Major Civil Rights Research Articles

Civil Rights and Political Realignment: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy

During his presidency, John F. Kennedy emerged as a powerful force for change in the area of equal rights for the nationʼs black population. In addition to the major civil rights legislation that he proposed and that Congress ultimately enacted, Kennedy served as the nationʼs teacher, trying to awaken in citizens a sense of understanding and fair-mindedness. He referred publicly to civil rights as a “national crisis of great dimensions,” and then worked hard in trying to resolve that crisis in a positive and peaceful way. However, the civil rights activities of both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson contributed immeasurably to a powerful and enduring political realignment in the United States. Millions of Democrats, located heavily in the south, were highly disaffected by Kennedyʼs and Johnsonʼs activism in civil rights. Many moved out of the Democratic Party and then into the Republican Party after flirting in 1968 with the short-lived and overtly racist American Independent Party. Today, more than fifty years later, the south remains strongly Republican.

2 Vigilant Coping Moderates the Relationship between Discrimination and Memory among Black and Latinx Adults

Objective:In the U.S, Black and Latinx individuals disproportionately experience daily acts of discrimination. To counteract the psychological distress, many individuals develop coping mechanisms, like vigilant coping, where behaviors are modified to attempt to prevent discriminatory experiences. Researchers have investigated how coping mechanisms moderate the relationship between discrimination and psychological stress, but not their role in the relationship between discrimination and cognitive function. Prior research has shown a link between discrimination and poor episodic memory. The current study examined vigilant coping as a potential moderator in the relationship between discrimination and memory among Black and Latinx people.Participants and Methods:We partnered with 1317 non-Latinx Black (n= 291) and Latinx (n= 1026) individuals who participated in the Offspring Study of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Alzheimer's Disease. Participants were assessed in English or Spanish, according to their preference. Experiences of discrimination were measured on two scales: Major (civil rights violations) and Everyday (daily hassles), and were coded according to yearly chronicity. Vigilance was measured among people with at least one reported experience of discrimination on either scale, using a 5-item survey which was dichotomized as low and high vigilant coping. The Selective Reminding Test, a 12-item word list task with 6 learning trials and a delayed recall trial, yielded scores for total immediate recall and delayed memory. Linear regression models were used to assess if vigilance moderated the relationship between discrimination and memory, with years of education and age as covariates.Results:Participants ranged in age from 27 to 91, with a mean age of 56.5 (SD=11.0) years, a mean education of 12.7 (SD=3.7) years, and were 67% women. High vigilant coping was associated with more experiences of major (b = 1.7, 95% CI = 0.9,2.5) and everyday (b = 90.3, 95% CI=66.2,114.3) discrimination. Memory was not associated with reported everyday discrimination, but lower delayed recall was observed among people who reported more experiences of major discrimination (b= -0.04, 95% CI = -0.07,-0.01). This relationship was moderated by vigilance, such that among people with low vigilant coping, major experiences of discrimination predicted lower memory (b= -0.06, 95% CI = -0.12,-0.01), but the association between discrimination and memory was weakened among people with high use of vigilant coping (b= -0.02, 95% CI = -0.05,0.01).Conclusions:This study builds on Black researchers' work that laid the foundations for examination of stress and coping in marginalized populations. Future studies on discrimination and cognitive health should consider coping mechanisms as key aspects of pathways linking structural racism and inequalities to cognitive health among Black and Latinx individuals.

Jack Nelson: Fighting for Racial Justice in Louisiana

Abstract: Jack Nelson was a white Catholic lawyer involved in the struggle for African American civil rights in New Orleans. Drawing upon his faith's teachings, he advocated for racial justice in the courtroom and his community. As an officer of Save Our Schools, he fought to keep public schools open, and as a candidate for the Orleans Parish school board, he opposed those resisting integration. He defended young civil rights activists in a landmark Supreme Court case, and he filed the lawsuit that forced Tulane University to admit its first Black students. He facilitated the integration of New Orleans' Catholic schools. His civil rights advocacy brought social ostracism, hurt his legal practice, and doomed his efforts to win political office. Despite these setbacks, Nelson remained faithful to the principles of his religion and his profession. His victories are not widely known today because his desire to remain a solo practitioner precluded his involvement in cases lawyers argued for major civil rights organizations.

Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales by Cynthia E. Orozco

Reviewed by: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales by Cynthia E. Orozco Rolando Avila Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales. By Cynthia E. Orozco. Foreword by Julián Castro. Hispanic Civil Rights Series. (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. xxxviii, 537. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-55885-896-1.) Cynthia E. Orozco’s stated purpose in her new book Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales is to rectify a deficiency in the historical record. Orozco explains that even though Alonso S. Perales (1898–1960) was a major civil rights leader, he “has largely been forgotten” (p. xix). [End Page 376] However, that is not entirely true. Perales’s own works are still on library shelves. Although Perales died in 1960 “before the field of Chicano history in the academy existed,” significant works on Perales were indeed published beginning in the 1970s (p. xix). For example, Adela Sloss-Vento published Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican-Americans (San Antonio, Tex., 1977), and Michael Olivas published In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of Mexican-American Public Intellectuals (Houston, Tex., 2012). While it may be true that Perales is not as prominent in the literature as he should be—he remains absent, for example, from the American National Biography—he is included in numerous Mexican American reference works, anthologies, and monographs. However, compared with writings about other groups in American history, the dearth of Mexican American political biographies remains glaring. In this regard, Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights is a welcome addition to the literature and will surely become Perales’s standard biography for years to come. Orozco’s book is, to date, the most extensive study of Perales’s life and work. She presents an engaging, well-organized narrative. Twenty-four chapters deal with Perales’s poor upbringing in Texas, military service during World War I, education, political activities, law practice, work as a U.S. diplomat, religion, character, family life, friends, adversaries, events leading to his death, and controversies. The author artfully uses historiography to frame this narrative, and each chapter is bookended by introductory remarks and concluding thoughts. One of the biggest strengths of Orozco’s work here is her use of an extremely large number of available sources, including archival material that was not available to other researchers until recent years. In fact, approximately one-third of the book is composed of supporting documentation, including a selected bibliography (divided by types of sources), a timeline of major events, and extensive notes for each chapter. In sum, the last third of the book is a gold mine for any prospective researcher in this field. Nevertheless, the absence of an index is a major drawback. As a champion for the civil rights of Mexican Americans, Perales was instrumental in the establishment of the Order Sons of America (Orden Hijos de América) in 1921 and the Latin American Citizens League in 1927. In 1929, these two organizations merged to form the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is still active today. Perales was recognized for his contributions with several honors during his lifetime, the highest of which was awarded to him by Spain in 1952 to honor his advocacy for Spanish-speaking people. It is regrettable that Perales’s contributions were overlooked during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but he is no longer forgotten thanks to conscientious writers like Orozco. Orozco does not shy away from controversies. She makes every effort to present her subject accurately. However, her advocacy for Perales becomes apparent when she confronts critics. This is not a negative. It is part of the book’s overall purpose that the author masterfully achieves. Over the span of this expansive biography, Orozco makes a compelling and well-documented case for Perales’s great importance as a pioneer of Mexican American civil rights. [End Page 377] Rolando Avila University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

“Spain’s Queen of Soul”: Donna Hightower and Black Women’s Internationalism during the 1960s–1980s

Donna Hightower (1926–2013) was an African American jazz expatriate who emigrated to Spain in the late 1960s and settled there until the mid-1990s. At first glance, Hightower’s international tours and musical career in Spain seem unrelated to the broader Black Freedom Struggle. She independently traveled throughout Europe without assistance from other Black jazz expatriates and intentionally disassociated herself from major civil rights and Black Power organizations. However, a closer examination of her life and influence in Spain highlights the diverse ways Black women participated in global politics and cultural diplomacy in the late twentieth century. This article argues that Hightower engaged in three forms of Black internationalism—political activism, public self-fashioning, and Black religious expression—in order to challenge existing social structures in the United States and Spain. In the process, she denounced American racism, uplifted African American religious practices, and presented alternative representations of Black womanhood on a global scale.

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.

A Conversation with Edie Windsor

Suzanne Goldberg [SG): It is not often that a law school gets to welcome a rock star. But in our world, Edie Windsor is a rock star. She is one of the major civil rights plaintiffs of our lifetime, whose lawsuit challenged--and triumphed over--the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Her victory in that suit has been vital to changing the landscape of marriage equality for all Americans. It is a tremendous honor, Edie, to have you here at Columbia Law School, and we welcome you. Edie Windsor [EW]: Thank you so much. SG: I will start off by asking the first question in our conversation this afternoon, and then Andrew Chesley and Madeline Gomez, who are both Columbia Law School students, will be following up with questions we have collected from students throughout the law school. Edie, you have shown courage in every imaginable way: entering the computer science field as a young woman at a time where there were few women computer scientists--in fact, there were barely computer scientists; making the decision to get divorced and then coming to New York City to find other lesbians; and then coming out in so many ways. So when Time Magazine called you the "unlikely activist," it was not quite right because in so many ways, for so many years, you have been an activist, and you have been willing to challenge conventions. (1) Let's start the conversation by you just talking about how it was as a young lesbian coming to New York and confronting this world, and then also about some of the activism that you've done along the way before you filed your lawsuit against the United States government. EW: First of all, I came out late enough in life that I missed a lot of the pain of adolescence when you're gay and don't belong. I first had any kind of real relationship with a woman when I was a first-year student in college. And I didn't fall in love seriously with a woman until I was in my third year in college. Meanwhile I had become engaged to be married to a great guy, who was my big brother's best friend. He and I did get married, but when I saw two women together on a Saturday night, I was jealous. I had never been out with a girlfriend even on a Saturday night. I went out with boyfriends. So it was a whole different world. I told my husband, "Honey, you deserve more and I need something else." But as I said, I missed most of the pain. I came to New York and there was nothing but bars, and 1 didn't even know how to find them. The first time I went to a bar, I really wasn't living in New York yet. I came in for a wedding, and then I got on the Fifth Avenue bus and I went downtown. I stopped a woman on the street who had on a trenchcoat. And I said, "Do you know a bar where only women go?" She sent me to Thompson Street, L's Bar. I sat down at the bar, and I ordered a drink; I had never paid for a drink myself in my life until then. And nobody talked to me. I was dressed to the T, and nobody said hello, nobody said anything. I sat there for two hours and then I left. Okay. I thought, this is not going to be easy. My first real experience with being afraid of being gay came when I worked on the UNIVAC at NYU, which was mostly subsidized by the government and used primarily by the Atomic Energy Commission. (2) We had to have security clearances. I got a notice from the FBI inviting me to a meeting and saying I did not need a lawyer at this point. I got a book to get ready--and the book was the first time I saw the word gay. (3) It also had an appendix with the states and what was illegal in each state. It said that as far as women were concerned, that in New York, as long as you weren't imitating a man or pretending you were a man, you were safe. And in the bars, everybody said that so long as you were wearing two pieces of women's underwear, you would be safe if the police raided. So I didn't want to lie. If they asked me, I wanted to say, "I am gay." I'll probably lose my job, but I won't be arrested. …

The Politics of (Dis)Information: Crippled America, the 25th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign

Politics – especially presidential campaigns – are an important means by which to examine the values and issues that are given priority by members of a society and the people who wish to be leaders of that society. The issues discussed in a campaign, and the ways in which they are discussed, reveal much about social attitudes and policy goals. In the past twenty years, information and communication technologies have become simultaneously central policy issues at the national level (access, privacy, security, etc.) and the main channels by which candidates engage their supporters (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). In this paper we examine both of these roles of information and communication technologies in the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States through the lens of disability issues. This particular focus was driven by: the occurrence of the 25th Anniversary of the American with Disabilities Act during the first year of the campaign, and, more significantly, the intersection of disability, information, and technology as a major civil rights issue for people with disabilities, who represent nearly one-fifth of the population of the United States. For this study we collected and analyzed campaign materials released online about disability issues by selected presidential campaigns, as well as news stories and other related Web content, to better understand the issues related to disability being discussed in the campaign and implications of those issues for people with disabilities.

AIDS Activists, FDA Regulation, and the Amendment of America's Drug Constitution.

This Article explores how AIDS activists, desperate for access to potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals, permanently transformed America’s “drug constitution.” Their advocacy altered the FDA’s interpretation and application of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) so as to expedite the availability of new, unproven drugs for critical illnesses, thus enhancing individual patients’ autonomy to make therapeutic choices without government interference.The FDCA is more than simple set of instructions to a federal agency — it is a source of vitally important and deeply entrenched institutional and normative frameworks. Like major civil rights, antitrust, and environmental statutes, the FDCA should be viewed as a quasi-constitutional “superstatute.” Therefore, the AIDS activists’ FDA reform campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s should be understood as a “constitutional” movement, even though it rarely invoked the United States Constitution and pursued its goals entirely outside of court. As a result of the AIDS movement’s efforts, federal drug regulation today reflects not only the FDCA’s original foundational principle of protecting consumers from hazardous protects, but also the (often contrary) fundamental goal of promoting the expeditious release of potentially effective treatments for severe illnesses. The AIDS activists’ successful advocacy regarding drug access permanently shifted decision-making power previously exercised by the FDA to individual patients and their physicians.In addition to linking the AIDS movement to other major civil rights campaigns focused on the implementation of statutes, this Article details a particularly remarkable advocacy effort that has gone mostly overlooked in the legal literature. The Article examines how a movement composed largely of members of a scorned and marginalized population — HIV-positive gay men — significantly altered a crucial body of law administered by one of the country’s most powerful federal agencies. As the Article describes, the AIDS movement achieved this success in a seemingly incongruous alliance with conservative libertarians. Rather than simply telling a triumphal story, however, this Article explores how the AIDS movement was ultimately torn apart by deep schisms that prevented it from ever coalescing around a fully coherent medical libertarian philosophy. The most profound of these divisions, rooted in the very nature of controlled clinical research, concerned the moral acceptability of limiting terminally ill people’s freedom to try experimental drugs to ensure the production of reliable data regarding the treatments’ effectiveness. Ambivalence about the proper resolution of this quandary — among activists and society as a whole — has inhibited a radical dissolution of the FDA’s gatekeeping power. Nevertheless, as this Article concludes, federal regulation of medical products is now very different than it would have been without the AIDS activists’ determined efforts.

We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. By Bruce Ackerman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 432 pp. $35.00 hardcover.

the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. By Bruce Ackerman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 432 pp. $35.00 hardcover.Bruce Ackerman has produced a stunning achievement with his latest book, the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. The book is the third volume in a larger project centered on rethinking constitutional development and moving it away from a conventional courtcentered approach to a regime-centered approach. Ackerman develops his framework in the first volume, the People: Foundations, which sought to challenge scholarly accounts-mostly by the establishment-to go beyond the formal arena to understand revisions to the Constitution. Specifically, Ackerman takes issue with scholarship that privileges an Article V approach to understanding constitutional change. Instead, he proposes that a more accurate and richer telling of the story of American constitutional change requires scholars to look outside the formal boundaries of the law to the people and to the workings of popular politics. Cautioning scholars against blindness and creating legal fictions, Ackerman suggests the Court is one player in a larger regime that includes other political institutions and nonjudicial actors.Ackerman's framework of constitutional change is guided by a deep belief that if we decenter the Court then we will see that We the People are actually responsible for the successive transformations of the American constitution over time. Despite the inegalitarian nature of the Founding, Ackerman believes that the Founders created a structure that has allowed the peoples voices to be heard in the process of constitutional revision. Stated most succinctly by Ackerman (p. 3), sovereignty isn't a myth. Popular politics is responsible for change in modern constitutional doctrine.The most recent installment of Ackerman's project applies this framework to the constitutional moment he terms the DealCivil Rights era. The New Deal is presented as a critical juncture- a moment in time which set in motion a number of critical changes in all three branches of government that paved the way for the civil rights revolution. According to Ackerman, the major civil rights acts are the expressions of the People. In this way, Ackerman situates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 as part of the project of constitutional revision. The interaction between the three branches of government during this period is one of the highlights of the book. Many studies of this period look at the different branches in isolation but Ackerman's analysis underscores the importance of considering the different branches together and highlights their interdependent nature.To articulate how the different actors and institutions are connected, Ackerman presents a six-step process of constitutional transformation. The first step, signaling is when a mass movement gets the attention of a governmental institutional and signals the need for reform. …

Uber's Dilemma: How the ADA May End the On-Demand Economy

This article is the first to point out that a few relatively low-profile lawsuits involving Uber’s liability under the ADA could have an outcome-determinative effect on O’Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc., the blockbuster employment misclassification case brought against the startup by its own drivers. Because both types of lawsuits hinge on the role that drivers play within Uber’s business model, a ruling in favor of ADA liability which compelled Uber to exert additional control over its drivers would also, in turn, jeopardize the drivers' legal status as independent contractors. Such an outcome would be catastrophic to Uber’s core business model, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars. And because Uber is but one of hundreds of Silicon Valley startups to have adopted a similar business model, a misclassification ruling against the tech giant could set in motion a domino effect that impacts scores of companies throughout the “on-demand” economy. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars may hang in the balance of a few ADA cases. So, too, may the rights of some 57 million Americans with disabilities, for whom victory could come to represent a major civil rights milestone.

National Historic Site Offers Chance to Trace Footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr.

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessNational Historic Site Offers Chance to Trace Footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr.Mark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Feb 2016https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2016.2b11AbstractAPA members wishing to tour the birth home of Martin Luther King Jr. will need to register at the information desk in Freedom Hall of the King Center.The birth home of Martin Luther King Jr. and the recently renovated Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King’s preaching helped ignite the civil rights movement, have given Atlanta prominence in the history of the American civil rights movement.Martin Luther King Jr. was born in an upstairs bedroom of this home at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta on January 15, 1929. Reservations are required to tour the home.Aaron LevinAPA members attending this year’s Annual Meeting can visit the church and tour the home as part of a visit to the King Center, the largest repository of documents and memorabilia associated with the slain civil rights leader. It was established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King to be “no dead monument, but a living memorial filled with all the vitality that was his, a center of human endeavor, committed to the causes for which he lived and died.”The King Center is at the hub of the 23-acre National Historic Site, which welcomes some one million visitors each year. Free attractions include tours of King’s birth home and tomb, multiple exhibits, and a reflecting pool.The only place on the tour of the National Historic Site that requires reservations is the King home at 501 Auburn Avenue, where King was born on January 15, 1929. Together with his grandparents, parents, siblings, other family members, and boarders, King lived in the house in “Sweet Auburn”—the center of black Atlanta—for 12 years. The home may be visited only on tours led by a park ranger, filled on a first-come, first-served basis. The 30-minute tours, conducted hourly, begin at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m. and are limited to 15 people each. The rest of the King National Historic Site is self-guided, so no special arrangements are needed. There are several routes of public transportation that provide access to the park, but for APA members with access to a car, the King Center website offers the following directions for touring the site on foot: After parking in the visitors’ lot on Johns Wesley Dobbs Avenue, follow the Civil Rights Walk of Fame past the statue of Mahatma Gandhi and proceed to the Visitor Center. It is here that visitors can sign up for the Birth Home tour and check out “Children of Courage,” an exhibit that educates children about the civil rights movement. Upon exiting the Visitor Center, turn right to view the International World Peace Rose Garden. Ebenezer Baptist Church underwent renovation to restore the sanctuary and fellowship hall to their appearance in the 1960-68 period, when Martin Luther King Jr. served as co-pastor with his father.Aaron LevinFrom there, visitors can travel to the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church (Heritage Sanctuary) at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street. Three generations of Kings served as pastors and co-pastors at Ebenezer—King’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Williams, who became Ebenezer’s second pastor in 1893; King’s father, who served as Ebenezer’s pastor from 1933 until his retirement in 1975; and King himself, who was co-pastor in 1947 until he left to attend Crozer Theological Seminary in September 1948. King returned in 1960 and again served as co-pastor until his assassination in 1968. After leaving the church, visitors can proceed east on Auburn to enter the King Center’s outdoor campus, where they can view the crypt of King and his wife, the Eternal Flame, Freedom Walkway, and the reflecting pool. As visitors walk eastward along the pool to Freedom Hall, they can learn more about King.The King Center contains the King Library and Archives—the largest repository of primary source materials on the slain civil rights leader and the American civil rights movement in the world. The collection consists of King’s papers and those of the organization he co-founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as the records of eight major civil rights organizations and of several individuals active in the civil rights movement. The archives also include more than 200 oral history interviews with King’s teachers, friends, family, and civil rights associates.Several exhibits, including a photographic history of the lives of King and his wife and tribute rooms to Rosa Parks and Gandhi, can also be found in the King Center. ■For more information about the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, click here. To make an appointment at the Library and Archives, contact Cynthia Lewis at (404) 526-8983 or [email protected]. ISSUES NewArchived

McCulloch of Ohio: For the Republic by Mark Bernstein (review)

Reviewed by: McCulloch of Ohio: For the Republic by Mark Bernstein Jerry M. Lewis McCulloch of Ohio: For the Republic. By Mark Bernstein ( New Bremen, Ohio: Equipment Corporation, 2014. 302 pp. Cloth $22.50, isbn 978-0692-20436-8.) This volume is a narrative biography of William Moore McCulloch, a longtime member of the United States House of Representatives from the Fourth District of Ohio. McCulloch was born in 1901 on a farm in Holmes [End Page 97] County, Ohio. The farm had limited amenities and even lacked electricity. Hard work, including milking cows and husking corn by hand, governed his youthful farming life. McCulloch was the first member of his family to go to college when he enrolled in 1920 in the College of Wooster, Ohio, near his home. He majored in political science as a preparation for law school. He later attended the Ohio State University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, graduating in 1925. He began to practice law in Florida, but after a few years returned to Piqua, Ohio, located in the southwest part of the state, which remained his base for the rest of his life. In 1933 he was elected as a Republican to the Ohio House of Representatives from Miami County. In 1936 he was elected minority leader and in 1939 Speaker of the Ohio House. During World War II, he served two years in a civil affairs unit providing administration for parts of France and Germany. In November 1947, he was elected to Congress from the Fourth District of Ohio, eventually serving thirteen consecutive terms. Bernstein offers numerous examples to demonstrate the McCulloch campaign style. “Years later, he told a junior member of his law firm, ‘Always run scared’” (54). This meant reaching out to voters by attending county fairs and having conversations with constituents ranging from farmers to retailers in his district. McCulloch was very conservative as was the Fourth District. A lifelong Republican, he was so frugal with costs that he often returned some of his unused congressional office expense money to the government. He supported just one of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs and that was health care for the elderly. A poll showed that 77 percent of the respondents in the District wanted to reduce both the federal income tax as well as federal spending. Why should we be interested in McCulloch? Because of his leadership with regard to civil rights legislation. The intriguing issue is how a conservative congressman from a conservative district came to play such an important role in establishing one of the major civil rights legislation of the twentieth century: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Some of the major provisions of the act included voting rights, public accommodations, desegregation of public education, extending the life of the Civil Rights Commission, and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In chapters 13 and 14 of this biography, the author explores how McCulloch worked both privately and publicly to make sure the proposed bill would not be watered down through political compromise. In these [End Page 98] chapters we see McCulloch interacting with such political actors as Robert Kennedy, Emanuel Celler, John Lindsey, Everett Dirksen, and, of course, presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The bill that became the Civil Right Act was, according to the New York Times writer, Adam Clymer, “McCulloch’s Bill” (119). McCulloch was also important in getting the act passed in Senate as well the conference’s joint bill. Many prominent people recognized McCulloch’s contribution to civil rights. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, on learning of McCulloch’s planned retirement, wrote: “You made a personal commitment to President Kennedy in October, 1963. … There were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill … but never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone along with you” (240). Do we have the answer to the question of why McCulloch took the leadership that led to the passage of major civil rights legislation? Bernstein provides a clue when he quotes McCulloch, saying, “Black power is voting power. The cry of a nonvoter in a representative government is silent cry. Let the black voices be heard” (221). Bernstein suggests that he supported the legislation because McCulloch...

AIDS Activists, FDA Regulation, and the Amendment of America's Drug Constitution

This Article explores how AIDS activists, desperate for access to potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals, permanently transformed America’s “drug constitution.” Their advocacy altered the FDA’s interpretation and application of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) so as to expedite the availability of new, unproven drugs for critical illnesses, thus enhancing individual patients’ autonomy to make therapeutic choices without government interference.The FDCA is more than simple set of instructions to a federal agency — it is a source of vitally important and deeply entrenched institutional and normative frameworks. Like major civil rights, antitrust, and environmental statutes, the FDCA should be viewed as a quasi-constitutional “superstatute.” Therefore, the AIDS activists’ FDA reform campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s should be understood as a “constitutional” movement, even though it rarely invoked the United States Constitution and pursued its goals entirely outside of court. As a result of the AIDS movement’s efforts, federal drug regulation today reflects not only the FDCA’s original foundational principle of protecting consumers from hazardous protects, but also the (often contrary) fundamental goal of promoting the expeditious release of potentially effective treatments for severe illnesses. The AIDS activists’ successful advocacy regarding drug access permanently shifted decision-making power previously exercised by the FDA to individual patients and their physicians.In addition to linking the AIDS movement to other major civil rights campaigns focused on the implementation of statutes, this Article details a particularly remarkable advocacy effort that has gone mostly overlooked in the legal literature. The Article examines how a movement composed largely of members of a scorned and marginalized population — HIV-positive gay men — significantly altered a crucial body of law administered by one of the country’s most powerful federal agencies. As the Article describes, the AIDS movement achieved this success in a seemingly incongruous alliance with conservative libertarians. Rather than simply telling a triumphal story, however, this Article explores how the AIDS movement was ultimately torn apart by deep schisms that prevented it from ever coalescing around a fully coherent medical libertarian philosophy. The most profound of these divisions, rooted in the very nature of controlled clinical research, concerned the moral acceptability of limiting terminally ill people’s freedom to try experimental drugs to ensure the production of reliable data regarding the treatments’ effectiveness. Ambivalence about the proper resolution of this quandary — among activists and society as a whole — has inhibited a radical dissolution of the FDA’s gatekeeping power. Nevertheless, as this Article concludes, federal regulation of medical products is now very different than it would have been without the AIDS activists’ determined efforts.

The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town by Jennifer R. Nájera

Reviewed by: The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town by Jennifer R. Nájera Tracy Brown The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town. By Jennifer R. Nájera. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. ix + 177 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, references, index. $45.00 cloth. In her book The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town, Jennifer R. Nájera uses evidence from both public education and the Catholic Church to trace the development of what she calls a “culture of Mexican segregation” in La Feria, a small South Texas town on the United States–Mexico border. Her historical ethnography traces the development chronologically through the 20th century. She concludes that despite the advances in breaking down the culture of segregation—especially following the social movements of the 1960s and the efforts of Mexican American activists in both the public schools and the Catholic Church—practices of segregation “endured well past the passage of the major civil rights legislation” in La Feria (9). Indeed, it appears to exist today, based on her description of class (if not racial) segregation that she witnessed at high school football games that she attended during her fieldwork, which she describes in the book’s epilogue. Nájera uses primary and secondary sources and oral histories to describe how the culture of Mexican segregation developed over time. The strength of the book is that by doing so, she links “global” or structural and racialized processes at work on the US-Mexico border to the local experiences of La Feria residents with those processes. Since racism is alive and well in the United States (despite popular claims that America is “postracial”), Nájera’s finding that a culture of segregation continues to exist in La Feria should not surprise any of her readers. Yet the strength of her work is also a weakness: one wonders if she might have located more archival evidence of La Feria residents’ personal experiences in order to more fully substantiate her narrative. Because she relies on the oral testimony of a small number of individuals as evidence of the local and personal impact of segregation, the evidence can seem anecdotal at points. Nevertheless, the personal and quotidian experiences of segregation outlined in the book should be a welcome addition to the literature on race in the US-Mexico borderlands. [End Page 139] Tracy Brown Central Michigan University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Local Protest and Federal Policy: The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the 1964 Civil Rights Act

When and how do movements influence policy change? We examine the dynamics leading up to Kennedy's decision to pursue major civil rights legislation in 1963. This marked a key turning point in shifting the executive branch from a timid and gradualist approach. Although it is widely taken for granted that the civil rights movement propelled this shift, how the movement mattered is less clear. While most protest targeted local economic actors, movement influence was exerted at the national level on political actors. Thus, movement influence was indirect. We focus on the relationship between local movement efforts to desegregate public accommodations (restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, etc.) and federal responses to movement demands. Although exchanges between movement actors and the federal government took place throughout the period, the logic of federal response evolved as political actors sought strategies to minimize racial conflict. Specifically, the Kennedy administration shifted to a dual strategy. First, the Department of Justice attempted to promote “voluntary” desegregation by working with executives of national companies and civic groups. Second, administration officials worked with these same groups to build support for major legislation among key interest groups. This shift toward a more assertive and proactive intervention in civil rights stands in contrast to the pessimism regarding the prospects for federal policy only a few months earlier. We examine the logic of this response including the impact of civil rights protest on the administration's policy proposals.

A Conversation with Edie Windsor

Suzanne Goldberg [SG): It is not often that a law school gets to welcome a rock star. But in our world, Edie Windsor is a rock star. She is one of the major civil rights plaintiffs of our lifetime, whose lawsuit challenged--and triumphed over--the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Her victory in that suit has been vital to changing the landscape of marriage equality for all Americans. It is a tremendous honor, Edie, to have you here at Columbia Law School, and we welcome you. Edie Windsor [EW]: Thank you so much. SG: will start off by asking the first question in our conversation this afternoon, and then Andrew Chesley and Madeline Gomez, who are both Columbia Law School students, will be following up with questions we have collected from students throughout the law school. Edie, you have shown courage in every imaginable way: entering the computer science field as a young woman at a time where there were few women computer scientists--in fact, there were barely computer scientists; making the decision to get divorced and then coming to New York City to find other lesbians; and then coming out in so many ways. So when Time Magazine called you the unlikely it was not quite right because in so many ways, for so many years, you have been an activist, and you have been willing to challenge conventions. (1) Let's start the conversation by you just talking about how it was as a young lesbian coming to New York and confronting this world, and then also about some of the activism that you've done along the way before you filed your lawsuit against the United States government. EW: First of all, came out late enough in life that missed a lot of the pain of adolescence when you're gay and don't belong. first had any kind of real relationship with a woman when was a first-year student in college. And didn't fall in love seriously with a woman until was in my third year in college. Meanwhile had become engaged to be married to a great guy, who was my big brother's best friend. He and did get married, but when saw two women together on a Saturday night, was jealous. had never been out with a girlfriend even on a Saturday night. went out with boyfriends. So it was a whole different world. told my husband, Honey, you deserve more and need something else. But as said, missed most of the pain. came to New York and there was nothing but bars, and 1 didn't even know how to find them. The first time went to a bar, really wasn't living in New York yet. came in for a wedding, and then got on the Fifth Avenue bus and went downtown. stopped a woman on the street who had on a trenchcoat. And said, Do you know a bar where only women go? She sent me to Thompson Street, L's Bar. sat down at the bar, and ordered a drink; had never paid for a drink myself in my life until then. And nobody talked to me. was dressed to the T, and nobody said hello, nobody said anything. sat there for two hours and then left. Okay. thought, this is not going to be easy. My first real experience with being afraid of being gay came when worked on the UNIVAC at NYU, which was mostly subsidized by the government and used primarily by the Atomic Energy Commission. (2) We had to have security clearances. got a notice from the FBI inviting me to a meeting and saying did not need a lawyer at this point. got a book to get ready--and the book was the first time saw the word (3) It also had an appendix with the states and what was illegal in each state. It said that as far as women were concerned, that in New York, as long as you weren't imitating a man or pretending you were a man, you were safe. And in the bars, everybody said that so long as you were wearing two pieces of women's underwear, you would be safe if the police raided. So didn't want to lie. If they asked me, wanted to say, I am gay. I'll probably lose my job, but won't be arrested. …

Title VII as Precedent: Past and Prologue for Future Legislation

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after nearly 90 years in which it enacted no major civil rights legislation. The 1964 Act stood out then - as it stands out now - as Congress acting at its best rather than its worst. It confronted the historic problem of race in America, it overcame partisan divisions and sectional obstruction, and it acted to enforce constitutional principles. This is not to say that sponsors of the legislation made no compromises in the 1964 Act. On the contrary, they had to do so, particularly in the Senate, to obtain the two-thirds majority then needed to close off debate and end a filibuster. The resulting legislation, compromises and all, then became the foundation for all employment discrimination law, providing the template for prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of age and disability. Even more remarkably, the legislation was consistently extended and reinforced, often over the narrowing interpretations imposed by the Supreme Court. Long after the Civil Rights Era had ended, Congress continued to pass expansive and progressive legislation, with virtually no examples to the contrary. The few restrictive or qualifying provisions that Congress enacted invariably came as compromises, like those in the 1964 Act, added in order to pass expanded prohibitions against discrimination. This article recounts this pattern of legislation, the role that Title VII played in it, and possible explanations for it. These explanations, like those for passage of the 1964 Act, extend over a wide range: from the simple selection effect of noticing only the statutes that are passed rather than those that fail, to an unholy alliance between plaintiffs’ lawyers and big business, to the moral and ideological force of the principle against discrimination.

Assets and African Americans: Attempting to Capitalize on Hopes for Children through College Savings Accounts

Although some racial inequalities have lessened in the half-century since the passage of the first major civil rights legislation, the racial wealth gap remains and in recent years seems to be widening. Households with children are the least likely to be asset secure or have sufficient resources to enable investment in opportunities for mobility. Viewing inequality from this perspective indicates that what households are able to save and invest for the future might have a more lasting impact on the life chances of children than their current income and consumption. Summarizing data from the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Initiative, a quasi-experimental study that is part of a national demonstration of Child Development Accounts (CDAs) in the United States, this paper describes how African-American households engage with one important investment opportunity – college savings accounts for their pre-school children. Combining account monitoring, survey, interview and focus group data, we explore the reasons that many households chose not to open accounts or invest their own money. We offer suggestions for making asset development programs viable for low-income African-American families and their children.