Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American HistoryMichael J. Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, is one of the leading authorities on the history of civil rights law in the United States. In Unfinished Business, he illuminates the course of racial equality in America, revealing that we have made less progress than we like to think. Indeed, African Americans have had to fight for everything they have achieved. Klarman highlights a variety of social and political factors that have influenced the path of racial progress--wars, migrations, urbanization, shifting political coalitions--and he looks in particular at the contributions of law and of court decisions to American equality. The author argues that court decisions tend to reflect the racial mores of the times, which is why the Supreme Court has not been a heroic defender of the rights of racial minorities. And even when the Court has promoted progressive racial change, its decisions have often been unenforced, in part because severely oppressed groups rarely have the resources necessary to force the issue. Klarman also sheds light on the North/South dynamic and how it has influenced racial progress, arguing that as southerners have become more anxious about outside challenges to their system of white supremacy, they have acted in ways that eventually undermined that system. For example, as southern slave owners demanded greater guarantees for slavery from the federal government, they alienated northerners, who came to fear a slave power conspiracy that would interfere with their liberties. Unfinished Business offers an invaluable, succinct account of racial equality and civil rights throughout American history. |
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Contents
Introduction | 1 |
The Founding | 9 |
The Antebellum Period | 25 |
The Civil War and Reconstruction | 45 |
Retreat from Reconstruction | 61 |
White Supremacy Ascendant | 75 |
The Progressive Era | 93 |
Between the World Wars | 111 |
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abolitionists action African Americans Alabama antislavery barred black suffrage black voter Brown challenge Chinese cities civil rights legislation civil rights movement Congress congressional constitutional convention criminal declared defendants delegates Democrats desegregation disfranchisement Dred Scott economic elections emancipation enacted enforcement federal government Fifteenth Amendment Fourteenth Amendment free blacks fugitive slave Governor grandfather clause housing immigration integration invalidated issue Japanese Jim Crow judges jury justices Klarman labor legislature litigation lynching ment Mississippi NAACP Negro neighborhoods newspaper North northern opinion percent political population President progressive racial change public accommodations race discrimination racial equality racial segregation railroads Reconstruction regation Republican Party residential segregation resistance riot Roosevelt rulings school desegregation Senator slave owners slavery social protest South Carolina southern blacks southern whites statute tion U.S. Supreme Court Union urban violence voting rights W. E. B. Du Bois white southerners white supremacy World World War II