Book Review by Judith Kelleher Schafer
The relationship of race and rights in the United States has been a difficult one since the ink dried on the Constitution. Before the Civil War, slavery was the great moral issue that impaled the Revolutionary generation and their descendants for decades. The Thirteenth Amendment dealt a death blow to African bondage, but it left African-Americans in only a quasi-state of freedom. Although Reconstruction was a time of increased rights for the freed slaves, governments based on white supremacy took over the South after the final withdrawal of Union troops. Segregation became the law of most Southern states, reinforced by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, which gave the United States Supreme Court's approval to the rule of Jim Crow. The beginning of the painfully slow dismantling of Plessy did not come about until the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, although it would be another decade until significant desegregation took place in the South.
About the Author
Judith Kelleher Schafer. Professor and Associate Director, Murphy Institute of Political Economy, Tulane University; Visiting Professor of Law, Tulane University School of Law. Ph.D. 1985, M.A. 1978, Tulane University; B.A. 1963, Newcomb College.
Citation
78 Tul. L. Rev. 2317 (2004)