Virtual Bookshelf: February 2022- Black History Month

The term 'civil rights' has such a familiar presence in discussions about American politics and law that we tend to use it reflexively and intuitively, but rarely do we stop to think about what exactly we mean when we use the term and why certain uses strike us as right or wrong. In this book, Professor Christopher W. Schmidt tells the story of how Americans have fought over the meaning of civil rights from the Civil War through today. Through their struggles over what it means to live in a nation dedicated to protecting civil rights, each generation has given the label new life and new meaning. Civil Rights in America shows how the words we use to understand our world become objects of contestation and points of leverage for social, political, and legal action.

The Civil Rights movement that emerged in the United States after World War II was a reaction against centuries of racial discrimination. In this sweeping history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta--the South's largest and most economically important city--from the 1940s through 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that the movement featured a vast array of activists and many sophisticated approaches to activism.

A Force for Change illuminates Cannady's key role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period's leading Black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that Blacks played little part in Oregon's history and it enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon and the civil rights movement across the country.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a riveting and alarming account of the continuing battle over Americans' right to vote.

Collects selected letters of Thurgood Marshall, who was at the forefront of the civil-rights movement and went on to become the first Black justice of the Supreme Court, covering the period from 1935 to 1947.

Profiles Black lawyers during the era of segregation and the civil rights movement, with an emphasis on the conflicts they felt between their identities as Black Americans and their professional identities as lawyers.

The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and better nation.

In 1945, six Black families from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., began a desperate fight to keep their homes. Each of them had purchased a property that prohibited the occupancy of Blacks and other minority groups through the use of legal instruments called racial restrictive covenants--one of the most pervasive tools of residential segregation in the aftermath of World War II. Over the next three years, local activists and lawyers at the NAACP fought through the nation's courts to end the enforcement of these discriminatory contracts. Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of their dramatic campaign, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court victory in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).

Civil rights lawyers were handmaidens of change who worked in the back rooms during twentieth-century America's era of profound social upheaval. Kent Spriggs, a noted lawyer of the period, gathers stories of legal maneuvers and memories of racial injustices from 26 voices--white and black, male and female, Northern-born, and Southern-born--many of whom share their own defining moments as civil rights lawyers.