From Jim Crow To Civil Rights

Michael J. Klarman

352 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Race, History, and American Society American Constitutional Law and Politics Judicial and Constitutional Studies

Abstract

Abstract Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court𠆘s decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence—vividly captured on television—that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court’s rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 352 citations exist upstream.

Cited by

2012Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–1945 2011CAPITALISM IN THE CLASSICAL AND HIGH LIBERAL TRADITIONS 2020Conceptualising backlash politics: Introduction to a special issue on backlash politics in comparison 2018The Political Context of Social Movements 2019Moral Contagion 2016The Two Faces of Law and Inequality: From Critique to the Promise of Situated, Pragmatic Policy 2007Party Politics or Judicial Independence? The Regime Politics Literature Hits the Law Schools 2011Is the Supreme Court a “Majoritarian” Institution?

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.