desegregation

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

by John Fabian Witt  · 14 Oct 2025  · 735pp  · 279,360 words

is remembered at all. But the Fund’s joint campaign set in motion a mostly forgotten parallel case, too. Coming a decade before the famous desegregation case, Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad told unions and employers they had to deal fairly with Black workers. Steele marked a culmination of the Fund

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the 1927 Supreme Court decision Nixon v. Herndon. In the revised proposal, the committee earmarked resources for school funding equalization suits, voting rights cases, railroad desegregation cases, jury service cases, and residential segregation cases. Black civil rights in Haiti and the Virgin Islands made the new, expanded list of projects for

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Fund’s abiding interest in labor remained in Margold’s plan, too. In particular, the blueprint revived the Committee on Negro Work’s plan to desegregate labor unions. Where Morris Ernst had understandably worried that suing white labor unions would fracture the progressive labor movement coalition, Margold proposed an attack not

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the era of Brown v. Board. Historians of the long civil rights movement purport to offer a grassroots alternative to the story of court-ordered desegregation. But the Fund’s two decades of efforts reveal the distinction as a false dichotomy. Social mobilizations and the litigation campaign came out of the

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. thesis (Stanford University, 1928), 61–63; Irvin D. S. Winsboro and Abel A. Bartley, “Race, Education, and Regionalism: The Long and Troubling History of School Desegregation in the Sunshine State,” Florida Historical Quarterly 92 (2014): 714–45. Atlanta University: Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 23–48; JWJ, Along This Way, 65–66

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(Harvard University Press, 2007), 56–95; Irvin D. S. Winsboro and Abel A. Bartley, “Race, Education, and Regionalism: The Long and Troubling History of School Desegregation in the Sunshine State,” Florida Historical Quarterly 92 (2014): 714–45. Hiram Revels: Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social

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the Meetings of the Board of Directors, NAACPP. “Human contact”… “face”: Quoted in Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Desegregation, 1865–1954 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), at 195. “scientific study”: Minutes of Executive Committee Meeting Held at 3:00 p.m. on Jan. 3, 1911

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F. Lau (Duke University Press, 2004), 155–72; Leland B. Ware, “Setting the Stage for Brown: The Development and Implementation of the NAACP’s School Desegregation Campaign, 1930–1950,” Mercer Law Review 52 (2001): 631. 4. “full-time”: Committee on Negro Work Meeting, July 8, 1930, b. 42, LGP; Tushnet, NAACP

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in the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Adrienne Berard, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South (Beacon Press, 2016); Jeannie Rhee, “In Black and White: Chinese in the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of Supreme Court History

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Education 4 (1935): 328–35. “cash value”: Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (Prentice-Hall, 1934), 236. 68. desegregate labor unions: NRM, Preliminary Report, 217. 18: SCOTTSBORO AND AFTER “made it impossible”: Quoted in Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle

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… “not lost my life”: McNeil, Groundwork, 35–45; Leland B. Ware, “Setting the Stage for Brown: The Development and Implementation of the NAACP’s School Desegregation Campaign, 1930–1950,” Mercer Law Review 52 (2001): 631, 634. 8. enrolled: Ibid., 49–51. Law Review: Editorial Board, Harvard Law Review 35 (1921): 68

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About Social Change? 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2023) (1991); Derrick A. Bell Jr., “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85 (1976): 470; Megan Ming Francis, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture,” Law & Society Review

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

by Christopher Lasch  · 16 Sep 1991  · 669pp  · 226,737 words

and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories—desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion— were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of

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these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed. The trauma of McCarthyism, the long and bitter resistance to desegregation in the South, and the continued resistance to federal spending (unless it could be justified on military grounds) all seemed to confirm liberals in the

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1963, public opinion polls showed large majorities, according to Harvard Sitkoff, "in favor of laws to guarantee blacks voting rights, job opportunities, good housing, and desegregated schools and public accommodations." Under the weight of federal legislation, backed up by solid public support, segregation gave way, together with the system of disfranchisement

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a distance—to people in the suburbs, for example, who do not have to worry about the safety of their streets or the impact of desegregation on their schools. In city neighborhoods where anxiety about these things has become a way of life, the attempt to achieve racial justice through busing

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-working, forgotten American." Antibusing activists point out, with good reason, that "limousine liberals" in the suburbs expect the cities to carry the whole burden of desegregation. "The burden is being put unfairly on the poor blacks and the working‐ class whites." The fact that many black people themselves reject busing and

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dominated the Citywide Coordinating Council, appointed by Judge Arthur Garrity in 1975 as the "eyes and ears of the court," when his ambitious plan for desegregation began to run into fierce popular opposition. * The Globe described the Coordinating Council as a "mixture of community people, clergy, educators and businessmen," which promised

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local resentment of Garrity's judge-made law. "A great injustice has been done to the people of South Boston by forcing on them a desegregation plan that didn't consider the needs of the students or the working-class background of the community." She admired the community pride she discovered

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is illustrated by the case of Vinnie, the only student in Charlestown willing to submit to busing into Roxbury during the first year of the desegregation program. Held up as a model of racial enlightenment in an account of the busing crisis by Pamela Bullard and Judith Stoia, Boston television reporters

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a similarly ambiguous example of successful integration. Monti reports a conversation with a white student in his sociology class at the University of Missouri. The desegregation plan in St. Louis, unlike the one in Boston, required suburban schools to accept black pupils from the city. Monti's student drove a school

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those kids, but it ain't from no ghetto family." The bus driver, Monti adds, "knew from his daily experience what many observers of the desegregation order had been complaining about. The black youngsters who 'volunteered' for long bus rides to county schools were not like their peers left back in

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(New York Times, 2 March 1980) is quoted in Robert A. Dentler and Marvin B. Scott, Schools on Trial: An Inside Account of the Boston Desegregation Case (1981). The idea that "racism" explains all that anyone needs to know about the rise of the new right is so pervasive that it

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. Ione Malloy's diary of the South Boston -565- conflict was published under the title Southie Won't Go: A Teacher's Diary of the Desegregation of South Boston High School (1986). Additional information can be found in J. Michael Ross and William M. Berg, "I Respectfully Disagree with the Judge

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's Order": The Boston School Desegregation Controversy (1981); Thomas J. Cottle, Busing (1976); and the book by Dentler and Scott, cited at the beginning of this chapter. Jon Hillson, The Battle

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of Boston (1977), sees nothing but "racism." On desegregation in St. Louis, see Daniel J. Monti, A Semblance of Justice: St. Louis School Desegregation and Order in Urban America (1985). On desegregation in general, see George R. Metcalf, From Little Rock to Boston: The History of School

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Desegregation (1983); and Jennifer L. Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (1984). Hochschild's book is a puzzle. The

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author supports desegregation but introduces a good deal of

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evidence damaging to the belief that desegregation is the best way to improve black education. Contrary to the assumption underlying the Brown decision

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and the whole struggle for desegregation—"that white institutions are superior to black ones," in Hochschild's words—"evidence seldom shows that racially isolated blacks have impaired self‐ esteem, and it

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all too often shows that blacks in desegregated schools do." One study cited by Hochschild concludes that desegregation leads to "bitter rejection, isolation, and intellectual incompetence." Desegregation often means, moreover, that black teachers lose their jobs and that black principals are demoted. The

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from black professionals who contrast their own experience in segregated schools, where teachers "made very strong demands" on them, with their children's experience in desegregated schools. "Lower expectations on the part of the teachers," these parents complain, undermine their children's "drive for educational achievement." In view of all this

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discouraging evidence, it is not surprising that black support for desegregation dropped from 78 percent in 1964 to 55 percent in 1978; that a former civil rights lawyer, Derrick Bell, now pronounces

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desegregation "wasteful, dangerous, and demeaning"; that a number of black scholars have begun to argue that attempts to achieve racial balance may "prove disastrous for black

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children and their communities"; that the Atlanta NAACP "gave up its fight for mandatory desegregation in favor of black control of the city's public school system"; and that Hochschild herself concedes that opposition to

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desegregation is no longer "synonymous" with racism. Yet Hochschild, like most liberals, still comes down on the side of desegregation—the only solution, in her view, that assures equal protection under the laws. "After all, we

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that racially balanced schools fall into the category of basic rights, even if we could agree to overlook "preferences or consequences"; and her support for desegregation therefore ap -566- pears doubly arbitrary: not only is the weight of empirical evidence against it, but the argument from abstract rights fails her too

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. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (1987), makes a similarly unconvincing and halfhearted case for desegregation. Gutmann believes that desegregation is the only means of reducing "racial prejudice among whites," but the most generous reading of her own evidence leads to the conclusion that

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an unresolved dilemma—the "greatest dilemma of democratic education in our time." But that does not prevent her from advocating a more aggressive program of desegregation. In effect, she chooses liberalism over democracy, while clinging to the hope that it is unnecessary to make such a choice. When democratic liberalism carries

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of prejudice, 128, 131 ; on tolerance, 123 n. Burnham, James, 510 Bush, George, 485 n. Bushnell, Horace: on Christian nurture, 291 -573- busing (in school desegregation), 403, 407, 409-10, 477, 478, 504 -5, 507, 525 ; in Boston, 496-504 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 353 Byllesby, Langton: on wage labor, 203 Byron

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., 476, 507 Democratic Review (New York), 96 Dempsey, Jack, III Dennis, Lawrence, 459 Descartes, René, 126, 289, 305 -6, 447 ; on universal language, 124 -25 desegregation: in schools, 565 -66; see also busing Destler, Chester M., 220 Dewey, John, 188, 352, 363, 370 ; on Middletown, 424 -25; on nostalgia, 113 ; on

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, 322, 323 Guild Socialism Restated (Cole), 323, 325, 327 Gunther, John: on Mencken, 361 Gutman, Herbert G.: on artisanal radicalism, 211 Gutmann, Amy: on school desegregation, 567 Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.), 172, 546, 548 Hahn, Steven: on populism, 543 -44 Hamilton, Alexander, 195 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 237 Hapgood, Hutchins

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with James, 294 Hobson, John A.: against thrift, 72 Hobson, S. G.: on Fabian socialism, 318 ; on guild socialism, 321 Hochschild, Jennifer L.: on school desegregation, 566 -67 Hodges, Harold: on working-class insularity, 466 Hofer, Johannes, 106 Hoffer, Eric, 463 Hoffman, Abbie, 27 Hofstadter, Richard, 176, 473, 543 ; on American

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and society, 140 n. Montaigne, 262 Montesquieu, 51, 172 Montgomery, David: on populism, 220 -21, 222 Montgomery bus boycott, 405, 406 Monti, Daniel: on school desegregation, 504 n. Moody, Samuel: on new divinity, 258 Moore, Barrington, Jr.: on conservative modernization, 156 -57; on dying classes, 2I0; on progress, 43 Moore, G

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, The" (Bourne), 35I Quest for Certointy, The (Dewey), 365 race problem, 355, 357 n., 370, 392 -93, 441, 477-78, 496 -504; see also busing, desegregation "race suicide," 296, 339 -586- Racial Imbalance Act (Massachusetts, 1965), 499 Radical Probe, The (Miles), 477 Rambling Kid (Ashleigh), 337 Ratliff, Beulah Amidon: on Mississippi

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell  · 21 Jan 2020  · 450pp  · 113,173 words

problem is the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years. The scholar Derrick Bell described the quarter-century after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) as “the greatest racial consciousness-raising the country has ever known.” This consciousness-raising has only

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the administrations of George Washington and John F. Kennedy. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation of all the country’s schools, was not just a landmark decision but an unusual one. It was brief to the point of curtness: Shorn

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to this surveillance. And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether. Just as assuming that two parallel lines can meet overturns much of Euclidean geometry, eliminating

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68% moderation in enforcement of the new civil rights law 13% no choice For all their pious sentiments about desegregating the South, whites opposed every single activist step that might have brought desegregation about, and every single activist who was working to do so. In 1961, they thought, by a margin of

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not have consented to it otherwise. Patterson was one of the few who understood that there were no logical grounds for limiting its work to desegregation. The Yale University law professor Robert Bork, in his own very different way, was another. Immigrant rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and the rights

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. Notably, there was also a belt of conservative Democratic states with brand-new laws permitting abortion under certain circumstances. They were all in the newly desegregated South. In the 1960s, every coastal Southern state from Alabama to Virginia legislated some kind of right to abortion, starting with a Mississippi law permitting

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Constitution tinkered with. They had found ways to resist. The ERA promised to feminize public space just as the civil rights acts had promised to desegregate it. People didn’t want that. As early as the spring of 1975, among those who blocked its passage, the reason most often cited was

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be subjected to the most high-handed carrying out of federal law in the decade to follow: the court-ordered “desegregation” of Boston’s public schools, starting in 1974. The word desegregation belongs in quotation marks because most of the schools affected were within white ethnic (mostly Irish-American and Italian-American

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Great Society as the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened, a transfer from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make desegregation viable. Desegregation was, as we have said, the most massive undertaking of any kind in the history of the United States. Like any massive undertaking, it

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’s Department of Education, he discovered, once he became president, that to do any of those things would have struck at the very foundations of desegregation. So he didn’t—although Democrats and Republicans managed to agitate and inspire their voting and fundraising bases for decades by pretending he had. Meanwhile

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. That innovation caused civil rights law to work in a very different way from laws in the past. For instance, no law required busing to desegregate schools, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act seemed to forbid it. But after 1966, the Justice Department’s OCR issued guidelines that set percentage targets

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could meet. Now, though, it was a different world. Immigration was beginning to create a country with several races, not two. King’s vision of desegregation had been one in which his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The

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institutions of desegregation set up by the courts rejected that approach. They took account of race as never before. The more distant King’s vision of race relations

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Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1989 [1987]), 308. Whites made up 60 percent: Arthur Flemming et al., School Desegregation in Boston, Staff Report Prepared for U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 1975 (typescript), 20 [in University of Maryland Law School library]. The figure

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–224, 227, 228 Dell Computer, 209, 223 democracy, 159, 170, 215 Democratic National Convention 1948, 26 1968, 72, 75, 157 2004, 188 Denny, Reginald, 259 desegregation, 4, 10, 13–14, 21, 35, 109, 146, 149 busing (for school integration), 22, 77, 146 of schools, 4, 13–14, 77 (see also Jim

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander  · 24 Nov 2011  · 467pp  · 116,902 words

inherently unequal and inferior in every respect to its law school for whites. In 1950, in McLaurin v. Oklahoma, it declared that Oklahoma had to desegregate its law school. Thus, even before Brown, the Supreme Court had already begun to set in motion a striking pattern of

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desegregation. Brown v. Board of Education was unique, however. It signaled the end of “home rule” in the South with respect to racial affairs. Earlier decisions

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Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and by 1956 Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a vicious backlash. In Congress, North Carolina Senator Sam Erwin Jr. drafted a racist polemic, “the Southern Manifesto,” which vowed to fight to

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of black homes and churches. NAACP leaders were beaten, pistol-whipped, and shot. As quickly as it began, desegregation across the South ground to a halt. In 1958, thirteen school systems were desegregated; in 1960, only seventeen.31 In the absence of a massive, grassroots movement directly challenging the racial caste system

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and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men, women, and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone, another fifteen thousand were imprisoned, and one thousand desegregation protests occurred across the region, in more than one hundred cities.32 On June 12, 1963, President Kennedy announced that he would deliver to Congress

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. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was

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motivations behind the law and order rhetoric and the harsh criminal justice legislation proposed in Congress. The most ardent opponents of civil rights legislation and desegregation were the most active on the emerging crime issue. Well-known segregationist George Wallace, for example, argued that “the same Supreme Court that ordered integration

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.53 He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so angered and alienated by the Democratic Party’s support for civil rights reforms, such as desegregation and busing, that those voters could be easily persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained. Warren Weaver, a New York Times

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dramatic political clashes over the Vietnam War and Watergate. During this period, conservatives gave lip service to the goal of racial equality but actively resisted desegregation, busing, and civil rights enforcement. They repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a contest between hardworking, blue-collar whites and poor

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properly belonged to them.65 His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar—arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to

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of 1965, when civil rights lawyers became embroiled in highly visible and controversial efforts to end hiring discrimination, create affirmative action plans, and enforce school desegregation orders. As public attention shifted from the streets to the courtroom, the extraordinary grassroots movement that made civil rights legislation possible faded from public view

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the first to critique this phenomenon, arguing in a 1976 Yale Law Journal article that civil rights lawyers were pursuing their own agendas in school desegregation cases even when they conflicted with their clients’ expressed desires.3 Two decades later, former NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer and current Harvard Law School

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that is difficult to describe. It may be analogous, in some respects, to the panic once experienced by poor and working-class whites faced with desegregation—the fear of a sudden demotion in the nation’s racial hierarchy. Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence’s book We Won’t Go Back captures

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those solutions all the more difficult.”44 He emphasized that “most of the gains of the past decade were obtained at bargain prices,” for the desegregation of public facilities and the election and appointment of a few black officials cost close to nothing. “White America must recognize that justice for black

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, however, have treated the white man’s suffering as largely irrelevant to the pursuit of the promised land. As civil rights lawyers unveiled plans to desegregate public schools, it was poor and working-class whites who were expected to bear the burden of this profound social adjustment, even though many of

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white elite, whether planters or industrialists, had successfully endeavored to make all whites think in racial rather than class terms, predictably leading whites to experience desegregation, as Derrick Bell put it, as a net “loss.”59 Given that poor and working-class whites (not white elites) were the ones who had

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their world rocked by desegregation, it does not take a great leap of empathy to see why affirmative action could be experienced as salt in a wound. Du Bois once

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Movement,’” Sept. 21, 2007, www.democracynow.org/shows/2007/9/21. 3 See Derrick Bell, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85 (1976): 470. 4 Lani Guinier, Lift Every Voice (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1998), 220-21. 5 Ibid., 222. 6 See

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Derrick Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518, 525; David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 174- 93, 206-7; and Robert J. Norrell, “Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from

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on behalf of criminals; and sentencing; and trickle-down theories of racial justice Civil Rights Movement; backlash against; and black people who defied racial stereotypes; desegregation protests; and economic justice; and end of Jim Crow system; and federal legislation; and human rights approach; initial resistance from some African Americans; and King

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk  · 26 Sep 2023

basis of race and ending practices like literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise Black voters. A number of carefully choreographed boycotts and sit-ins desegregated public facilities from buses in Alabama to lunch counters in North Carolina. At the height of the civil rights era, many Americans came to hope

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shape the core tenets of the new ideology that is now in the ascendant in powerful institutions across the country. DERRICK BELL’S CASE AGAINST DESEGREGATION After he graduated from law school in 1957, a young Black law student was able to secure a brief audience with his idol: William H

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man had been “born fifteen years too late.” With landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education, which provided a legal imperative to desegregate schools, already on the books, the only tasks that were left involved some “mopping up.” The brief encounter with Hastie left that young man, who

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schools. In case after case, Bell sued those authorities to make Brown v. Board a reality. All in all, he helped oversee three hundred cases desegregating schools and small businesses. At first, Bell found his work exhilarating. He was finally fulfilling his ambition of making a real difference by practicing the

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own experiences, Bell observed that many civil rights attorneys litigating cases over public schools in the American South were guided by an ideological commitment to desegregation. But the Black clients on whose behalf they were working often had different goals. They wanted their children to have access to a quality education

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, irrespective of the composition of the student body. At times, this even made them oppose efforts at desegregation outright. As a coalition of Black community groups wrote in a letter to a Boston district court that Bell used as the epigraph for his

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article, Any steps to achieve desegregation must be reviewed in light of the black community’s interest in improved pupil performance as the primary characteristic of educational equity. . . . We think it

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neither necessary nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit. Bell’s article was written in the sober, even painstaking, tone typical of contributions to American

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his conclusion was a political bombshell. Drawing on a line of argument that (as Bell himself acknowledged) had originally been advanced by racist opponents of desegregation, he warned that civil rights lawyers were trying to “serve two masters” at the same time. Caught in a conflict between their clients’ wishes and

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were wrongly prioritizing what they themselves thought was right. “Having convinced themselves that Brown stands for desegregation and not education,” Bell complained, “the established civil rights organizations steadfastly refuse to recognize reverses in the school desegregation campaign—reverses which, to some extent, have been precipitated by their rigidity.” It was time for

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equal. Many of Bell’s progressive colleagues regarded this conclusion as sacrilege. But he was undeterred. In his mind, casting doubts on the merit of desegregation was only the opening salvo in a much wider campaign to question the logic and the values of the civil rights movement. THE (SUPPOSED) PERMANENCE

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come to exert an unexpected influence on American public policy over the course of the 2010s. According to Bell, the kinds of neutral remedies, like desegregation, that had been implemented during the civil rights era would never suffice to overcome the legacy of slavery. Because judges could always reinterpret precedent in

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universalism, for these disappointments. Derrick Bell, the biggest influence on the new movement of critical race theory, concluded that civil rights lawyers erred in making desegregation the principal aim of school reform. Bell and other theorists within the tradition of critical race theory also denied that universal moral principles could help

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less numerous and less powerful groups—making it, at best, an extremely risky tool for overcoming historical injustice. As Hubert Humphrey, a passionate advocate of desegregation, reportedly insisted when he shepherded the Civil Rights Act through the Senate, giving preferential treatment to a group on the basis of its ascriptive characteristics

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-09-23-8603110287-story.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Black pupils languished: Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT much less wealth: As of 2011, the median Black household income ($32

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Bell on Racism,” filmed 1994, YouTube, video, 1:42, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVy8w0Sz9LY&t=102s. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT imperative to desegregate schools: Urban Agenda, “Derrick Bell on Racism,” 1:42. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT encounter with Hastie: For an overview of Derrick Bell’s

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TEXT quit his government position: Bernstein, “Derrick Bell, Law Professor and Rights Advocate, Dies at 80.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT three hundred cases desegregating: “In Memoriam: Derrick Bell, 1930–2011,” NYU School of Law, accessed Jan. 30, 2023, www.law.nyu.edu/news/DERRICK_BELL_MEMORIAM. GO TO NOTE

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, Dies at 80.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Any steps to achieve”: Derrick Bell, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85, no. 4 (March 1976): 470, doi.org/10.2307/795339. See also 482–83 for further context. GO TO NOTE

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open to legal remedies: As Bell asked, “Why, one might ask, have [civil rights lawyers] been so unwilling to recognize the increasing futility of ‘total desegregation,’ and, more important, the increasing number of defections within the black community?” (Bell, “Serving Two Masters,” 488.) In a 2004 book, Bell laid out his

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. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20–28. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT merit of desegregation: See in particular Derrick Bell, “The Real Cost of Racial Equality,” Civil Liberties Review 1 (1974): 79–95; Derrick A. Bell Jr., “Brown v. Board

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of critical race theory. As I described in part I, Bell was a civil rights lawyer who gradually came to believe that many efforts at desegregation in the American South were a serious mistake. This stance may seem deeply counterintuitive at first sight. But a consideration of the three key postulates

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America of the 1950s, a landmark decision like Brown v. Board of Education must have been in their racial self-interest. The true motivation for desegregation, Bell argued, was to serve the interests of whites by improving America’s international image and making it easier to develop the Sunbelt. (See Derrick

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Democratic National Convention, 300n Democratic Party, 11, 80, 210–11, 268, 270, 276–77, 340n Demos, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 45, 305n, 311n Descartes, René, 136 desegregation, see integration Dewey, John, 183 DiAngelo, Robin, 80, 107, 108, 123–24, 126, 189, 241, 244, 268 disabilities, 9, 10, 15, 46, 69, 311n, 319n

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Aug 2020

criticism that he was trying to be all things to all people; spoke candidly about his own moral failing in neglecting to speak against school desegregation until Brown v. Board of Ed, and in supporting the Vietnam War until 1971. He was blunt about America’s failings, too, citing the CIA

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Richard Nixon attempted to repeat the accomplishment in 1968, intimating his sympathy for the region’s desire to keep the federal government from forcing racial desegregation upon it, it was dubbed the “Southern strategy.” When he swept the South along with almost all the rest of the nation in 1972, experts

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black vote. In 1968, Nixon followed Goldwater’s lead, aiming his appeal at white segregationists in the South, and white Northerners opposed to busing to desegregate public schools. In 1972, nonwhites were practically the only voters who didn’t support Richard Nixon, giving him 13 percent. But for some Republicans this

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week in Miami, many of the same activists who had circulated the anti-gay-rights petitions convinced the Dade County School Board to cancel a desegregation plan. “We don’t want to lose control of our children,” one activist explained, “and that is what happens when they are bused.” Following their

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toddler by her side carried a sign reading, “IF YOU LIKED JUDGE GARRITY, YOU’LL LOVE THE ERA,” referring to the federal judge administering the desegregation of the schools in South Boston. “For a lot of these ERA people giving the feds control over the school doesn’t matter because they

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in frustration with its rightward march. Much in its pages was respectable: statistics-laden studies, for example, claiming a failure of busing to achieve quality desegregated schooling, or the ways Washington-directed urban renewal was proving counterproductive in reversing blight. Work like this comprised the most important intellectual contribution of neoconservatism

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handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, Southern public schools—sometimes entire school systems—shut down rather than desegregate. Private “segregation academies” sprung up to replace them. In some states, governments provided grants to subsidize tuition. The movement accelerated following passage of the 1964

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’s segregated schools hit a snag, he said it might not open it all—for what would be the point? Orangeburg’s public schools were desegregated, however, and the school named after the Confederate general opened its doors in the fall of 1967. Five months later, as it happened, three black

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that schools seeking tax deductible status face higher scrutiny if they were opened or expanded in a community following an order for public schools to desegregate. The civil rights group the Children’s Defense Fund began dispatching investigators to Southern towns to see if the ruling was being carried out. In

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August 21. It announced that it would apply to any school “formed or significantly expanded” after the local district began a court-ordered or voluntary desegregation plan—an estimated 3,500 of the nation’s 18,000 tax-exempt private schools. It demanded neither abortion counselors nor gay teachers. It simply

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bankruptcy), and a ban on busing—a potent pledge in Boston, still raw from the violent street clashes that followed an infamous 1974 federal court desegregation plan. Massachusetts’s Democratic Party endorsed King. Dukakis lost by nine points. “You gave us a message,” King proclaimed in his victory speech. “You said

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that they were false. Like the one about a black cook who manned the guns at Pearl Harbor so heroically the armed services were immediately desegregated. (That came seven years later.) Or a favorite “quotation” he attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “We will take Eastern Europe. We will organize the hordes of

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age of twenty-nine as a liberal, became the senator from outside the deep South who did the most to stymie busing to achieve school desegregation, and pioneered the imposition of mandatory sentences for federal crimes. (He said drug dealers were “potential killers” who should be tracked down “like we track

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Day Hicks, the legendary leader of the violent opposition to the integration of South Boston High School; he called integration supporters “Communist dupes,” the federal desegregation order “a Communist plot against Boston,” was an adamant supporter of South Africa’s apartheid government, and famously never went anywhere without a gun. Then

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, “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,” integrating blacks into the league. (There was no such guidebook, and he stopped broadcasting a decade before baseball desegregated.) He would claim that his best friend—William Franklin Burghardt, “Burgie,” a college football teammate—was black (they exchanged letters occasionally), and cite the fact

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Reagan’s campaign chairman, Senator Paul Laxalt, that would explicitly declare spanking children protected by the Constitution and ban federal legal aid for abortion, school desegregation, divorce, and homosexual rights litigation. Phyllis Schlafly’s deputy Rosemary Thomson attended a luncheon at which, she complained, the feminist minister’s invocation was “interspersed

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, 531 Denton, Jeremiah, 870 Denver, John, 573 Department of Consumer Affairs, 202 depression (economic), 849 Des Moines Register, 303, 675, 715 Des Moines Tribune, 303 desegregation, Florida and, 69 Detroit, Republican National Convention (1980), 792 Detroit News, 666, 792 Deukmejian, George, 123, 124, 125, 377 DeVos, Richard, 25, 90, 843 Diamond

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Board of Education, 347 Briggs Initiative (California), 371, 374 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 346 Christian schools, 345–355, 471–484 curriculum, 350 desegregation plan for private schools, 354 Engele v. Vital, 348 funding for, 346–355, 471 Meek v. Pittinger, 481 prayer in schools, 348 private schools seeking

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, 708, 910 Anita Bryant, 85–88, 91–92, 93, 97, 98, 110–112, 120 Connally as candidate, 619–620, 622, 624 Cuban refugees, 777–779 desegregation plan, 69 ERA and, 83, 87, 395, 495 evangelical Christians, 769 gay rights and, 68, 83–88, 92–93, 109–112 primary, 747, 750, 751

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

by Rick Perlstein  · 1 Jan 2008  · 1,351pp  · 404,177 words

loudly reporters couldn’t phone in their stories. Martin Luther King was in Chicago. In 1956, Eleanor Roosevelt had said that if the Windy City desegregated, it would set a lovely example for the South. Mayor Daley replied that there was no segregation in Chicago. He was still proclaiming it—even

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though, in 1965, after Dick Gregory led silent desegregation marches past Daley’s Bridgeport house, neighborhood school-girls adopted a new jump-rope chant: “I’d like to be an Alabama trooper / That is

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, Mississippi, “while,” the New York Times reported, “state and local law-enforcement officials stood by, laughing and chuckling,” a white mob ran off six hundred desegregation marchers. (“You’re going to see a show tonight,” the sheriff had promised newsmen.) In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s

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-funding law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and a series of federal courts ruled that jurisdictions with dual school systems would have to file desegregation plans with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to get federal money (which would, in some school districts, make up a quarter of

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clouds of technicalities. Mendel Rivers’s side was winning the debate. On Wednesday, September 21, Rules Committee Republicans engineered a surprise investigation into HEW’s desegregation guidelines; on Thursday the Senate Appropriations Committee slashed HEW’s enforcement budget; on Monday, the same committee argued the guidelines were illegal under the terms

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, who spoke of how “the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life,” was a Southern senator who voted down the line against desegregation. Lowenstein wrote them all letters nonetheless, begging them to stand in the gap. Only Eugene McCarthy, the diffident, difficult senator from Minnesota, expressed any interest

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system without a ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund immediately asked federal district courts to revisit all desegregation plans for compliance with New Kent County. And how to keep on fighting federally mandated integration was now the abiding obsession of every ambitious Southern

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tailor his message to suit local tastes. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a fast-growing New South metropolis where the NAACP had recently filed a school desegregation lawsuit, he boldly, boldly affirmed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Then he added, undercutting that message, “To use

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House of Representatives, because Nixon wouldn’t have won an electoral college majority. If Nixon didn’t “carry out his commitments,” Wallace said—lay off desegregation guidelines and appoint “constitutionalists” to the federal bench—the Alabaman would run for president again in 1972. Nixon hadn’t even been inaugurated, and his

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-day delay. Just to make sure, Nixon met with his HEW secretary, Robert Finch, and told him to personally monitor that any action on school desegregation was “inoffensive to the people of South Carolina.” Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman was the linchpin of the White House system. He and his partner and

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biological weapons, begun the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the Soviet Union. He was “allowing some Southern school districts more time to formulate their desegregation plans,” but chose as his chief justice Warren Burger, whose Supreme Court “unanimously rejected the delays”: perfect equipoise. Some of the Middle Americans Time profiled

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schools, steadily and speedily, in accordance with the law”—but that “a policy requiring all school districts, regardless of the difficulties they face, to complete desegregation by the same terminal date is too rigid to be either workable or equitable.” The next day was the NAACP’s July 4 national convention

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administration’s double-dealing was “almost enough to make you vomit.” It was hard to play both sides sedulously, the higher the stakes got. “Complete desegregation by the same terminal date”—the start of the 1969–70 school year—was exactly what the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had demanded

…

that John Stennis of Mississippi, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was threatening to block the administration’s defense authorization bill if more desegregation went through. Nixon replied, “Anybody who knows Senator Stennis and anybody who knows me would know that he would be the last person to say

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Mississippi went to the Supreme Court. For the first time since Brown v. Board of Education, the federal government argued on the side against school desegregation. It lost. On October 30, 1969, in the middle of Nixon’s preparations for the Silent Majority speech, the Supreme Court handed down Alexander v

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school situation in Washington can be worked out.” Another memo, from Dent to Finch on White House stationery marked CONFIDENTIAL, asked Finch to drop a desegregation case in Strom Thurmond’s Columbia, South Carolina. A third indicated that Dent had intervened with a judge. Winning the South for the Republicans was

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as anyone else, buy a nice home, a car or two in the garage, send their kids to nice suburban schools. The problem was forced desegregation, which let folks jump the queue: “Now, on this busing, I said many years ago, if we don’t stop the federal takeover of the

…

,913; “Senate Restricts Rights Guideline; Would Allow Segregation of Patients in Certain Cases,” NYT, September 28, 1966. Explained Majority Leader: “Mansfield Asks Slowdown on School Desegregation,” NYT, September 29, 1966. Indeed, in May, 32 percent: USNWR, October 10, 1966. Crowed Senator James Eastland: Carter, Politics of Rage, 307. See also Reporter

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6 press conference: “Johnson Concedes Errors on Rights,” NYT, October 7, 1966; PPP 501, October 6, 1966. “We accept tokenism”: “Mansfield Asks Slowdown on School Desegregation.” It seems HEW is determined: Elizabeth Kulcyzk to Douglas, September 30, 1966, PDP722. He was lying: September 11, 1966, Gallup poll in LBJCR, Reel 3

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968

by Thomas E. Ricks  · 3 Oct 2022  · 482pp  · 150,822 words

military terms, the Freedom Rides of 1961 are a classic example of a long-range raid behind enemy lines. Similarly, the problems that plagued the desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, the following year are instantly recognizable to any military historian who has studied how a clever, adaptive enemy can stymie an

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Woodard’s eye sockets. President Harry Truman was shocked by the incident and would cite it in a letter explaining his 1948 executive order mandating desegregation of the armed forces. “I can’t approve of such goings on,” he wrote to an old friend and former Army comrade. “I am going

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tactical discussion of how to reach that outcome: “What are you going to do?” Significantly, the session Rosa Parks attended at Highlander was titled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” That decision was the ruling the previous year by the high court in Brown v. Board of Education that racial

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of notes during the sessions. She was struck by the idea that the goal of protest was not to influence attitudes, but to force change. “Desegregation prove[s] itself by being put in action,” she wrote in her notes. “Not changing attitudes, attitudes will change.” In other words, don’t try

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that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” He was saying that they would shun the buses of this city until they were desegregated. The tactical business at hand was to continue the boycott beyond the one-day wildcat action. That interesting word “coercion” left hanging a question of

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its strategy, was to end the treatment of Blacks as second-class citizens and so to reorder the nation’s public culture. It wanted to desegregate public accommodations—buses, restaurants, parks, and such—and to win for Blacks the right to vote, consistently denied to them in the South. The mode

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American history. The sad opposite echo would come two decades later, when whites in the northern city of Boston reacted violently to the court-ordered desegregation of schools through what was called, in political shorthand, busing. The end of the beginning The Montgomery campaign was over, yet the war for civil

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colleges, as well as two white ones. The city prized its reputation for political moderation, which had led it to take some tentative steps toward desegregation. Lawson would soon put those steps to the test. It also had a community of engaged Black ministers who were paying close attention to the

…

addressed Nash as “little lady.” No, it is not, he conceded. So, she said, should the lunch counters be desegregated? “Yes,” the mayor responded. They shook hands. With that exchange, the desegregation of Nashville began. But it would take several years for all the city’s restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels and

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, but Roy Wilkins threatened to retaliate against the SCLC if he did. King dropped the idea. On May 10, the six downtown lunch counters were desegregated. The sit-ins also taught a financial lesson: national attention aided fund-raising. By the end of that month, the balance in the Nashville Christian

…

the state’s chapter of the NAACP, and they often resorted to violence. But even so, the initiative remained almost always with the forces of desegregation. One of the best examples of the variety of novel operations available to the Movement was the Freedom Rides. In them, a small band conducted

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of Order. He was only partially redeemed by a petition he filed on May 29 to the Interstate Commerce Commission asking it to adopt stringent desegregation regulations. As one historian put it, “For all their talents, the Kennedy men suffered under a colossal misconception—they thought they could steer and control

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in areas they hadn’t visited. Indeed, later that year, all CORE had to do to force forty-seven restaurants in Maryland and Delaware to desegregate was to announce that it planned sit-ins there. Almost an equal number of restaurants along the highways in the area failed to agree to

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politician Roy Harris, a dedicated segregationist and the president of the white supremacist Citizens’ Councils of America, had stated in 1959 that whites would oppose desegregation so intensely and broadly that failure was unthinkable. “There won’t be any integration in Georgia,” he confidently informed a reporter. Indeed, some 75 percent

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in Selma, Alabama, put it in November 1954, the organization’s plan was “to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit or renew a mortgage.” This was not an empty threat. Rather, it was a time-tested formula

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lost their jobs. Newspapers helped by publishing the names and addresses of those who tried to register. The fallback line of defense was tying up desegregation in the courts, fighting it in every county and school district. This approach produced much delay but few long-term victories. The final line of

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only” section of the town’s bus station. They then put together a coalition of groups called the Albany Movement with the announced purpose to desegregate the entire town. The students were then expelled from school, a punishment that provided Sherrod with an instant staff. “They had nothing else to do

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in various histories. One version is that King, in an incautious moment, supposedly vowed that he would stay jailed until there was an agreement to desegregate the city. The city then offered an unwritten “truce” under which almost all protesters would be freed, all bond money would be returned, the city

…

buses would be desegregated, and a biracial committee would be formed to study further steps. In return for this, King would agree to leave town. Nothing was put in

…

to seek a new truth—this situation in Birmingham was intolerable.” Young informed Birmingham’s white business leaders what the Movement wanted them to do: desegregate the city’s store and lunch counters, hire Blacks as clerks and cashiers, and drop charges against nonviolent demonstrators. The Movement also called for a

…

committee to develop a way forward for school desegregation, but according to Ralph Abernathy, that demand was included simply to give white negotiators something to throw out. The white businessmen were not much interested

…

process touches the life of the Negro in Birmingham.” It said that civil rights leaders in the city had tried in good faith to negotiate desegregation, but their efforts had resulted only in broken promises and hesitant steps that were reversed. The call for civil rights for Blacks had religion, morality

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essential to success in warfare. Avoiding them is a recipe for stalemate, at best. Bevel designated May 2 as D Day. The “D” stood for “desegregation,” but the echo of World War II would also have been caught, especially because The Longest Day—a Hollywood blockbuster about the D-Day landings

…

settlement was reached between the city’s white business leaders and the SCLC, under which the Movement appeared to win on all its demands: the desegregation of lunch counters and bathrooms in downtown stores, the hiring of some Black salesclerks, and the formation of a biracial committee on school

…

desegregation. These would not be immediate, but would be phased in. That slight compromise follows a rule of warfare of allowing your enemy an avenue for

…

it happened in Birmingham, the compromise split the city’s power structure. The business community now favored change; those who held political power did not. Desegregation would be a long and difficult process in the city. Bull Connor’s sulking comment on the settlement was, “You know what’s the trouble

…

away with literacy tests for anyone with a basic elementary school education. It would enable to the Justice Department to file suits to compel school desegregation. It restricted federal funding for programs that discriminated on the basis of race. Most important, it outlawed segregation in public places—stores, restaurants, hotels, and

…

years. As noted, this was in part because seeking reconciliation was always listed as the final goal in nonviolent campaigns. When downtown Birmingham began to desegregate, local Movement leaders used their calmest, best-trained activists to implement the agreement. In an interesting variation on sit-in tactics, these actions were purposefully

…

was best known for having been forced out of his leadership position in 1949 under President Truman after “publicly and pugnaciously” opposing the executive order desegregating the military. Royall and Blaik wandered around the town, did not seem to learn much, and never produced a report. Once again, the executive branch

…

the following Monday. About this time, the SCLC and SNCC began conducting small reconnaissance patrols, seeing how demonstrators would be received in motels and restaurants. Desegregating these places wasn’t the primary focus of the campaign, but it still had a purpose. “The main thing is to keep the police busy

…

(University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 136. “Had you seen Rosa Parks (the Montgomery sparkplug)”: Charron, Freedom’s Teacher, 235. “Desegregation prove[s] itself by being put in action”: “Rosa Parks Notes, School Desegregation Workshop, Highlander Center, July 24–August 8, 1955,” Civil Rights Movement Archive, crmvet.org/docs/5507park.htm. “At Highlander

…

battle in Americans for the Preservation of the White Race Anderson, Carol Anderson, William G. Anniston, Ala. Appel, John armed forces, U.S. Blacks in desegregation of presence missions of Ranger Handbook of war colleges of see also military and warfare Armstrong, Thomas arrests bail and of children violence in see

…

Bible Biewen, John Bigelow, Albert Bilbo, Theodore Birmingham, Ala. Black veterans killed in bombings in Freedom Riders in Gaston Motel in police in segregation and desegregation in shopping mall in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in violence in Birmingham Barons Birmingham campaign allies in arrests and imprisonments in Bevel in Birmingham

…

.S. Black members of House of Representatives Senate Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Rides and in Freedom Summer campaign; see also Freedom Summer restaurant desegregation and Connor, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Birmingham campaign and Freedom Rides and Pritchett and Constitution, U.S. First Amendment to Cook, Eugene Cooper, Annie Lee CORE

…

Bridge, Bloody Sunday at education Algebra Project Black educators in Selma campaign in Black history Freedom Schools in literacy segregation in, see school segregation and desegregation voting and Edwards, Don Edwards, Len Egerton, John Eig, Jonathann Eisenhower, Dwight Ellis, Kate Emancipation Proclamation Episcopal Church Erenrich, Susie Erikson, Erik H. Eskew, Glenn

…

Drang, Battle of India Chauri Chaura incident in Delhi Pact and partition of Salt March in strikes in insurgency and counterinsurgency integration, see segregation and desegregation Internal Revenue Service (IRS) internet social media Interstate Commerce Commission interstate travel, segregation in Iraq Isaac, Larry Ivory, Cecil Jackson, Bacardi Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Jimmie

…

Jeffries, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Judson Jemison, T. J. Jesus Jesus and the Disinherited (Thurman) Jet Jeter-Bennett, Gisell Jim Crow laws see also segregation and desegregation Johnson, Jacqueline Johnson, James Johnson, Kathryn Lee Johnson, Lyndon civil rights and King’s meeting with Reeb’s murder and Voting Rights Act and Wilkins

…

student movement Reeb and SCLC and in Selma campaign in Selma to Montgomery march Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and Nashville, Tenn. bombing attack in desegregation of Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) Nashville sit-ins arrests in attacks on protesters in Big Saturday in documentary on effects of jailing of protesters

…

, City, Wisc. Scanlon, Jennifer Scheips, Paul J. Schlesinger, Arthur Schmitt, Brad SCLC, see Southern Christian Leadership Conference schools and education, see education school segregation and desegregation Brown v. Board of Education ruling on busing and in St. Augustine at Little Rock High School at University of Mississippi, see University of Mississippi

…

Schultz, Bud Schultz, Ruth Schwerner, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, Rita Scott, Willie Emma Seale, Bobby Sears, Zena segregation and desegregation of armed forces of buses; see also Montgomery bus boycott delay tactics against desegregation in housing in interstate travel Jim Crow laws local versus national laws on of lunch counters of restaurants of

…

schools, see school segregation and desegregation Selma campaign and “separate but equal” and Wallace on segregationists assessment of power of Black veterans and and children employed in civil rights movement communism

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 7 May 2024  · 470pp  · 158,007 words

sort: those with Black Americans as the central actors. He had nothing to say about the white mobs opposing busing, the hollering masses blocking the desegregating schoolhouse door, or the vigilantes who threw bombs into churches, lobbed glass bottles at protesters, or burned crosses to terrorize. The memo was similarly unconcerned

…

and the Chicago anti-Keynesian economists gave right-wing southerners cover by coding their racist preferences, such as opposition to civil rights laws and school desegregation, as simple fidelity to the free market. Compared to George Wallace’s rabid racism, the economists’ views allowed for the genteel maintenance of the status

…

biographer.13 He would not openly defy the Court’s orders, as the proponents of massive resistance, a strategy Virginia politicians designed to prevent school desegregation, had urged, taking a more measured tone that focused on practicalities and timing rather than obstipant refusal to integrate. Powell wrote a memo on behalf

…

.14 Yet Powell’s diplomatic and genteel resistance reached the same results without the controversy, presaging his tenure on the Court. Rather than oppose the desegregation orders, he found a route around them through a series of legal procedures that drew district lines using neighborhood maps which were conveniently racially segregated

…

first opportunity to short-circuit antidiscrimination laws. In 1973, during Powell’s first year as a justice, the Burger Court heard a series of school desegregation cases. At issue in the first, Keyes v. School District No.1, was whether the city of Denver’s “placement testing” plan—which had been

…

in 1974, Solicitor General Robert Bork defended the state of Michigan’s redistricting plan as compliant with Brown. The NAACP had challenged the state’s desegregation program for fifty-three segregated schools, which, it argued, had in fact increased segregation. Bork argued that judicial “disruption” in “local affairs” was unwarranted because

…

—or, rather, the backlash to Brown. After oral arguments in the case, Justice Felix Frankfurter worried that his colleagues on the Court would decide to desegregate schools. As Alexander Bickel, one of the justice’s clerks that term and a future Yale Law professor, recounted, Frankfurter asked the Department of Justice

…

to brief the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, specifically to answer the question: “Did the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intend or contemplate school desegregation to fall within the scope of the equal protection clause?” According to the historian Calvin TerBeek, the plaintiffs addressed this question during the oral arguments

…

of the Reconstruction amendments as well as of the “founders’ intent.” The state of Kansas filed a brief stating that the “framers did not intend” desegregation while the NAACP briefed the court that the Plessy standard of “separate but equal” was not in line with the “intent of the framers.”16

…

, 237–38, 241, 257, 258, 267, 268, 276–77, 292, 296–97, 315, 316, 323 derivatives (derivatives contracts), 241, 262–66, 275, 293, 303, 316 desegregation, 10, 22, 104, 119, 120, 144. See also integration Detroit Free Press, 77 developing countries, 95 development loans, 60, 66 DeVos, Betsy, 187 DeVos Foundation

…

insurance (insurance products), 11, 177, 213–14, 245, 275, 285, 292 integration, 16, 25–26, 86, 100, 104, 121, 123, 145, 221, 226. See also desegregation interest groups, 135–36, 222, 224–25, 232, 362 interest-only loans, 216 interest rates and fees, 193, 196, 197, 199–200, 215, 249, 250

…

), 81, 258, 261, 328 segregation, xxix, 6, 7, 12–14, 21, 22, 100, 101, 104, 117, 119–23, 144, 186, 213, 315, 352. See also desegregation segregation academies, 186 Seid, Barre, 140, 187 self-interest, 35, 172, 184, 193, 222, 224, 228, 234, 351 self-sufficiency, 227 Senate, U.S., 140

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg  · 20 Jun 2016  · 709pp  · 191,147 words

children” inside the school—the “hill children of the big, poor families” alongside the children of engineers. Here was a clear-cut experiment in class desegregation. If only this was America, he thought.63 As Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath had put it, Daniels repeated for his southern audience

…

was a crucial year of social experiment and consciousness-raising. Little Rock, Arkansas, grabbed national and international attention when Governor Orval Faubus thwarted the racial desegregation of Central High School. On September 4, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford attempted to enter the school building, but was blocked by the Arkansas National

…

on the west side of the city. Only Central High, built in the 1920s and catering mostly to working-class families, however, was selected for desegregation. Armis Guthridge of the Capital Citizens’ Council, the lead spokesman for antidesegregation forces, willfully fanned the flames of poor white resentment when he announced that

…

overalls. At a private meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, away from the unfolding drama, President Eisenhower tried to convince Faubus to accept the court-ordered desegregation plan; the southern governor left the meeting angry and humiliated. He later admitted that he knew full well that Eisenhower’s advisers had thought him

…

; see “Housing Bias Ended,” New York Times, May 29, 1949; and James Wolfinger, “‘The American Dream—For All Americans’: Race, Politics, and the Campaign to Desegregate Levittown,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 230–52, esp. 234. For the Norfolk housing facility, see Larrabee, “The Six Thousand Houses That

…

, Elizabeth and Hazel, 37, 105; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 263; and Phoebe Godfrey, “Bayonets, Brainwashing, and Bathrooms: The Discourse of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 42–67, esp. 45–47; and Belman Morin, “Arkansas Riot Like

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, 1963. For the tangled career of John Frederick Kasper, the paid agitator from New Jersey, see John Egerton, “Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville,” Southern Spaces (May 4, 2009). 61. An Afro-American newspaper gave this description of the film Poor White Trash: “There are no Emily

…

-shirt was not only the outfit of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but also the dress of angry poor white men protesting desegregation in Nashville in 1957. See “The South: What Orval Hath Wrought,” 15. 62. Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South, 183, 175, 179. 63. See “redneck

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Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

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Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975

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The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

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We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

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The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America

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Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline

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A People's History of the United States

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Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents

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USA Travel Guide

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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

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Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

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Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

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Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

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The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

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Amazing Stories of the Space Age

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The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

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What's the Matter with White People

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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

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Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Mar 2009  · 1,037pp  · 294,916 words

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All

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The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

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Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

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On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

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The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy

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Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

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Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

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1968: The Year That Rocked the World

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American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

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The Stolen Year

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There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

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We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

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Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

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Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

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Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

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The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 2002  · 901pp  · 234,905 words

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

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Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom

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Presidents of War

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Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America

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Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

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Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

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Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars

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Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age

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City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

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Mattering: The Secret to Building a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose

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Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

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Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

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Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

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The New Geography of Jobs

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The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

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There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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The Abandonment of the West

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Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America

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The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

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The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream

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The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

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The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

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How to Be Black

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The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

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The Sellout: A Novel

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Give People Money

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This America: The Case for the Nation

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Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

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The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II

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Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior

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Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

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Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It)

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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

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Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

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Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age

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Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism

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Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

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Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

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American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It

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Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America

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Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

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Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City

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America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

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The Passenger

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American Foundations: An Investigative History

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Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools

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Hard Landing

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A History of Future Cities

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