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Civil Rights Movement

July 10, 2012
Economic, Social Inequalities Creating a Wobbly Democracy
by Jeremy Leaming

While liberals continue to ponderously ponder how to refute the right’s method of constitutional interpretation called originalism, the right continues to advance a simplistic and destructive story that the Constitution is all about severely limiting the federal government’s reach.

For far too long liberals have obsessed over methods of constitutional interpretation, leaving rightists to advance the constitutional storyline, which says the nation’s governing document only promotes individualism, limited government, and of course Christianity.

As law professor and historian William E. Forbath recently noted in an op-ed for The New York Times liberals have far too often shrugged their shoulders at this narrative, claiming that “rights and wrongs of economic life” are not addressed by the Constitution, but instead through politics.

“That’s a major failing,” Forbath (pictured) writes, “because there is a venerable rival to constitutional laissez-faire: a rich distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics, rooted in the framers’ generation. None other than James Madison was among its prominent expounders – in his draft of the Virginia Constitution, he included rights to free education and public land.”

In a more expansive piece for the book, The Constitution in 2020, Forbath explores the “historical heft” of a century-long effort “to make good on the constitutional justice of livelihoods and social and economic rights ….”

For example, Abraham Lincoln and other founders of the Republican Party argued that equal rights also included “a fair distribution of initial endowments,” and FDR in his State of the Union proposing a Second Bill of Rights, said the government “owes to everyone an avenue to possess himself of a portion of [the nation’s wealth] sufficient for his needs, through his own work.”

Moreover, Forbath noted, African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement strived to “craft a broader social rights agenda,” including the right to a decent income. During the Civil Rights movement, the federal courts took note of the efforts in “undoing the exclusion of black women from welfare rolls,” he continued.

The Supreme Court in its 1970 Goldberg v. Kelly opinion, said, “From its founding the Nation’s basic commitment has been to foster the dignity and well-being of all persons within its borders. We have come to recognize that forces not within the control of the poor contribute to their poverty.”

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Tags:
Methods of interpretation, Economic inequality, Originalism, Commerce clause, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Civil Rights Movement, FDR, Goldberb v. Kelly, Joseph Stiglitz, Pamela Karlan, social and economic inequalities, The Constitution In 2020, William E. Forbath
May 10, 2012
Nicholas Katzenbach: the Loss of a Civil Rights Hero
Guest Post
By Estelle Rogers, Legislative Director, Project Vote

The civil rights movement lost a hero yesterday: Nicholas Katzenbach, whom I was privileged to know for more than 20 years. Even his name said a lot: Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach. A son of privilege. Exeter and Princeton, a distinguished stint in World War II, then back to Yale Law School and a Rhodes at Oxford. He could have done anything – and indeed, he did a lot of things, including many years as General Counsel of IBM.

But we should remember him as the man who accompanied James Meredith when he enrolled in Ole Miss, who faced down George Wallace at the University Alabama door (pictured), who put the power of the U.S. Justice Department behind the fight for racial equality, and who co-authored the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was a very large man. (The Katzenbach-Wallace confrontation must have been particularly gratifying for the federal marshals to watch.) He was an even larger presence.

I first met Nick Katzenbach the way I’ve met a lot of terrific people: I cold-called him and asked him to do something for the greater good. In this case, it was an amicus brief on another civil rights issue, the right to abortion. He said yes. The brief was to be filed in the Supreme Court on behalf of a large legal organization, and it was a delicate drafting job, overseen by a committee. I will never forget a particular conference call after he had circulated the first draft. I felt a little sheepish and expressed discomfort at critiquing a brief by the former Attorney General of the United States. “Oh, forget it!” he said. “My partners do it all the time.” He had an ego, no doubt about it, but he also knew when to put it aside.

After serving as Deputy Attorney General to Bobby Kennedy, and then as attorney general in the early years of the Johnson administration, he took a demotion to become undersecretary of State. He wanted to end the Vietnam War, and at that he was a failure. It may have been his only one.

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Tags:
Civil rights, Equality and Liberty, Civil Rights Movement, Estelle Rogers, Guest Post, James Meredith, Nicholas Katzenbach, Ole Miss, Voting Rights Act of 1965
October 14, 2011
Remembering Professor Bell
Guest Post

By Anjana Samant, who works as counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights

Professor Derrick Bell. Say his name and many will remember him as the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School who left in protest over the institution’s failure to hire women of color for the faculty. Or they will remember him as a prolific writer who, in books such as And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well, indicted the legal “victories” of the civil rights movement (including those that he himself had championed) for creating false hope and failing to live up to their promise. Others will recall Professor Bell as the ground-breaking academic whose legal scholarship gave rise to critical race theory, a movement that used “the first person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity” to question whether colorblindness and liberal anti-discrimination principles could ever eradicate racism and inequality.

Ask any of the hundreds of students and colleagues with whom Professor Bell worked, and they will tell you he was all this and much more. Professor Bell was a courageous, principled, and inspiring figure. And yet for all the acclaim (and derision) he garnered, he also was consummately human. Professor Bell was humble, soft-spoken, loving, and openly self-critical – in many ways, the antithesis of what one would expect of an esteemed legal academic.

I first came to know Professor Bell as his student during my second and third years of law school, then while working at his side as the Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow from 2001 to 2002, and in the years since, as former student, mentee, and, dare I say, friend. Teaching – and learning – were two of Professor Bell’s greatest passions and he pursued them at every turn, not just within the confines of the classroom. He spent as much time sharing wisdom gained from his professional career, life experience, and careful self-reflection as he did gleaning insight from the perspectives and queries of his students. Humility was valued and encouraged, not through lecture and preaching but by way of example. Looking back at his work in school desegregation, Professor Bell wrote, “I continued my work in school desegregation, but with a growing sense that the symbolic value of eliminating dual school systems was not equaled by substantive educational benefits for our clients, or the millions of people they symbolically represented. I had been humbled by reality, and while at first I worried that this was a flaw in the idealism I needed to do this work, I soon understood that humility is a crucial kind of strength.”

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Civil rights, Equality and Liberty, Anjana Samant, Civil Rights Movement, critical race theory, Guest Post, Professor Derrick Bell
October 7, 2011
Nation Loses Towering Civil Rights Leader, the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth
by Jeremy Leaming

The nation lost more than a visionary corporate leader this week, but a towering figure of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth.

The New York Times notes, Shuttlesworth, who died at 89 on Oct. 5 in Birmingham, Ala., was a “storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Shuttlesworth is pictured, third from right, with former members of the ACS Student Chapter at Stanford Law School.)

In Birmingham in 1963, the newspaper continues, “Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.”

The brutality unleashed against the demonstrators led by the city’s racist “public safety commissioner” Bull Connor helped “galvanize the nation’s conscience,” and along with other tragic events helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home, told The Times, “Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement, he was Martin Luther King’s most effective foil; blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory – meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”

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Tags:
Civil rights, First Amendment, Civil Rights Movement, David Hudson, Diane McWhorter, Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth
May 5, 2011
The Civil Rights Heroine You’ve Never Heard Of
BookTalk

At the Dark End of the Street

Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

By:
Danielle L. McGuire

Available Here

By Danielle L. McGuire, a writer and assistant professor in the history department at Wayne State University. Watch a trailer here about her new book, At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.

On Thursday May 12, 2011, I will help honor Rosa Parks as a champion for human dignity and pay tribute to Mrs. Recy Taylor, a living legend and civil rights heroine that most people have never heard of, at the National Press Club.

I first met Recy Taylor while doing research for my book, At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. For 67 years, Recy Taylor has been patiently waiting for justice. In Abbeville, Ala., in the fall of 1944, seven white men with guns and knives kidnapped and brutally assaulted her and then threatened to kill her if she told. Somehow Taylor, an African American mother and sharecropper, found the courage to tell her husband, her father, and the local sheriff the details of the assault. Taylor’s testimony was part of a longstanding tradition among African American women, who suffered similar abuses from slavery through the better part of the 20th century. A few days after Taylor’s attack, the Montgomery NAACP promised to send their very best investigator.

Her name was Rosa Parks.

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Tags:
Civil rights, Other courts, Racial justice, Women's rights, Criminal Justice, Equality and Liberty, BookTalk, Civil Rights Movement, Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks

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