic second half of the book and the sources Seaton used in the book. Seaton does an outstanding job of approaching Hechler's career in Congress thematically by separating the chapters by issue. Throughout this section of the work, Seaton effectively uses Hechler's position on the different issues to illustrate both his progressive ideals and his willingness to be a maverick in Congress. The most effective chapter is the one on Civil Rights. Not only was Hechler supportive of Civil Rights legislation in Congress, he was also the only member of Congress to attend the Selma to Montgomery march in support of the Voting [End Page 134] Rights Act of 1965. Hechler's willingness to do what he felt was right, despite the political risks, was one key characteristic of his political career. Seaton also used excellent sources. She had unprecedented access to Hechler and his papers, and made good use of other archival resources, including collections at the Truman library. Although there are some concerns about the use of great-man theory in the work, Seaton has provided an excellent biography of one of West Virginia's most interesting and influential politicians. Anyone interested in the political history of West Virginia would benefit from reading this well-done biography. Mark Myers Indiana Academy, Ball State...

Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald

Reviewed by: Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald Kenneth W. Noe Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 451. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6606-2.) An unexpected sesquicentennial is following hard on the heels of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Conflicting memories and agendas, polarizing political rhetoric, exposed corruption in high places, struggles for public space and unobstructed ballot boxes, and tragic acts of senseless violence followed by judicial apathy now rise regularly like the ghosts of Reconstruction. Some voices even warn of a new redemption. Accounts and attitudes born in Reconstruction's aftermath, meanwhile, continue to have currency in many circles and appear regularly in a bevy of newspaper comment sections and Facebook memes. As Michael W. Fitzgerald observes at the beginning of Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South, the major survey of Alabama in the Reconstruction era somehow remains Walter L. Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York, 1905), a volume that is not only well over a century old but also steeped in the racist assumptions of its times. In this new work, Fitzgerald sets out to supersede Fleming's painfully passé volume while integrating a mass of recent literature. Fitzgerald delivers more than a new synthesis, however. Boldly postrevisionist in its interpretation, Reconstruction in Alabama offers nothing less than a new framework for understanding the period in the complicated cotton South. Throughout Reconstruction in Alabama, Fitzgerald stresses the centrality of factional politics and proto–New South economics, factors that he believes most historians of the period gloss over too readily. He grounds his analysis in antebellum Alabama, where white non-elites regularly confronted black belt [End Page 479] planters for power. When a mass of planters attempted to push Alabama out of the Union in 1861, Jacksonian Democrats from the northern Alabama hill country uncomfortably joined a growing handful of elite Whig conservatives to oppose the Confederacy. Wartime persecution, battlefield defeats, and brutal retaliation along the Tennessee River increased both Unionist numbers and their alienation from many of their white neighbors. Shared harassment never successfully welded these vying scalawag factions, and rivalry and class distrust endured. Unconditional Unionists from the hills particularly scorned wealthy latecomers, some of whom really did embrace the Union simply as a way to protect or rebuild personal fortunes. Race, in contrast, ironically provided a unifying element, as few white Alabama Republicans were antislavery or interested in the rights of postwar freedpeople except when they needed temporary allies. Instead, economic concerns such as railroads became uppermost to postwar GOP leaders and Alabama boosters. Class and prewar status likewise divided freedpeople, who in reality could only trust the United States Army during military occupation. Struggles over political rights and labor deepened as agricultural conditions worsened. Crop failures fatefully coincided with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and black suffrage. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups rose up during hard times out of the violent tradition of antebellum patrollers and wartime guerrillas. Reconstruction was not an uninterrupted period of insurgent bloodletting, however. Challenging many scholars of the period, Fitzgerald stresses again and again that in most of Alabama, and notably in the black belt, a period of relative peace emerged in 1870. Ulysses S. Grant occupied the White House. Better prices for crops and cotton due to war in Europe, the Democrats' own deep divisions, and the "Liberal Republican movement" lowered the pressure (p. 263). White landowners and African American laborers needed each other and warily coexisted in hopes of all boats rising. Outside of the hills, where bloody ethnic cleansing continued, black people voted in relative safety and began increasing their demands, notably in the arena of civil rights. Reconstruction was working. But it was a "false dawn" (p. 257). The Amnesty Act of 1872, the devastating national depression in 1873, the subsequent collapse of the state's railroad bonds, a new round of local crop failures due to heavy rain, and civil rights legislation in Congress all combined to give...

Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era eds. by Carol Emberton and Bruce E. Baker

Reviewed by: Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era eds. by Carol Emberton and Bruce E. Baker Paul A. Cimbala Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era. Edited by Carol Emberton and Bruce E. Baker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8071-6602-4. 296 pp., cloth, $45.00. Americans, influenced by race, region, politics, and time, have developed a problematic, sometimes unmindful, but enduring relationship with Reconstruction. Indeed, even as the nation moves through the era's sesquicentennial years, Reconstruction's memories arguably have a greater influence over a wider stretch of American life than do the more dramatic events of the preceding Civil War years. Scratch the surface of controversies over modern voter identification laws or the removal [End Page 105] of a New Orleans monument erected in 1891 to commemorate an earlier street battle, and the lingering impact of Reconstruction, with its contested memories, becomes apparent. It has been so since the 1870s, as the essays in Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era, edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce Baker, prove. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes in his introduction, the essays in this volume support the idea that ultimately, despite the efforts of Union veterans, African Americans, and their allies, sectional reconciliation meant conceding to a historical memory of Reconstruction constructed by white southerners. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brundage explains, interpretations of Reconstruction influenced the answers to important questions about "the rights of citizens, the measure of patriotism, and the appropriate exercise of national power in the century after Appomattox" (5). For example, K. Stephen Prince's exploration of white supremacy and the rise of Jim Crow describes how deftly and shamelessly southerners used Reconstruction memories to restrict black citizenship. Jason Morgan Ward examines how disenfranchisement supported by the poll tax, a bulwark of white supremacy, failed to yield to the circumstances produced by World War II. Recalling carpetbaggers and nineteenth-century civil rights legislation, the possibility of outside interference proved as frightening to white southerners as a black man holding a ballot during the Reconstruction era. Both authors show how white southerners used what they consider to have been misguided northern efforts to intervene in their post–Civil War affairs to derail subsequent federal efforts to protect the rights of black Americans. It appears that no area of policy could escape the influence of Reconstruction's memory. Mark Elliot explores how white understanding of the era spilled over into debates concerning Native Americans and imperialism during the 1890s. In the process, he adds an interesting point about the nature of Progressive Era gradualism in matters of race advancement. "If Reconstruction and black suffrage were not entirely right," Elliot notes white reasoning, "perhaps slavery was not entirely wrong" (159). Shortly thereafter, in the early twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson's approach to the peace issues of the Great War, as Samuel L. Schaffer explains, meant having a southern born-and-bred historian attempting to influence the Allies' handling of victory, defeat, and European reconstruction. As Schaffer rightly notes, Wilson had complex views of the issue, but he also "held true to his belief that a punitive peace was detrimental to a lasting peace" (211). Reconstruction taught many Americans such a lesson. Americans settled on a peculiarly white southern memory of Reconstruction, but the editors have not failed to include efforts to construct an alternative useable past. Shawn Leigh Alexander's work on T. Thomas Fortune and Justin Behrend's [End Page 106] study of John R. Lynch, for example, examine the efforts of African Americans to further a different interpretation of Reconstruction. Carole Emberton's contribution, dealing with the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives, adds the perspective of what not too long ago would have been an unheard voice. In the process, she shows that an unreliable narrator—in this case, an elderly black woman who contributed her memories to the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives—left behind a valuable record of the black sense of Reconstruction, even if the details she recalled "do not always conform to historians' expectations" (132). Elaine Parson...

Challenges To Reducing Discrimination And Health Inequity Through Existing Civil Rights Laws.

More than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, health care for racial and ethnic minorities remains in many ways separate and unequal in the United States. Moreover, efforts to improve minority health care face challenges that differ from those confronted during de jure segregation. We review these challenges and examine whether stronger enforcement of existing civil rights legislation could help overcome them. We conclude that stronger enforcement of existing laws-for example, through executive orders to strengthen enforcement of the laws and congressional action to allow private individuals to bring lawsuits against providers who might have engaged in discrimination-would improve minority health care, but this approach is limited in what it can achieve. Complementary approaches outside the legal arena, such as quality improvement efforts and direct transfers of money to minority-serving providers-those seeing a disproportionate number of minority patients relative to their share of the population-might prove to be more effective.