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This book offers original readings of the ideal of colorblindness in canonical cases to the critical study of race and law. It does this by deconstructing and tracing colorblindness as a fantasmatic core around which law enforces classic principles of American democracy – including, equal protection, citizenship, personal privacy, and freedom of expression. This fantasmatic core, variously materialized in the formal literary structure of universal legal reason, reveals how racial slavery continues to haunt American democracy. This reading of colorblindness critically revises current debates that generally take the contemporary “post-civil rights” moment as an incontrovertible sign of colorblindness’s hegemony. Arguing that colorblindness is more than the law’s failed recognitions of the social reality of racial inequality, or a structure of the law’s formal function as objective arbiter of political struggles, the book moves beyond these constructivist and historicist discussions to explore colorblindness as the symptomatic production of law around the Real of racial slavery and black freedom struggle. Opening up a space to encounter the many instances of the continued arrival of the Real of race in law’s language, this book argues that the black radical tradition’s questions of abolition and freedom continue to be essential for developing a critical knowledge of race and law.

What role should racial difference play in the American workplace? As a nation, we rely on civil rights law to address this question, and the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemingly answered it: race must not be a factor in workplace decisions. This book contends that after decades of mass immigration, many employers, Democratic and Republican political leaders, and advocates have adopted a new strategy to manage race and work. Race is now relevant not only in negative cases of discrimination, but in more positive ways as well. In today's workplace, employers routinely practice “racial realism,” where they view race as real—as a job qualification. Many believe employee racial differences, and sometimes immigrant status, correspond to unique abilities or evoke desirable reactions from clients or citizens. They also see racial diversity as a way to increase workplace dynamism. The problem is that when employers see race as useful for organizational effectiveness, they are often in violation of civil rights law. This book examines this emerging strategy in a wide range of employment situations, including the low-skilled sector, professional and white-collar jobs, and entertainment and media. The book urges us to acknowledge the racial realism already occurring, and lays out a series of reforms that, if enacted, would bring the law and lived experience more in line, yet still remain respectful of the need to protect the civil rights of all workers.

Unjust Deeds explores the history of an often overlooked civil rights milestone: the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). In a group of cases from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., six African American families challenged the hardening boundaries of the nation’s racial ghettos as they fought desperately to hold onto their homes. Aided by the NAACP and local civil rights attorneys, they attacked the legal legitimacy of racial restrictive covenants, one of the most pervasive instruments of residential segregation in the 1940s. Their dramatic campaign culminated in a unanimous Supreme Court victory that left the struggle for justice under the law forever transformed. Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of the covenant cases and reveals how the campaign against housing discrimination—in both its successes and failures—helped to reshape the postwar nation. Providing a critical vantage point to witness the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal change in the twentieth century, this book ultimately offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow and the making of the civil rights movement in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. After blazing a unique path through the world of higher education, including becoming the first black student ever to be editor-in-chief of the law review at a historically white southern law school, Chambers was selected as the initial intern for NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s civil rights internship program. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked closely with LDF in forwarding the strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, with Chambers arguing and ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Aided by a small group of white and black attorneys and support staff which he gathered together in a truly integrated law firm, and undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its high-water mark. This book connects the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, the authors reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.

Twenty-six contributors tell their stories about being civil rights lawyers in the Deep South. A thematic structure is employed to reflect these stories. Ten of the stories describe how children of the South and children of the North chose to become civil rights lawyers. The context of civil rights lawyering is explored from big events such as the 1965 Selma march to the everyday experiences of mass meetings and the recurring racism of Neshoba County. The misadventures of civil rights lawyers are described from arrests, to beatings, to a black lawyer being called by a racial epithet in court by a judge. The development of civil rights lawyer groups—the Legal Defense Fund, the LCDC (Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee), and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. Voting rights dramatically spurred by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were crucial to the newly emerging status of blacks. The public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 broke barriers in hotels and eating places. School desegregation litigation changed the face of public schools forever. Employment discrimination litigation dramatically changed the workplace. The success of civil rights litigation led to using the federal courts to reform prisons and facilities for the mentally ill. Two authors discuss the contemporary language of race and the status of white supremacy.

The Search for Justice is a study of the role of lawyers in the Civil Rights Revolution. The work focuses on school desegregation from 1950 to 1975 and includes counsel on both sides of the struggle in the courtroom and in Congress, the federal and state judges and justices, and law school constitutional authorities. Key cases include Sweatt v. Painter, Brown v. Board of Education, and NAACP v. Alabama. Key players include Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, John W. Davis, Earl Warren, James Patterson, Strom Thurmond, Richard Russell, Alexander Bickel, and Herbert Wechsler. The argument is that the outcome of the struggle was never inevitable: lawyers for segregation did an able job of representing their clients, and in some sense were successful with resegregating neighborhood schools.

Charges, denials, and countercharges of bigotry are increasingly frequent in the United States. Bigotry is a fraught and contested term, evident from the rejoinder that calling out bigotry is political correctness. That is so even though renouncing—and denouncing—bigotry seems to be a shared political value with a long history. Identifying, responding to, and preventing bigotry have engaged the efforts of many people. People disagree, however, over who is a bigot and what makes a belief, attitude, or action bigoted. This book argues that bigotry has both a backward- and forward-looking dimension. We learn bigotry’s meaning by looking to the past, but bigotry also has an important forward-looking dimension. Past examples of bigotry on which there is consensus become the basis for prospective judgments about analogous forms of bigotry. The rhetoric of bigotry—how people use such words as “bigot,” “bigoted,” and “bigotry”—poses puzzles that urgently demand attention. Those include whether bigotry concerns the motivation for or the content of a belief or action; whether reasonableness is a defense to charges of bigotry; whether the bigot is a distinct type, or whether we are all a bit bigoted; and whether “bigotry” is the term society gives to beliefs that now are beyond the pale. This book addresses those puzzles by examining prior controversies over interfaith and interracial marriage and the recent controversy over same-sex marriage, as well as controversies over landmark civil rights law and more recent conflicts between religious liberty and state anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ persons.

In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to “taxpayer citizenship”--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like a public education. Tracing the genealogy of this concept, this book shows how tax policy and taxpayer identity were built on the foundations of white supremacy and intertwined with ideas of whiteness in civil rights law and constitutional law. From the origins of unequal public school funding after the Civil War and the history of African American families resisting segregated taxation through school desegregation cases from Brown v. Board of Education to San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the 1970s, this study spans over a century of racial injustice, dramatic courtroom clashes, and white supremacist backlash to collective justice claims. Incorporating letters from everyday individuals as well as the private notes of Supreme Court justices as they deliberated, this legal history reveals how the idea of a “taxpayer” identity contributed to the contemporary crises of public education, racial disparity, and income inequality.