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This Note explores the relationship between contractual parties in the credit market, as shaped by debt capitalism, through a brief history of slavery, peonage, and credit/debt legislation. Debt capitalism is a racially exclusionary system — stemming from slavery — in which asset acquisition, facilitated by working to pay debt, (1) is a requirement for inclusion in the economic market, and (2) has a disparate impact on excluding Black Americans from wealth building given their bargaining power position. Over time, debt capitalism shifted from using Black enslaved people as primary sources of labor and collateral to indebting freed Black Americans. Currently, debt capitalism continues to extract labor and interest from Black Americans in particular through different forms of debt peonage. I highlight what I call modern student debt peonage through the story of the Greenes, a couple who filed for bankruptcy and claimed that the U.S. Department of Education owed them reparations in the form of student debt cancellation. By exploring predatory consumer bankruptcy practices and the strengths and weaknesses of the Greenes’ claims in the context of the socio-political and economic subordination of Black Americans by the U.S. government, this Note debunks the idea that a student loan is a valid enforceable contract signed by equal parties. The Note supports policy proposals for student debt relief, such as full debt cancellation, bankruptcy reform, and abolishing the current student debt complex. This Note encourages the use of an alternative framework for negotiating and defining credit relationships, which relies on a more equitable understanding of opportunity. This alternative framework could mobilize debt relief policies that reduce the Black-white wealth gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The murder of George Floyd sparked renewed advocacy around racial justice. However, many Americans responded defensively to the increasingly widespread recognition of systemic racism and police brutality against Black Americans. Backlash to increased calls for racial justice manifested in the passage of anti-critical race theory bills by multiple states, the enactment of the Patriotic Education Commission by President Trump, and other efforts to quell recognition of racial inequality in the United States. These emblematic events demonstrate the consequences of the United States failing to fully acknowledge and atone for its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Drawing from case studies that have implemented transitional justice schemes, this Note argues for the adoption of a responsive, holistic transitional justice scheme by the federal government. Such an approach, this Note contends, will position the United States on a path to achieving lasting justice, reconciliation, and equality. To achieve this end, the Note recommends amending the Constitution, establishing a commission on truth and history, re-examining the way we teach history in schools, and providing reparations. Thus, the Note offers a novel contribution to the literature on reparations and racial justice by demonstrating the efficacy of pairing reparations and a truth and history commission with education policy and constitutional amendments. The path to achieve transitional justice goals in the United States will be a long one, but as this Note demonstrates, this approach presents a viable means of fully achieving these goals. Discussing holistic transitional justice in the United States and developing strategies within this framework lay the first bricks in the path to achieve lasting justice, reconciliation, and equality in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article introduces a novel concept, higher education redress statutes ("HERS"), to illustrate efforts that acknowledge and amend past wrongs towards African Americans. More proximally, the Article shines a probing light on the escalation of HERS in southeastern states that serve as a site for state regulation and monitoring. The Author exposes how higher education redress statutes, designed to provide relief or remedy to Black people for states' higher education's harm, categorically ignore groups of Black people who rightfully should also be members of the statutorily protected class. This Article queries whether legislators can expand the scope of such statutes and reveals the myriad ways in which higher education redress statutes now serve as tools for aiding in the erasure of the higher education industry's culpability and complicity in slavery, degradation, and discrimination toward Black people. As such, this Article shows the growing hostility toward Black people's contribution to the higher education industry and states' unwillingness to offer redress efforts inclusively, broadly, and robustly. This Article serves as a platform for recognizing Black people's harm and hurt and the degree to which that recognition has been undermined by the states' disparate treatment of their humanity. Lastly, this Article proffers recommendations to activists, legislators, and other relevant stakeholders regarding the enforcement and promulgation of more comprehensive and inclusive higher education redress statutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current law enforcement practices--including efforts to address sex trafficking--disproportionately harm Black people. This Article proposes that front-end criminal justice reforms to reduce the criminalization of poverty, reform racially biased police practices, and increase police accountability could mitigate the disparate impact that policing has on Black individuals being sex trafficked. Aligning anti-sex trafficking efforts with criminal justice reform would prioritize the prevention of sex trafficking as well as the protection of people who experience trafficking, while seeking to prosecute traffickers with less collateral harm to Black individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do Black Guns Matter?1 This Article considers what Justice Scalia's opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller tells us about how the law treats Black gun owners' rights. The opinion appears to tell two stories. One elevates white gun holders through three white paradigms: the colonial revolutionary, the frontiersman, and the hunter. The second excludes Black gun holders through repeated citations to instances where Black Americans have been denied the same gun rights extended to white Americans, and through a list of presumptively lawful gun regulations with racial consequences the opinion does not acknowledge. This unequal construction matters because Heller lays the foundation for the modern Second Amendment, and when we then take stock of Black Americans' ability to own and use guns--limited through enforcement of firearm prohibitions from police action to court determinations--Black Americans do not have access to the same scope of gun rights that white Americans do. If Heller is here to stay, then we should recognize this inequality as a problem. The national reckoning around race and police violence in recent years has renewed Americans' focus on guns and made this discussion particularly salient. This Article combines Second Amendment and critical race analysis to highlight a twofold problem: the doctrinal formulation of the Second Amendment and the broader cultural conception of whose gun rights merit protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law students are uniformly taught that.federal circuit courts cannot and will not overrule Supreme Court precedent under any circumstance. This is not true. They can, with little.fear of corrective mechanisms like en bane oversight, Supreme Court review, or congressional override. And in certain circumstances, they are bound to do so by the law of the circuit. Under the prudential law of the circuit doctrine in-circuit precedent binds circuit courts, even in scenarios where conflicting long-standing Supreme Court precedent exists. Circuits can only depart from erroneous circuit precedent ifs later-decided SCOTUS or en bane decision obviates the circuit precedent. This means that if' in the year 2000, a circuit court refuses to obey an on-point Supreme Court precedent decided in 1997, then the circuit precedent, not the Supreme Court precedent, binds all later circuit panels in that circuit until the Supreme Court, or an en bank panel takes up the issue again or until Congress overrides the circuit precedent. However, these fail-sank apparatuses offer little deterrence value. Estimates of an individual panel's risk ofSCOTUS and en bane review are as low as .002% and .008% respectively. In at least one case involving black vote denial plaintiff in the Sixth Circuit, later-decided SCOTUS precedent was insufficient to override the precedential weight of circuit precedent despite irreconcilably conflicting with earlier circuit precedent. Jurists believe the law of the circuit rule to be necessary to prevent intra circuit splits, and to encourage efficiency and robust discussion of an issue between circuits prior to SCOTUS review (otherwise known as percolation). Though intra circuit unity, judicial efficiency, and percolation are valuable prudential concerns, the current interpretation and in some cases the express language of the law of the circuit policy violates established Supreme Court precedent, which forbids lower federal courts from overruling the Supreme Court under any circumstance. Because this concept has become so deeply ingrained in the legal conscience, scholars rarely engage its problematic aspects, allowing it to hide in plain sight. Particularly worrisome is the application Of the law of the circuit to statutory interpretation in the vote denial context: riding that a certain class of plaintiffs lacks an implied private right of action to surfboard vote denial under the Civil Rights Act bars all future Civil Rights Act plaintiffs from judicial recourse under that Act. The law of the circuit compounds this danger because circuit panels are prudentially bound by circuit precedent, even if that precedent conflicts with binding Supreme Court precedent, creating preventable problems that carry grave consequences, In light of the Supreme Court's most recent ruling in Mohorovicic. DNC severely limiting the application of the vote denial provisions Off 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 is emerging as one of the last bulwarks against vote denial. However, should the Sixth Circuit's SCOTUS deviance continue in vigour, we may continue to see further the demise of the remnants of the omnibus civil rights era legislation under girding our enfeebled democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author examines the laws in Florida that allegedly suppress African Americans' right to vote, particularly the provisions of the Florida Statute section 98.0751 mandating felons to pay all their legal financial obligations to regain their voting rights. Also cited is the reason why the U.S. Eleventh Circuit allegedly erred in its ruling reversing a district court's decision stating that the section's poll tax provision violated the 24th constitutional amendment.

Despite the constitutional guaranty of trial by a fair and impartial jury, racial bias has long plagued juries of Black defendants. Although voir dire, the process of questioning potential jurors during jury selection, could help defendants identify racially biased jurors, courts have been largely unwilling to hold that defendants have a right to ask questions about race during voir dire. However, in State v. Crump, the Supreme Court of North Carolina held that Black male defendants involved in shootings with police do have this right. This Recent Development explores that holding and examines its future implications, ultimately arguing that the Crump holding can be used as a powerful tool to confront racial bias in juries. This Recent Development argues that, especially in an era where police brutality is well-known and well-documented, questions about race during voir dire will be most effective when they center on specific instances of racial bias and police brutality. By engaging in a frank conversation with potential jurors about their impressions of police interactions with Black people, attorneys can help secure their clients' constitutional right to an impartial jury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the argument that affirmative action should be utilized in the criminal justice system to ameliorate the disproportionate representation of African Americans in the criminal justice system. Topics covered include a series of proposals modeled after affirmative action to address this reality, affirmative action's larger deterioration as a legal doctrine, and the contemporary abolitionist efforts to solve such racial inequities.

Black people have long faced obstacles when attempting to access the freedom of mobility represented by the "open road." The phenomenon of "Driving While Black" is a manifestation of those obstacles. This Essay posits that the restriction of Black freedom through the racialization of space is the common thread that ties "Driving While Black" to the broader phenomenon of "Living While Black." It examines "Driving While Black" through a lens of spatial structural racism enforced by state-sanctioned police violence in the guise of the pretextual traffic stop and concludes that banning such policing practices is the remedy for "Driving While Black.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Article, written in connection with a symposium honoring Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory's twenty years on the bench, I place Judge Gregory's jurisprudence within the tradition of African-American political thought. I suggest that, at bottom, Judge Gregory has a leveling-up jurisprudence that seeks to interpret the Constitution in a way that ensures the least well-off in society are granted the same rights as the most privileged. This brand of democratic theorizing approximates a mainstream position by Black political theorists optimistically seeking to have the least well-off integrated into a fully equal society. By comparing and contrasting his work with other legal and political thinkers in this tradition, I sketch an example of how Judge Gregory uses his role in the judiciary to help shape an America that lives up to the ideals expressed in its founding documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 election showed the importance of faith in the democratic system and the ability for citizens to cast a ballot for federal, state, and local races. After the election, state legislatures will be redrawing federal, state, and local electoral districts. Those new districts will affect the voting rights of nearly every American. This Note examines Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has traditionally afforded minority group members the opportunity to challenge discriminatory electoral policies that thwart the ability "to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." This is an important avenue that minority group members can seek to remediate biased districting processes. Claims brought by one minority group at a time--such as a Black community suing to be a majority in a newly drawn electoral district after being discriminated against in the district drawing process--have been commonplace for several decades. But given the diversifying country, these standard challenges are becoming insufficient. A newer and more controversial theory pursued by litigants under Section 2 is the "aggregated claim"--which is a joint claim brought by two or more minority groups saying essentially, "We've been discriminated against collectively." This Note asks the question of whether aggregated claims are permitted under Section 2 and argues that they are. In particular, this Note examines the impact of a 2009 Supreme Court case, Bartlett v. Strickland, on the viability of aggregated claims, and makes a novel argument based on statutory interpretation that such claims should be permitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an African American male defendant tries to plea bargain an equitable justice outcome, he finds that the deep-rooted racial bias that casts African American men as dangerous, criminal and animalistic, compromises his justice rights. Plea bargaining has become the preferred process used to secure convictions for upwards of 97 percent of cases because of its efficiency. This efficiency, however, comes at a cost. The structure and process of plea bargaining makes it more likely that the historical racial bias that exists against African American male defendants will taint the negotiation process and justice outcomes. The racial profiling by the police, the presumption of guilt rather than innocence for African American men, the prosecutor's discretion when charging the defendant, and the justice negotiation's speed all contribute to the harsher negotiated sentences that African American male defendants receive compared to white male defendants accused of similar crimes. These racially tainted outcomes threaten the integrity of our justice system, and the core of our democracy. This Article traces the origins of racial bias in plea bargaining by chronicling the historical relationship among three societal developments: slavery, the criminal justice system, and plea bargaining. The Article then explains how plea bargaining's structure, as it exists today, allows these historical racial biases to manifest and fester. Culling from the research of cognitive psychologists, dispute system design scholars, and anti-racism educators, this Article prescribes organizational and procedural reforms to unshackle plea bargaining from racial bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic racism in the United States is pervasive. It runs through every aspect of society, from healthcare to education. Changing all of the parts of society touched by racism is necessary; however, this Article does not provide a cure for systemic racism. It seeks to address a byproduct of this racism: police brutality. Over and over, headlines broadcast the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police--why has nothing changed? This Article argues that meaningful reform requires trust in U.S. law enforcement, which can only be achieved by holding police accountable and deterring misconduct. To do so, this Article proposes reconsidering police licensing to guarantee more thirdparty, unbiased oversight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, "Don't get it twisted--the criminal justice system ain't broke. It's working just the way it's supposed to." This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community's interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about interdicting crime. From its inception in the nineteenth century, organized policing served the social, political, and economic priorities of empowered groups, from supporting Southern agrarian capitalist interests by imposing de facto slavery on emancipated Blacks to bolstering Northern industrialization by oppressing immigrant laborers. Afterward, police forces grew in response not to spikes in gardenvariety crimes but to political campaigns and cultural anxieties. And today, it remains contested whether current policing practices--especially street policing--function to alleviate, rather than exacerbate, crime problems. While policing's crime-reduction success is questionable, one obvious, tremendous success has been its control of race, space, and place. Police draw blue lines around Black neighborhoods--just as banks drew their red lines--designating them as high-risk, pathological spaces. Police use aggressive stop and frisks, intense surveillance, and military-style home raids to keep the people in their spatial and social place. Brutality is the business of policing, reinforced in recruitment, training, and practice. I conclude that because racialized brutality is integral to policing, reformers should not primarily focus on incarcerating specific bad cops who draw headlines. The "bad apple" narrative casts racist violence as individual and deviant, rather than institutional and structural, and undermines the current promising, if glacial, movement toward dismantling policing as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the U.S. Supreme Court's reliance on a theory of the nature of corporations to uphold the Day Law in Berea College v. Kentucky was pretextual. Topics discussed include Berea College's decision to open itself to black students after the end of the Civil War, the enactment of the Day Law in Kentucky in 1904, and the use of a corporate law principle known as the grant theory to resolve the parties' constitutional law dispute.

The article explores how racialized judgments of Black youth, families and communities might impact decisions to impose monetary sanctions in the U.S. Topics discussed include racial history of the juvenile court, intertwined nature of race, poverty and criminalization, and how courts might utilize monetary sanctioning in furtherance of conscious, unconscious or institutional racial biases.

Increasingly, prosecutors have charged rap artists under various true threats statutes based solely on the content of their song lyrics despite artists' First Amendment freedom of speech claims. This Article examines the progression of the true threats j urisprudence and its application to cases involving rap lyrics while also taking a critical look at the barriers Black Americans have faced in attempting to exercise their constitutionally protected right to free speech. Next, this Article contemplates various free speech theories which provide the basis for protecting the types of speech often at issue in rap music cases. Finally, this Article concludes by suggesting that courts should import the third prong of the Miller test, which requires an analysis of "whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." In doing so, courts would strike a more appropriate balance between prosecutors' interests and defendants' First Amendment rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Furman v. Georgia, capital punishment jurisprudence has equipped decisionmakers with increased structure, guidance, and narrowing in death sentencing in an effort to eliminate the arbitrary imposition of death. Yet, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful given the wide discretion built into capital sentencing which allows for prejudice, bias, and racism to persist. Juries continue to sentence a disproportionately high number of defendants who have been convicted of murdering white victims to death. As a result, death sentencing schemes tend to undervalue Black murder victims' lives. Any effort to eliminate the disparity must center on the undervaluation of Black lives. This Article suggests that the next challenge to the death penalty should be on equal protection grounds based on the undervaluation of Black lives. It highlights that the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended, in part, to extend the equal protection of the laws to Black victims of crime. The Article then explores the pitfalls of other race-based challenges to the death penalty. And demonstrates that a challenge based on disparities in capitally prosecuting white and Black victim cases could end capital punishment. The Article concludes with a road map for what a challenge based on the undervaluation of Black lives would look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of felony disenfranchisement in the U.S. Topics discussed include granting felons the right to vote in Iowa; the impact of felony disenfranchisement laws on African Americans; and the enactment of Voting Rights Act for addressing voting discrimination in the country. It also informs on Iowa Supreme Court case Griffin v. Pate on voting rights.

The article examines the constitutional foundation of Black Lives Matter which goes beyond more than racial justice. Topics discussed include the connection between the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Black Lives Matter movement, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to individual states, and the benefits of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment to police officers under disciplinary action.

This article discusses the implications of the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case "Dred Scott v. Sandford," as written by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, on the issues of citizenship, corporations, and race in the U.S. The case raised fundamental questions concerning race relations within U.S. society and the author explores public response to the court's decision.

This article describes a lesson, recommended for grades 4-6, which explores Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass' 45 year relationship as allies, fighting for equal rights for African Americans and women during the 1800s. The lesson features the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Notable Trade Book for Young People award winner, Friends for Freedom: The Story of Susan B. Anthony & Frederick Douglass. Highlighted in the story line are the abolitionist movement, U.S. Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, Ms. Anthony's famous 1872 arrest for voting, and the 13th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Descriptions of historic equal rights challenges and successes, made possible through an unlikely partnership between two activists during the 1800s, extends students' historic knowledge and skills through primary source analysis, interpreting characters and events, Socratic seminar, and monument and memorial study. The lesson's central purpose is to help students actively examine historic U.S. equity issues and civil rights history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay examines the enforcement of morals law in Los Angeles, California, during the mid-20th century. It discusses the concept of sexual liberalization in the areas of legal reform and social science, and how racial inequity in the enforcement of morals laws in the city established a foundation for conflict between African American residents of the city and the city's police force, which resulted in urban unrest, specifically the 1965 riots in the Watts neighborhood.

Following the Civil War Congress passed the Nth amendment to the constitution. It granted citizenship to African Americans and forbade any state government from taking away life, liberty or property of any person without due process of law. However, the amendment bene fited the corporations with little help to black Americans. Each time a state decided to curb the monopoly power of a business, the courts would step in and proclaim that the state flouted the due process clause. This collusion between the government and corporations has contributed to high rates of poverty in America, especially among African American communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his memoirs, Chief Justice Earl Warren singled out the redistricting cases as the most significant decisions of his tenure on the Court.1 A review of the changes redistricting introduced in Georgia supports Warren's assessment. Not only have the obligations to equalize populations across districts and to do so in a racially fair manner transformed the makeup of the state's collegial bodies, Georgia has provided the setting for multiple cases that have defined the requirements to be met when designing districts. Other than the very first adjustments that occurred in the 1960s, changes in Georgia plans had to secure approval from the federal government pursuant to the Voting Rights Act. Also, the first four decades of the Redistricting Revolution occurred with a Democratic legislature and governor in place. Not surprisingly, the partisans in control of redistricting sought to protect their own and as that became difficult they employed more extreme measures. When in the minority, Republicans had no chance to enact plans on their own. Beginning in the 1980s and peaking a decade later, Republicans joined forces with black Democrats to devise alternatives to the proposals of white Democrats. The biracial, bipartisan coalition never had sufficient numbers to enact its ideas. After striking out in the legislature, African-Americans appealed to the U.S. Attorney General alleging that the plans enacted were less favorable to black interests than alternatives offered by the coalition. Every iteration, save for the plans drawn in the 1960s and 2011, bore the marks of what the Department of Justice (DOJ) believed necessary to secure equal treatment of African-Americans. As will become clear in the course of this Article, the DOJ's perspective has changed over time. This Article is arranged chronologically and examines each of the major rounds of redistricting. Aside from adjusting for population shifts, which remain constant, a different concern or theme dominated each round. In the 1960s, Georgia and other states were like individuals who had begun flexing long-ignored muscles as they set about adjusting lines that had gone unchanged for decades. In the 1970s, as the need for redistricting merged with demands from the Voting Rights Act, pushback occurred as it did in the many other aspects of racial interaction as the nation finally began to take seriously its commitment to equality. A decade later, Georgia encountered a DOJ that had precise quantitative goals for what was necessary to provide African-Americans an opportunity to elect their preferences. In the 1990s, DOJ incorporated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into its preclearance reviews and demanded that Georgia enhance the number of majority-black districts and that it maximize the black percentage in those districts. The turn of the new century found the generations-long Democratic control of Georgia slipping away and the majority party pulled out all the stops desperately trying to cling to power. Democratic efforts could not withstand the tide of partisan realignment and court challenges so that in 2011 Republicans sat at the computer terminals and redistricted Georgia. Republicans attempted to maximize their control over the legislature by devising plans that might produce super-majorities with two-thirds of the seats in each chamber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the U.S. repressive measures to contain African American liberation as of 1973. Topics include the surprise attack to exploit the unawareness of the intended targets, the federal government's preparation for war, and the need for the African American population to become an independent power to make wanton aggression by America more costly than it is to end it. Also noted is a possible African American victory if there is planning, execution, and dedication to the cause.

The author discusses the U.S.'s disregard of the human rights of African Americans and of global human rights struggles as of 1980. Topics include the conflicting concerns of some African American gentlemen on human rights violations abroad and of preserving U.S. interests there, the U.S. policy of protecting its control of other nations, and African American assemblies' opposition to it and the war to deny human rights to them. Also noted is the recognition of alliances in a state of war.

In the United States, competency to stand trial (CST) evaluations ensure that criminal defendants are capable of participating in their defenses, thus ensuring an important legal right. However, some research has suggested that the CST process may be impacted by legally irrelevant factors such as a defendant's race and cultural background. However, the majority of researchers examined factors that are predictive of CST recommendations and decisions. Few studies have focused on potential racial discrepancies in attorney referrals for CST evaluations and whether they are exacerbated by professional experience. The current study examined potential racial disparities in referrals for CST evaluations among 322 law students and 102 attorneys. Participants were randomly assigned to read vignettes describing either African American or Caucasian defendants who varied in their fitness to stand trial. The participants were asked to indicate whether they would refer the client for a CST evaluation and to describe their reasoning. The results indicated that both law students and attorneys were generally more likely to refer unfit rather than fit defendants, indicating an understanding of the legal criteria. Law students displayed a racial bias, only when referring the defendants who were unfit due to the lack of a rational understanding of the relevant legal case, χ2(1) = 4.90, p = 0.03, Φ = 0.13. Fitness condition was the only significant predictor of attorney referrals. The generally encouraging results indicated that professional experience did not increase racial biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the changing same struggle against white supremacy in the U.S. He looks back at the struggle of African Americans during the 1960s and the vulnerability of African Americans to police stops, frisks, arrests and killings. Also discussed are the emergence of racism as a technology of power and the creation of social movements to promote the rights of African Americans.

Noting the paucity of research on the racial threat hypothesis in the juvenile courts, this study examined the interplay of defendant characteristics and country-level characteristics on dispositions. Data were retrieved from the Department of Juvenile Justice files in South Carolina and were analyzed using multinomial logistic hierarchical linear modeling. Results revealed support for the racial threat hypothesis, as racial inequity operated in a different manner (more punitively) for Black defendants. Larger Black populations in counties also led to an increased use of punitive sanctions. In addition, concentrated disadvantage effects were found, and heightened levels of teenage population led to higher incarceration rates for Black defendants. Limitations of this study, implications for stakeholders/practitioners, and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its recent slowdown, immigration from Latin America continues to be a controversial issue. Some scholars argue that the social climate is increasingly inhospitable to Latinos, potentially fueling discriminatory attitudes and behaviors. However, little research has examined Latinos' experiences with discrimination, especially variation by nativity and legal status. We address this issue with research on perceived discrimination among Mexican and Central American residents of Los Angeles County, a major destination for Latin American immigrants. Using data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey and the American Community Survey, the analyses consider immigrants’ legal status, intersectionality, and competing perspectives on assimilation. The results show that undocumented immigrants do not report especially high levels of discrimination. Instead, young U.S.-born Latinos are the most likely to report mistreatment in interpersonal and institutional domains. Neighborhood ethnoracial and income diversity also have implications for perceived exposure to different types of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does media exposure to salient criminological events exacerbate racialized perceptions of injustice? We examine whether closely following media coverage of the fatal encounter of George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin moderates racial and ethnic differences in opinion surrounding the event and the U.S. criminal justice system. Our analysis addresses several key aspects of the case: Whether Zimmerman would have been arrested sooner if Martin had been white, whether respondents felt Zimmerman's acquittal was justified, and whether there is racial bias against African Americans in the criminal justice system. Relying on national opinion surveys before and after Zimmerman's trial verdict, our findings support the racial gradient thesis by demonstrating that sustained exposure to racialized framing of the incident in the media affects Hispanics the most and hardens entrenched attitudes among African Americans relative to whites. The analysis supports the continuing relevance of the mass media in attitude formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of African Americans' quest for racial equality and social justice in the Twentieth Century is typically construed in the context of main-line civil rights organizations- e.g., NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and the like. However, for decades, black fraternal networks had been helping to lay the groundwork for the major civil rights campaigns that culminated in the Civil Rights Act o f 1964. In 1938 Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated created the National Non-Partisan Lobby on Civil and Democratic Rights ("NPC"), later renamed the National Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs. It was the first full-time congressional lobby for minority group civil rights. Throughout the organization's life, the NPC worked with a range o f other organizations that sought similar ends. The NPC was dissolved in 1948. In place of the NPC, Alpha Kappa Alpha established the American Council on Human Rights ("ACHR'j with the help of Delta Sigma Theta, Zeta Phi Beta, and Sigma Gamma Rho sororities as well as Alpha Phi Alpha, Phi Beta Sigma, and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternities. From 1948 to 1963 the ACHR employed the collective resources o f its organizations to make recommendations to the United States government concerning civil rights legislation. This piece draws from primary ACHR documents to analyze the organization's history and works as it lead to the passage o f the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 2016 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit case North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory which deals with voter identification laws and the court's determination that certain provisions in North Carolina's 2013 election reform law violate a ban against discriminatory intent under section 2 of the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. State-sanctioned voter disenfranchisement is assessed, along with the legal rights of black (African) Americans.

This article examines Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's "metalanguage of race" as a black feminist legal theory of racism. It demonstrates how Higginbotham's essay exposes racism's far-reaching effects on the construction of other social and power relations by looking primarily at the ways in which the law helped to solidify the power of white supremacy in the United States. I argue that the signal contribution of Higginbotham's essay, its concept of the metalanguage of race, is part of a genealogy of black feminist legal theorizing that recognizes the role of race in determining the meanings of gender. Higginbotham and other black feminist legal thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Pauli Murray have created a black feminist interpretive practice attentive to the contradictions and connections between race and other relations of power and difference. Indeed, the consideration of the contradictions and connections in the courts' understanding of race and gender brings us some of our most prominent and pronounced theorizing of black feminism, especially the concepts of Jane Crow, intersectionality, and metalanguage of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A chief contribution of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's 1992 essay, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," was her insights into the formative role that racialized violence played in constructing gender and sexuality. Black women, she suggested, had no choice but to express their sexual identity and bodily sovereignty in the context of immense violence. While contemporary readers may find these observations unsurprising, twenty-five years ago they anticipated and stimulated new scholarship examining the ways in which black women negotiated violent regimes of containment and an expanding carceral state. This essay reviews some of the literature and draws attention to the ways in which Higginbotham helped inspire a new generation of scholars to consider the policing, imprisonment, and surveillance of African American women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects all citizens from discriminatory state action that is, state action employed against select classes or groups of people, if such government regulation does not past the muster of varying levels of federal court scrutiny. This misleadingly simple legal principle has been used to transform American jurisprudence, securing substantive due process rights for African-Americans, women and the LGBTQ population. While traditional Equal Protection jurisprudence may seem straightforward, varying interpretations put forward by jurists and legal scholars over the years have sought to alter the traditionally rigid formula to allow the Equal Protection Clause to protect the substantive due process rights o f varying groups of people not traditionally recognized by the suspect class categorization. At the same time, municipalities throughout the country have adopted, in whole or part, the Unified Development Ordinance, to govern land use and planning within their municipal borders. However, certain portions o f the UDO have proved to be particularly discriminatory. This problem is especially important to recognize given the changing demographics and poverty levels in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, where discriminatory land-use regulations could drastically curtail the substantive due process rights of the economically disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years 2014 to 2016 likely will go down as a significant if not watershed period in the history of U.S. race relations. Police killing of African Americans has engendered further conversations about race and policing. Yet, in most of the discussions about these tragic deaths, little attention has been paid to a significant dimension of the police violence problem: the legalization of racial profiling in Fourth Amendment law. This legalization of racial profiling is not a sideline or peripheral feature of Fourth Amendment law. It is embedded in the analytical structure of the doctrine in ways that enable police officers to force engagements with African Americans with little or no basis. The frequency of these engagements exposes African Americans not only to the violence of ongoing police surveillance, contact, and social control but also to the violence of serious bodily injury and death. Which is to say, Fourth Amendment law facilitates the space between stopping black people and killing black people. This Article demonstrates precisely how by employing a series of hypotheticals to reveal the ways in which the extraordinary violence police officers often use against African Americans can grow out of the ordinary police interactions Fourth Amendment law empowers police officers to stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - To examine gender and racial differences in known wrongful conviction cases. Methodology/approach - Cases were identified for inclusion in this study through the use of established databases available electronically. Supplemental information was gathered through newspapers, magazines, and direct correspondence with individuals associated with the cases. Findings - Of special significance was the role of witness error in wrongful convictions. Although more prominent in cases involving African American men, witness error was also problematic in murder and manslaughter cases involving African American women. Whereas white women were more likely to be included in wrongful convictions for murder and child abuse, African American women were more likely to be found in wrongful convictions for drugs and property and other offenses. Wrongfully convicted white women were 2.7 times more likely than their African American counterparts to be sentenced to life. Victim race appeared to play a role in a number of the wrongful convictions for both African American men and women. Originality/value - This study expands our knowledge of known wrongful convictions among African Americans, a group that is disproportionately found in the criminal justice data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, black leaders and institutions generally opposed immigration for economic reasons. Today, however, they largely support immigrant rights for reasons of principle and strategy. This article establishes and explores that change over time, using a content analysis of 1413 articles from black newspapers (2000-2013) to evaluate contemporary trends. The results indicate that a shift toward greater support for immigrant rights in the black press culminated in the years after 2007, despite the Great Recession that began in 2008, in which blacks suffered deep losses. This study highlights political factors, as opposed to the conventional economic explanations, as key determinants of the changing public discussion of immigration in black newspapers. It makes a case for further attention to the relationship between Republican resistance to immigrant rights and black support for those rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of Francis Zaccheus Santiago Peregrino is one that has intrigued historians for many years. He represented a direct link between West Africa (Gold Coast, modern Ghana), Britain, the United States and South Africa. Peregrino was a campaigning editor and vocal supporter of black rights in both the United States and southern Africa. He appeared to be the embodiment of the black Atlantic. These qualities have, rightly, been celebrated, but there is another side to the man, which has received only limited attention. He was also someone of ruthless ambition. In New York he was accused of labour-broking practices that replicated slavery. In South Africa he thought nothing of denouncing some of his closest black associates to the white authorities. Peregrino also pursued his private agenda at the cost to the wider African and Coloured communities, threatening them at a critical moment in the formation of the Union of South Africa. This article traces his life in the USA, Britain and southern Africa to reveal Peregrino as a more complex and disturbing figure than has previously been acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public opinion about gay rights is often shaped by egalitarian values. While the extant literature has suggested that African Americans’ value structure tends to be very egalitarian, many popular media accounts as well as some scholarly research indicate that Blacks have, at times, opposed gay rights. We assert that when the media frame gay rights as equality issues, Blacks are more likely to rely on egalitarianism to form their opinions. We use content analysis to show that equality framing of gay rights dramatically increased in 2012, and we use national survey data to show that Blacks’ support for marriage equality also precipitously rose beginning in 2012. Then, we use data from an original framing experiment to show that exposure to an equality frame does, indeed, encourage Blacks to be more reliant on their egalitarian values to form an opinion about same-sex marriage and to be more supportive of the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have found that African Americans are more likely to perceive racial biases in the criminal justice system than are those from other racial groups. There is a limited understanding of how neighborhood social processes affect variation in these perceptions. This study formulates a series of hypotheses focused on whether perceived racial biases in the criminal justice system or perceptions of injustice vary as a function of levels of moral and legal cynicism as well as of adverse police-citizen encounters. These hypotheses are tested with multilevel regression models applied to data from a sample of 689 African Americans located in 39 neighborhoods. Findings from the regression models indicate that the positive association between structural disadvantage and perceptions of injustice is accounted for by moral and legal cynicism. Furthermore, adverse police encounters significantly increase perceptions of injustice; controlling for these encounters reduces the strength of the association between cynicism and injustice perceptions. Finally, the findings reveal that cynicism intensifies the association between adverse police encounters and perceptions of criminal injustice. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for research regarding perceived biases in the criminal justice system and neighborhood social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to understand the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens—who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the United States in the twenty-first century—can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to ask blacks to enact “appropriate” democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison’s meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt’s critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. I suggest that there is a conceptual trap in romantic historical narratives of black activism (especially the civil rights movement) that recast peaceful acquiescence to loss as a form of democratic exemplarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The law largely has overlooked one of the most important sociological developments of the last half century: a sharp decline in residential segregation. In 1970, 80 percent of African Americans would have had to switch neighborhoods for blacks to be spread evenly across the typical metropolitan area. By 2010, this proportion was down to 55 percent and was continuing to fall. Bringing this striking trend (and its causes) to the attention of the legal literature is my initial aim in this Article. My more fundamental goal, though, is to explore what desegregation means for the three bodies of civil rights law--housing discrimination, vote dilution, and school segregation--to which it is tied most closely. I first explain how all three bodies historically relied on segregation. Its perpetuation by housing practices led to disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act. It meant that minority groups were "geographically compact,"as required by the Voting Rights Act. And it contributed to the racially separated schools from which segregative intent was inferred in Brown and its progeny. I then argue that all of these doctrines are disrupted by desegregation. Fair Housing Act plaintiffs cannot win certain disparate impact suits if residential patterns are stably integrated. Nor can claimants under the Voting Rights Act satisfy the statute's geographic compactness requirement. And desegregating homes usually result in desegregating schools, which in turn make illicit intent difficult to infer. Lastly, I offer some tentative thoughts about civil rights law in a less racially separated America. I am most optimistic about the Fair Housing Act. "Integrated and balanced living patterns" are among the statute's aspirations, and it increasingly is achieving them. Conversely, I am most pessimistic about the Voting Rights Act. One of its objectives is minority representation, which is threatened when minorities are politically distinctive but spatially dispersed. And a mixed verdict seems in order for school desegregation law. Rising residential integration eventually should produce rising school integration. But it has not done so yet, and even when it does, this improvement may not reach schools'other racial imbalances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]