Jim Crow: Selected Resources: Civil Rights/Law

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status, much like their grandparents before them.

The civil rights movement was arguably the most successful social movement in American history. In a provocative new assessment of its success, David Chappell argues that the story of civil rights is not a story of the ultimate triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress. Rather, it is a story of the power of religious tradition.

In Legislating Racism, historian and civil rights scholar Thomas Adams Upchurch offers a pioneering study of the Fifty-first Congress's exhaustive debates and legislative approaches to America's racial problems

In 1985, a black veteran of the civil rights movement offered a bleak vision of a long and troubled struggle. For black men and women, the question is: how free is free? Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. This book probes the story of racial inequality and the fight for freedom in black America.

From a study of the segregation of household consumption to a fresh look at critical elections, from an examination of an unlikely antilynching campaign to an analysis of how miscegenation laws tried to sexualize black political power, these essays about specific southern times and places exemplify the latest trends in historical research.

In this book, Michale 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.