Promises to Keep: African Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights)

This book examines the influence of race in the development of the U.S. Constitution and argues that African Americans have had a powerful influence creating constitutional rights. It examines the debate over slavery in the Revolutionary Era and at the Constitutional Convention, how antislavery advocates, black and white, created constitutional ideas that promoted equality, and their role in ending slavery, securing adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and establishing civil rights protections during Reconstruction. By 1900, southern whites had reversed most of these changes through disfranchisement, segregation, and sharecropping, but African Americans continued to resist. Through organizations like the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People, they challenged segregation, discriminatory criminal justice, lynching, and disfranchisement. After World War II, the civil rights movement triumphed through legal victories (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education), legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act), and mass protest. Civil rights advocates won victories in the 1970s and 1980s challenging institutionalized racism, even though conservative political strength grew. However, from the 1980s to the 2010s, a conservative Supreme Court invoked color-blind constitutional principles to weaken civil rights protections. Continued economic disparities between blacks and whites as well as the war of drugs and mass incarceration undermined gains made by the civil rights movement, although new social movements like Black Lives Matter continued the quest for equal justice--

• | Author: Donald G. Nieman
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: March 13, 2020
• | Number of Pages: 368 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0190071648
• | ISBN-13: 9780190071646