Civil Rights Legislation Research Articles

Civil Rights, the War on Poverty, and Black-White Convergence in Infant Mortality in the Rural South and Mississippi

For the last sixty years, African-Americans have been 75% more likely to die during infancy as whites. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, however, this racial gap narrowed substantially. We argue that the elimination of widespread racial segregation in Southern hospitals during this period played a causal role in this improvement. Our analysis indicates that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandated desegregation in institutions receiving federal funds, enabled 5,000 to 7,000 additional black infants to survive infancy from 1965-1975 and at least 25,000 infants from 1965-2002. We estimate that by themselves these infant mortality benefits generated a welfare gain of more than $7 billion (2005$) for 1965-1975 and more than $27 billion for 1965-2002. These findings indicate that the benefits of the 1960s Civil Rights legislation extended beyond the labor marker and were substantially larger than recognized previously.

Undoing Hardship: Life Writing and Disability Law

Undoing Hardship:Life Writing and Disability Law G. Thomas Couser (bio) "Whether the ADA has the transformative effect that its supporters predicted will ultimately not be resolved in the courtroom." Matthew Diller, "Judicial Backlash" (87) The opening words of the introduction to Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's recent book, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, link human rights and life narrative in a way that is highly applicable to disability as a human rights (and civil rights) issue: The post-Cold War decade of the 1990s has been labeled the decade of human rights . . . . Not incidentally, it has also been described as the decade of life narratives, what commentators refer to as the time of the memoir. Many of these life narratives tell of human rights violations. Victims of abuse around the world have testified to their experience in an outpouring of oral and written narratives…. [These narratives] begin to voice, recognize, and bear witness to a diversity of values, experiences, and ways of imagining a just social world and of responding to injustice, inequality, and human suffering. Indeed, over the last twenty years, life narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. (1) Progressive disability laws (the ADA, its American antecedents, and its international equivalents) are prime examples of contemporary civil rights legislation, and, as I have argued elsewhere ("Disability" 604), the current burgeoning of disability [End Page 71] memoir is related to these legal initiatives insofar as both life narrative and disability law are aspects of a broad disability rights movement. To this extent, the story of disability rights activism and disability life writing can be subsumed in Schaffer and Smith's master narrative of the simultaneous worldwide emergence and convergence of life narrative and human rights campaigns. Further, the aims of the Disability Rights Movement are essentially those of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which, according to Schaffer and Smith, "signaled . . . a collective moral commitment to just societies in which all people live lives characterized by dignity, equality, bodily inviolability, and freedom" (2). Nor is it incidental that the adoption of the Declaration in 1948 "was an aftereffect of the revelation of war crimes by Japanese and German war efforts and the war crime trials, especially the Nuremberg trials" (14). Like the UDHR, the Nuremberg Code was engendered by the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, especially the series of cases known collectively as the Nuremberg Medical Trial (1946), which addressed the brutal experiments carried out on the bodies of people with disabilities in Nazi Germany. Thus, there is a strong historical connection between disability history and the advocacy of human rights. In their discussion of human rights violations, however, Schaffer and Smith concentrate on depredations against groups defined by ethnicity, race, gender, or religion. (Their case studies involve Apartheid in South Africa, oppression of indigenous people in Australia, the exploitation of sex prisoners in East and Southeast Asia during World War II, incarceration in the U.S., and the democracy movement in China.) So although their generalizations are just as relevant to disabled people, the pertinence of disability rights to the universal discourse of human rights goes almost without mention in their book. While they are entitled to define the scope of their project—which is impressively global and inclusive—it's unfortunate that, once again, disabled people appear only marginally on the radar of cultural critics. It appears, then, that although human rights discourse and disability narrative may have converged in the recent past as never before, that convergence has not been fully recognized. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that among marginalized groups, people with disabilities have been the most hidden from public view. Many have been sequestered in institutions, and although their institutionalization has typically been represented as humane, even benevolent, it has denied them voice as well as visibility. A case in point is John Tayman's new book, The Colony, about the former leper colony on Molokai. Despite the welcome attention this book brings to the colony, archival material apparently did not permit Tayman to give voice to the people who were quarantined there.1 And...

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re-scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity-based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re-focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.

“The Like of Which Is Found Nowhere Else in All the World”: Placing and Imagining an African American West

E s s a y R e v i e w “T h e L i k e o f W h i c h Is F o u n d N o w h e r e E l s e in A l l t h e W o r l d ”: P l a c i n g a n d Im a g i n i n g a n A f r i c a n A m e r i c a n W e s t M i c h a e l K. J o h n s o n W o r k s R e v i e w e d Allmendinger, Blake. ImaginingtheAfricanAmericanWest.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 161 pages, $49.95. Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection. DVD, G. William Jones Film and Video Collection/Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University, 2004. $250.00. Whitaker, Matthew C. Race Work: The Rise ofCivil Rights in the Urban West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 382 pages, $35.00. Matthew Whitaker writes in Race Work that “the American West has long been narrowly labeled as a region with few if any African Americans and virtually no black history,” an area neglected by scholars of both African American and western history, in part because that history has existed outside the dominant paradigms of each field (9). As Whitaker observes, “the history of African Americans in the West is a story of urban life and ‘the struggle for racial equality,’” a history at odds with “academic and popular views of the American West” as an exceptional and egalitarian place fundamentally different from the East, replete with spectacular and rugged wilderness and empty of burdensome governmen­ tal regulations, a place where the ready availability of unclaimed land enabled “rugged Anglo American pioneers” to write their own destinies (10, 9, 9). Many African Americans, however, found that the West replicated rather than opposed eastern forms of government, the same antimiscegenation laws, the same de facto and de jure segregation, the same restrictions on land ownership, the same bigotry and discrimina­ tion. Contradicting rather than reinforcing the dominant mythology of an egalitarian and exceptional West of wilderness spaces rather than cities, of unusual freedom and democratic values rather than govemW e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e 4 1 . 3 ( F a l l 2 0 0 6 ) : 3 3 6 - 4 4 . M i c h a e l k . J o h n s o n 3 3 7 ALFRED N.SACK p re se n ts JULY J0NE5 SPENCER W IL L IA M S Lobby card from Juke Joint (1947). Courtesy of John Kisch. Separate Cinema Archive®. mental limitations, African American experience has been ignored, un­ noticed, or deemed unimportant to the history of the development of the American West. Scholars of African American history have, in their own way, con­ tributed to this “scholarly vacuum” by focusing on national issues and leaders and often overlooking the “local ‘race men’ and ‘race women’” whose contributions to regional civil rights struggles helped feed prog­ ress at the national level (9). Recent scholarship such as Whitaker’s Race Work, Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s anthol­ ogy African American Women Confront the West (2003), and Taylor’s In Search of the Racial Frontier (1998) have attempted to redress the neglect African American western history has received from both fields. All three books demonstrate how regional activism in the West set precedents for later national civil rights legislation and how even small African American minority populations have had significant impacts on the social and political development of western towns and cities. Blake Allmendinger’s Imagining the African American West likewise emphasizes the importance of not subsuming multiple experiences into a single story of “typical” western (or national) experience. As Allmendinger 3 3 8 W e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e f a l l 2 0 0...

Accessibility of Electronically Mediated Education: Policy Issues

Electronic technology has transformed education systems over the past 30 years. Generally speaking, technology has been an incredible benefit for individuals with disabilities. However, the use of technology, particularly in education, has been sometimes discriminatory toward those who are unable to interact with it in the standard ways anticipated by its inventors. Disability policies have attempted to address issues of equality of opportunity for all citizens, but application of these policies to rapidly evolving technology has been difficult. In this article we provide a brief review of disability policy as it pertains to education. We also review several current policy initiatives related to higher education information technology—all of which pertain to public kindergarten through 12th-grade education. We raise questions that arise when careful thought is given to ways in which disability, education, and technology policies overlap. We anticipate that these next few pages will generate dialogue among researchers, policy makers, educators, technology engineers, and others interested in how electronically mediated education affects individuals with disabilities and how it can be used to ensure equal access to the educational benefits available in schools protected by U.S. civil rights legislation.

A Continuity of Conservatism: The Limitations of Brown v. Board of Education

ON MAY 17, 1954, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT ISSUED THE landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. Some civil rights activists reacted with caution to the decision, most conspicuously the man who had led the legal challenge against Jim Crow education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Nonetheless, many supporters of the civil rights cause saw the ruling as a decisive breakthrough. Charles S. Johnson, president of the black Fisk University, articulated the excited sense of expectation that the ruling would break down social barriers not only in schools but in all areas of public life: If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life. (1) The New York Amsterdam News was even more emphatic, declaring that 'The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation. (2) Despite the initial optimism of civil rights campaigners, the process of school desegregation was beset by obstruction and delay. Although the era of massive resistance was relatively short-lived, white southerners subsequently succeeded through less confrontational tactics in restricting the implementation of the Brown decision. The defiance of federal authority by segregationists ignited a broad conservative reaction against the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, while Brown also inspired a southern white backlash against Washington that persists to the present day. My purpose is to assess how white southerners mobilized in opposition to school desegregation and then to turn to the longer-term impact of conservative political strategy. It has been argued that the Brown decision impeded the gradual process of racial change that had been taking place in the southern states since the late 1940s. According to this interpretation, the Supreme Court seriously miscalculated by selecting education as the target for a judicial assault on segregation rather than choosing the less emotionally sensitive area of voting rights or public transportation. Instead, the ruling undermined the reform of Jim Crow practices by provoking a militant backlash among southern conservatives. The integration of public facilities occurred because massive resistance stirred blacks into mobilizing a more effective protest movement that forced a previously complacent federal government to impose coercive civil rights legislation. (3) One of the principal criticisms of this analysis is that it overstates the momentum of racial reform in the pre-Brown South. The years during and immediately after World War II witnessed a resurgence in racial violence as whites attempted to repress the growing political assertiveness of the black population. Between 1941 and 1946, white lynchers murdered at least twenty-two African Americans. (4) Despite substantial increases in membership that occurred during the war, civil rights organizations struggled to score any decisive political breakthroughs. The efforts of southern blacks to build a stronger political power base through the integration of labor unions also suffered as a result of the racially divisive tactics of employers. Although there were some signs of change in the air, they were less a strong wind than a faint breeze. In the early 1950s several southern states attempted to preempt a legal challenge to public-school segregation by eliminating the most blatant disparities in educational facilities for black and white students. More than half a century after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, white southerners were finally taking measures to provide practical meaning to the doctrine of separate but equal. Yet such action only underlined their determination to protect the social order from federal interference. Proponents of the backlash thesis are more persuasive in their assertion that the Brown decision was not the principal catalyst for the development of the civil rights movement. …

The 1964 Civil Rights Act: Narrating the Past, Authorizing the Future

Civil rights legislation of the sixties and seventies sought to end racial discrimination in the United States; doing so required that the federal government establish an official ethnoracial taxonomy in order to specify who was and was not covered by the various statutes. Specifically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, and the Home Mortgage Act of 1975 required federal agencies to identify particular groups to be monitored for evidence of discrimination. Since these statutes were enacted, scholars and activists have argued over their political effects. In fact, the questions raised are legion: Who has benefitted from civil rights protections? Has discrimination diminished or simply morphed into new forms? Who counts as a minority and on what grounds? How has the massive immigration of the last four decades intersected civil rights reform? Should foreign nationals qualify for civil rights protections? If yes, how do more recent claims to diversify fit with older notions that civil rights legislation as a means of redressing past wrongs?

Introduction: Health and Human Service Delivery to Limited English Proficient and Immigrant Communities: Policy, Management, and Educational Issues

Immigration increased and the immigrant population became much more widely dispersed during the last decades of the 20th century. Many of these new immigrants are Limited English Proficient (LEP) individuals. These demographic shifts, and federal policy initiatives that expanded civil rights legislation of the 1960s, have created new service demands for both public and private agencies that participate in publicly funded health and human services programs to accommodate both language and cultural differences of their client populations. The introduction to this special symposium issue of the International Journal of Public Administration includes: (1) Overview of demographic trends and service needs; (2) Major federal policy initiatives, stakeholder responses and suggested future policy options; and (3) Key policy, management, and educational issues inherent in delivering health and human services to LEP and immigrant populations and how the authors address them.

Voting: The Biggest Challenge and What Can Be Done

Voting is one of the fundamental cornerstones of a democratic nation. The right to cast a ballot is one that denotes full civil membership in our society. It is also an essential building block of a minority community's political infrastructure and a major asset that can advance as well as protect its group interests. The right to vote, of course, has been contested throughout much of American history. The struggles through civil rights litigation, legislation, and activism have been fought to ensure minority groups and women have the same voting rights and opportunities as all other citizens. There has been progress, but more needs to be done.

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.

At Law: The Judicial Dismantling of the Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, product of broad coalition of persons with disabilities, was most significant civil rights legislation since Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ADA's explicit objective was to provide clear and comprehensive national mandate for elimination of discrimination against individuals with Disability and AIDS advocacy groups hailed it as landmark in protecting rights of all disabled Americans--a victory worth celebrating. (1) That celebration was not long-lived. The Rehnquist Court dismantled ADA by narrowing definition of disability, allowing discrimination for paternalistic reasons, and removing right to sue states for discrimination. The act disintegrated further during Court's 2001-2002 term, which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said might remembered as the Disabilities Act term. For persons with disabilities and civil rights advocates, it will remain painful memory--a time when Supreme Court was unfaithful to Congress' broad aspirations for rights of persons with disabilities. Narrowing Definitions Courts deciding cases under, Rehabilitation Act (the ADA's predecessor) did not view definition of as strict obstacle for plaintiffs. The judgments did not turn on whether an individual had disability; at issue instead was whether disability was cause of adverse action and whether action was justified because person's disability rendered her unqualified for job or ineligible for service. The courts' approach was similar to that taken in discrimination claims based on race or gender. When making decisions regarding race or gender discrimination, courts do not engage in searching inquiries into whether individual is really or really an African American. If cases are lost, it is usually because individuals were unable to prove they had been discriminated against because of their race or gender. Nothing during passage of ADA suggested narrow definition of disability. In fact, ADA's definition is derived from Rehabilitation Act, which courts interpreted broadly. Congress explicitly said that ADA should not be construed to apply lesser standard than [that applied under Rehabilitation Act]. (2) However, legal landscape changed dramatically. In approximately 87 percent of ADA cases from 1992 to 2000, federal appellate courts favored employers, usually on grounds that individuals failed to meet statutory definition of disability. (3) Even in 1997, commentator declared that ADA has become increasingly narrowed to point where. (4) it is in danger of becoming ineffective. In 2002, Justice O'Connor, writing for unanimous Court, declared that ADA must be interpreted strictly to create demanding standard for qualifying as disabled. (5) The Court's interpretation depends on its construal of several key concepts: life activity. The ADA defines as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of life activities,... record of such an impairment, or being regarded as having such an impairment. Major life activities include caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, reproducing, or working. (6) The Court adopted narrow construal of major life in Toyota Motor Mfg. Ky Inc. v. Williams. (7) The Court focused on activity of performing manual tasks. A woman with carpal tunnel syndrome was fired because she could not perform manual tasks associated with her assembly line job; she claimed that, with reasonable accommodations, she was able to work. The Court found that medical diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome was not sufficient to qualify person as disabled; nor is evidence that person cannot perform isolated, unimportant, or particularly difficult manual tasks. …

No “Illusion of Separation”: James L. Bevel, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War

As a student activist and member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James L. Bevel played a leading role in the civil rights movement. After the passage of the landmark federal civil rights legislation of 1964–65, Bevel promoted a new set of goals for the freedom struggle including ending United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Bevel's objections to the war grew from the belief, shared by other African–American leaders, that America's Vietnam policy could not be separated from issues of race and racism. Yet Bevel's antiwar stance remained unique. Driven by the depth of his antiwar sentiment as well as by a commitment to push nonviolent social action to its fullest potential, he increasingly worked to make peace the leading goal of the civil rights movement. Bevel's effort generated new levels of cooperation between civil rights and peace activists but also highlighted some of the barriers to a strong alliance between the two movements.

(Un)Furl That Banner: The Response of White Southerners to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965

BY THE LATE 1950s THE AMERICAN SOUTH HAD REACHED ANOTHER crossroads in its eventful history. De jure segregation, a cornerstone of southern life in the first half of the twentieth century, was under attack. Powerful instruments of change such as economic modernization, federal intervention, and a burgeoning black-led civil rights movement had begun to weaken the grip that segregation exerted on the lives of local people. In recent years some historians have added the agency of white southerners to the list of factors involved in the destruction of Jim Crow. Important interest groups in white society, these scholars argue, reached the conclusion that massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education was counterproductive. Growing numbers of businessmen, parents, religious leaders, and politicians believed that the violence and intimidation accompanying opposition to court-ordered school desegregation were corrosive of regional stability and economic development. At the very least some white southerners were willing to accept token or gradual integration as the price of progress. (1) The starting point for this essay is that more research must be done on southern whites before we are in a position to evaluate precisely the extent of, and reasons for, local white input into the demise of segregation. Historians have devoted a good deal of energy to probing the activities of the civil rights movement, particularly at the state and community levels. As a result of this work, few members of the academy would deny that the movement played the principal role in destroying the Jim Crow system--both by destabilizing segregation at the grass roots and by prompting federal intervention to guarantee equal rights under the law. To recognize the movement as the primary agent for change, however, is not necessarily to come to a full understanding of why most southern whites eventually accepted that segregation would have to go. After all, at the end of the 1950s there was nothing inevitable about the end of Jim Crow. Significant numbers of die-hard segregationists, particularly in the old plantation districts of the upper and lower South, were determined to maintain the practice, even in the wake of federal intervention during the 1957 Little Rock crisis and the first wave of student sit-ins in 1960. Had these people succeeded in monopolizing white opinion in the region, two key consequences would have ensued. First, the movement would have triggered an even more violent response from southern whites than it actually did. Second, local whites would never have complied with the federal civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. With whites forming the majority of the South's population and with Washington's readiness and capacity to exert its power in the region perennially limited, even grudging acquiescence to this legislation was a critical precondition for the success of the movement. Put another way, to explain why the civil rights movement was ultimately so successful in the 1960s, we need a deeper understanding of the motives and actions of white southerners. (2) The Civil War Centennial provides a useful window into the mind-set of the white South during the watershed years of the civil rights movement, 1961 to 1965. (3) As C. Vann Woodward once observed, the legitimacy of the racial order in the 1950s rested upon assumptions that constituted a veritable credo of the region. (4) What some scholars call historical memory was thus a fundamental prop of an oppressive social system that was grounded as solidly in culture as it was in politics and economic relationships. (5) Southern whites responded negatively to Brown for many reasons, but among them was their familiarity with a distinctive narrative that had coalesced around the turn of the century. Their sense of racial superiority and personal identity owed much to their understanding of the region's past. …

Race-Neutral Individualism and Resurgence of the Color Line: Massachusetts Civil Rights Legislation, 1855-1895

Race-Neutral Individualism and Resurgence of the Color Line: Massachusetts Civil Rights Legislation, 1855-1895

Section 504

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is civil rights legislation that is beginning to have a major impact on public schools. Schools have recently begun to pay more attention to this law because parents are beginning to request services for children not eligible under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Schools must ensure that students who are protected under Section 504 have equal access to a free, appropriate public education and to extracurricular activities. To ensure this, schools must take several specific steps. This article presents an overview of the requirements of 504 and provides schools with actions that can be taken to ensure compliance.

Keeping the "Civil" in Civil Litigation: The Need for a Punitive Damage: Actual Damage Link in Title VII Cases

Most jurisdictions subscribe to the common law rule that a plaintiff must be awarded actual damages before recovering punitive damages.' This rule stems from the view that without a finding of actual damages, there effectively exists no cause of action to support a punitive damage award.2 Moreover, a plaintiff who is unable to show damages worthy of compensation is seen by the common law as undeserving of the potential windfall provided by punitive damages.3 Despite the desirability of the common law rule, Congress forsook it in drafting civil rights legislation, most particularly Title VII.4 When Congress amended Title VII through the enactment of ? 1981a in 1991,5 it did not explicitly require that workplace discrimination plaintiffs be awarded actual damages before receiving punitive dam-

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and Beach Integration, 1959-1963: A Cotton-Patch Gestapo?

ON APRIL 24, 1960, THE SEGREGATED BEACHES OF HARRISON COUNTY became the first battleground for integration in Mississippi when nearly 125 black men, women, and children walked upon the sand with the intention of holding a peaceful wade-in demonstration in the Gulf of Mexico. A large group of agitated whites met the protesters at the beach and attacked them with pool sticks, clubs, chains, lead pipes, blackjacks, and a wire cable fashioned into an eighteen-inch-long whip. The assault began what the New York Times called the worst racial riot in Mississippi history, as at least fifteen African Americans sustained serious injuries inflicted by the white mobs who patrolled the area into the next morning. (1) While historians have focused on other segregation protests in Mississippi during the civil rights era, they have paid virtually no attention to the integration of its coastal beaches. Yet beach desegregation in Mississippi is an especially compelling topic, not only as an example of grassroots black protest, but also due to the role played by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in the episode. A cloud of secrecy has surrounded the commission since state legislators created it in 1956 to defend segregation throughout Mississippi. Its reticence regarding its activities during the civil rights era has been compounded by the fact that commission files remained sealed until 1998; scholars have consequently written little concerning the agency. (2) Since the coastal protests provide insight into the commission's operation, tactics, successes, and failures in suppressing black equality during the late 1950s and 1960s, the process of Harrison County beach integration significantly illuminates the nature of white resistance in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. (3) The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case played a crucial role in the solidification of white southern resistance to racial change. As Michael J. Klarman has argued, Brown produced a southern political climate in which racial extremism flourished, catapulting into public office politicians willing to use any necessary means to preserve Jim Crow. This proved particularly true in Mississippi, where the decision instigated a new phase of organized white resistance characterized by an increased level of state-subsidized support. Public reaction to the case certainly influenced the 1955 Mississippi gubernatorial election's outcome, as candidate James P. Coleman's vocal opposition to forced integration attracted many voters. Shortly after his election, Coleman promised to release a bombshell measure to fight integration that could be heard `from the Atlantic to the Pacific.' (4) In 1956 Coleman sent a bill to the legislature to create an official bureau, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, dedicated to the preservation of segregation in the state. The commission had the ambiguous power to perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government if it forced civil rights legislation and court decisions, such as Brown, on the state. To fulfill these vaguely defined goals, the commission possessed extensive investigative and subpoena powers, the use of fines and imprisonment to enforce obedience to and cooperation with Mississippi's segregation policies, a public relations department, and a two-year state appropriation of $250,000. The governor served as the agency's ex-officio chairman, while the senate president, attorney general, and house speaker held honorary positions. Coleman's bill passed through the lower house with a resounding 130-2 victory, with only 8 abstentions. Despite substantial approval, the commission's broad power and public funding nevertheless aroused misgivings in some state legislators, who pushed for another vote. The bill passed its second consideration with a closer 91-23 vote, as 26 representatives refused to participate. …

The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945–1980. By Timothy J. Minchin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. x, 277. $24.95, paper.

This book documents efforts to integrate the southern paper industry during the post–World War II period. It makes an important contribution not only to the vast and growing literature on the civil-rights movement but also to economic and legal history. In contrast to the traditional focus of civil-rights historians on voting rights, school desegregation, and public accommodations, Timothy Minchin takes up the issue of fair employment and access to jobs as components of the broader civil-rights struggle. Building on his earlier research on the textile industry (Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), Minchin focuses specifically on the role of black activists and civil-rights advocates in utilizing the legal machinery put in place by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (specifically, Title VII) as a vehicle for litigation against companies and unions seeking to deny black workers equal employment opportunities. Drawing on the vast record generated by Title VII litigation and oral interviews with key actors, Minchin provides considerable insight into the lived experiences and strategic thinking of those struggling to integrate the industry. The overall story provides powerful support for the efficacy of federal civil-rights legislation in opening up new opportunities for black workers.

From the Field -- The Changing Nature of Disability Policy and Its Distributive Impact

The focus of disability policy changes over time. Starting with vocational rehabilitation programs for disabled veterans of World War I and continuing down to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the policy slowly evolved from paternalistic handouts to civil rights legislation. Nevertheless, the intended outcomes of these public policies were based upon need (equity) to a large degree. The literature contains some findings that persons with developmental disabilities and persons who are severely disabled are the beneficiaries of assistance more than others. However, conclusions from a study of the Disability Community in Massachusetts indicate that class considerations are highly associated with receiving benefits from disability policy of all types. The same is true of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is a case of class politics operating in the guise of need (equity). The implications of these conclusions for disability policy are discussed.

Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina

North Carolina's 1963 speaker ban law declared the state's public college and university campuses off-limits to members of the Communist Party or to anyone who cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions posed by any state or federal body. Oddly enough, the law was passed in a state where there had been no known communist activity since the 1950s. Just which communists was it attempting to curb? In Communists on Campus, William J. Billingsley bares the truth behind the false image of the speaker ban's ostensible concern. Appearing at a critical moment in North Carolina and U.S. history, the law marked a last-ditch effort by conservative rural politicians to increase their power and quell the demands of the civil rights movement, preventing the feared urban political authority that would accompany desegregation and African American political participation. Questioning the law's discord with North Carolina's progressive reputation, Billingsley also criticizes the school officials who publicly appeared to oppose the speaker ban law but, in reality, questioned both students' rights to political opinions and civil rights legislation. Exposing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the main target of the ban, he addresses the law's intent to intimidate state schools into submission to reactionary legislative demands at the expense of the students' political freedom.Contrary to its aims, the speaker ban law spawned a small but powerfully organized student resistance led by the Students for a Democratic Society at the University of North Carolina. The SDS, quickly joined by more traditional student groups, mobilized student radicals in a memorable effortto halt this breach of their constitutional rights. Highlighting the crisis point of the civil rights movement in North Carolina, Communists in Carolina exposes the activities and machinations of prominent political and educational figures Allard Lowenstein, Terry Sanford, William Friday, Herbert Aptheker, and Jesse Helms, in an account that epitomizes the social and political upheaval of sixties America.