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The Dark Past offers a historical overview and interpretive guide to all the major cases decided by US Supreme Court that have affected the freedom and rights of Black Americans since 1800. It lends coherence to what could otherwise be a disjointed chronicle of cases and connects the events of the past to the current era of racial inequality.
List of contents
- Prologue
- Chapter 1: The Antebellum Court, 1800-1861
- Chapter 2: Reconstruction and the Supreme Court, 1861-1880
- Chapter 3: Redemption, 1880-1900
- Chapter 4: The Nadir and the Blue Hour, 1900-1920
- Chapter 5: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Between the Wars, 1920-1940
- Chapter 6: War and Cold War, 1941-1953
- Chapter 7: The Second Reconstruction, 1954-1971
- Chapter 8: Right Turn, 1960-1980
- Chapter 9: The Resegregation of America's Schools
- Chapter 10: Affirmative Action
- Chapter 11: Redemption Redux, 1972-2015
- Epilogue
About the author
William M. Wiecek is Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, where he was appointed the Congdon Professor of Public Law, with a joint appointment in the history department of the Maxwell School. He is the author of
The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 and
The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886-1937, among other titles.
Summary
The Dark Past offers a historical overview and interpretive guide to all the major cases decided by US Supreme Court that have affected the freedom and rights of Black Americans since 1800. It lends coherence to what could otherwise be a disjointed chronicle of cases and connects the events of the past to the current era of racial inequality.
Additional text
The Dark Past deftly documents how the US Supreme Court has surreptitiously transformed the Constitution's promise of racial equality into a tool that preserves white supremacy by denying the legal relevance of structural discrimination against non-whites. I was surprised by how many new facts and insights I discovered in this engaging narrative, which illuminates the personalities, alliances, and strategies of the Justices in their infamous past decisions and identifies the contemporary echoes of those decisions in the current Court's efforts to ensure that genuine racial equality remains hopelessly out of reach.
