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| Document Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| All Authors / Contributors: |
A Leon Higginbotham |
| ISBN: | 0195038223 9780195038224 |
| OCLC Number: | 34704897 |
| Notes: | Includes index. |
| Description: | xxxii, 304 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. |
| Contents: | Introduction: From Total Racial Oppression to Shades of Freedom -- 1. My Forty-Year Journey in Formulating the Precepts -- 2. The Precept of Inferiority -- 3. The Ancestry of Inferiority (1619-1662) -- 4. The Ideology of Inferiority (1662-1830) -- 5. The Politics of Inferiority (1830-1865) -- 6. The Constitutional Language of Slavery: From Non-disclosure to Abolition, 1787-1866 -- 7. The Dream of Freedom and Its Demise -- 8. The Supreme Court's Sanction of Racial Hatred: The 1883 Civil Rights Cases -- 9. The Supreme Court's Legitimization of Racism: Plessy v. Ferguson: A Case Wrongly Decided -- 10. Too Inferior To Be Their Neighbor -- 11. Unequal Justice in the State Criminal Justice System -- 12. Limiting the Seeds of Race Hatred: The Charles Evans Hughes Supreme Court Era (1930-1941) -- 13. Voting Rights, Pluralism, and Political Power -- Appendix. The Ten Precepts of American Slavery Jurisprudence -- Articles published by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. |
| Responsibility: | A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. |
| More information: |
Abstract:
The Dred Scott decision of 1857 declared that under the United States Constitution, blacks were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Higginbotham reveals the tragedy that, after the Civil War,and even during the Reconstruction period, the courts construed the new Constitutional amendments with such hostility that the dream of freedom was buried by judges with black robes, politicians posing as statesmen, and vigilantes in white hooded robes. In the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which Higginbotham terms "one of the most catastrophic racial decisions ever rendered," the Supreme Court legitimized racial segregation under the deceptive rationale of "separate but equal," which, in practice, became always separate and never equal. Higginbotham also documents the eloquent voices that opposed the openly racist workings of the system, from Reconstruction Congressman John R. Lynch to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan to African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Hamilton Houston, William Hastie, and a few other lawyers - both black and white, Jew and Gentile - who confronted the legitimization of racism. To establish the nexus to decades of racism in the past, he asserts that, even today, racial bias still permeates the American consciousness.
He shows how six recent events reveal that many public perceptions of black inferiority persist to this day.
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- African Americans -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- History.
- Rassendiscriminatie.
- Vooroordelen.
- Rechtspleging.
- Rechtsprechung
- Rassenfrage
- Geschichte.
- Justiz
- Rassendiskriminierung
- Recht
- USA
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