A Century of Civil Rights

Konvitz, Milton R.

doi:10.7312/konv90052

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…They added a list that included "personal property" and the "equal benefit of all laws". 110 Even though this bill was defeated, the concept of civil rights was there. Subsequently they were protected by the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871 and 1875.…”

Section: Opera Historica • Ročník 22 • 2021 • čmentioning

confidence: 99%

America's Racist Founding? An East-European View

Cerman¹

2021

Opera Historica

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By now everybody must have heard about The 1619 Project of the New York Times Magazine and the recent push to reinterpret the American Revolution as a racist enterprise which aimed at preserving slavery. 1 There is a difference between saying that the United States failed to abolish slavery at a federal level, and saying that it declared independence precisely to preserve slavery. It is one thing to claim that white racists who tortured a Black American war veteran in 1946 were betraying Jefferson's ideals, and it is quite another thing to say they were acting on the basis of "the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers used as the nation's founding." 2The 1619 Project was a 100-page supplement to The New York Times magazine published in August 2019 to recall the 400 years since the arrival of the first Black slaves in the present-day USA. It includes an introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones and ten short essays on various topics relating to slavery by multiple authors. In June 2020 it was followed by another supplement edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones that uses the historical narrative to justify reparations for Black Americans. 3 Since then it has grown into an initiative that aims to reframe the entire history of the USA and make this reframed history the basis of school education. The narrative is also being imposed on historians.According to the New York Times Magazine, the preservation of slavery has been the main mission of the United States throughout its entire history. Hence the shift from 1776 to 1619, the year in which allegedly the first Black slaves arrived in the present-day USA. In the flowery language of the editor Jake Silverstein, this was the moment when the "seeds" were planted, and the racist flower took its "roots". 4 This metaphorical language manipulates the reader into believing that everything in American history has been determined by its "seeds", and there is no other remedy than uprooting the whole plant that has been growing since 1619. In the words of Jake Silverstein, the aim of The 1619 Project is "to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation's birth year." 5

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Section: Opera Historica • Ročník 22 • 2021 • čmentioning

confidence: 99%

America's Racist Founding? An East-European View

Cerman¹

2021

Opera Historica

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“…In response to the Civil Rights Cases , activists organized “civil rights” leagues (Alexander , 30). Many state legislatures passed their own public accommodation laws, which they typically labeled “civil rights” laws (316 n.10; see also Konvitz and Leskes , 157–58). One can even locate at least one reference to the campaign to pass state‐level public accommodation laws as a “civil rights movement” (Colored Leagues ).…”

Section: Contesting Civil Rights: An Alternative Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal History and the Problem of the Long Civil Rights Movement

Schmidt¹

2016

Law soc. inq.

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This essay offers a critical examination of use of the term “long civil rights movement” as a framework for understanding the legal history of the battle against racial inequality in twentieth‐century America. Proponents of the long movement argue that expanding the chronological boundaries of the movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s allows scholars to better capture the diverse social mobilization efforts and ideas that fueled the black freedom struggle. While not questioning the long framework's usefulness for studying the social movement dynamics of racial justice activism, I suggest that the long framework is of more limited value for those who seek to understand the development of civil rights, as a legal claim, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The tendency of long movement scholars to treat civil rights as a pliable category into which they can put any and all racial justice claims is in tension with historical understandings of the term. Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880–1915 suggests an alternative approach. Her detailed and nuanced account of a period in American history when racial justice activists understood civil rights as a relatively narrow subset of legal remedies within a much broader struggle for racial equality indicates the need for an alternate history of civil rights—one that places the evolving, contested, and historically particularized concept of civil rights at the center of inquiry.

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From “Evolutionary Theory and Law” to a “Legal Evolutionary Theory”

Zamboni¹

2008

Ger. law j.

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Evolutionary theories have always been treated by legal scholars as a sort of cousin to the legal theoretical family, both in Europe and the United States. They are nice theories, they tell interesting stories, you sometimes listen to what they have to say and when among friends, you may even quote them. However, in the modern mononuclear family, when it is time to tackle important issues and reach important decisions, or simply to celebrate some success stories, these cousins are often left outside the door, being simply “relatives” and not part of the legal family in the proper sense. A former evolutionary scholar strikingly stated in a manner that can be seen as representative of the general skepticism towards the evolutionary approach of a large segment of the legal family, “Legal scholarship should not be so timid as to depend on others for its theoretical models. We might take our inspiration where we find it, but we should build our theories within our own discipline, constrained only by the data that defines it and the criteria of quality appropriate to it.” The main objective of this article is to take the first step towards making evolutionary theory “our own discipline,” by elevating evolutionary theory from the status of “cousin” to one of “sibling” (or at least “in-laws”) of the legal family. The focus in particular is to understand why, despite the fact that the evolutionary theory approach to law (or “evolutionary theory and law”) has been present quite a while in the legal scholar's discussion, the legal world at large has left it at the front step of the legal house. Based on this analysis, the task is also to evaluate whether it is possible, after certain adjustments, to invite evolutionary theory into the larger family of legal thinking, in particular as part of the legal theories of law-making (as “legal evolutionary theory”).

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A Century of Civil Rights

Cited by 7 publications

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America's Racist Founding? An East-European View

America's Racist Founding? An East-European View

Legal History and the Problem of the Long Civil Rights Movement

From “Evolutionary Theory and Law” to a “Legal Evolutionary Theory”

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