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Shades of Freedom - Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process (Hardcover, New)
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Shades of Freedom - Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process (Hardcover, New)
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Few individuals have had as great an impact on the law--both its
practice and its history--as A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. A winner of
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian
honor, he has distinguished himself over the decades both as a
professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, and
as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals. But Judge
Higginbotham is perhaps best known as an authority on racism in
America: not the least important achievement of his long career has
been In the Matter of Color, the first volume in a monumental
history of race and the American legal process. Published in 1978,
this brilliant book has been hailed as the definitive account of
racism, slavery, and the law in colonial America.
Now, after twenty years, comes the long-awaited sequel. In Shades
of Freedom, Higginbotham provides a magisterial account of the
interaction between the law and racial oppression in America from
colonial times to the present, demonstrating how the one agent that
should have guaranteed equal treatment before the law--the judicial
system--instead played a dominant role in enforcing the inferior
position of blacks. The issue of racial inferiority is central to
this volume, as Higginbotham documents how early white perceptions
of black inferiority slowly became codified into law. Perhaps the
most powerful and insightful writing centers on a pair of famous
Supreme Court cases, which Higginbotham uses to portray race
relations at two vital moments in our history. The Dred Scott
decision of 1857 declared that a slave who had escaped to free
territory must be returned to his slave owner. Chief Justice Roger
Taney, in his notorious opinion for the majority, stated that
blacks were "so inferior that they had no right which the white man
was bound to respect." For Higginbotham, Taney's decision reflects
the extreme state that race relations had reached just before the
Civil War. And after the War and Reconstruction, Higginbotham
reveals, the Courts showed a pervasive reluctance (if not
hostility) toward the goal of full and equal justice for African
Americans, and this was particularly true of the Supreme Court. And
in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which Higginbotham terms "one
of the most catastrophic racial decisions ever rendered," the Court
held that full equality--in schooling or housing, for instance--was
unnecessary as long as there were "separate but equal" facilities.
Higginbotham also documents the eloquent voices that opposed the
openly racist workings of the judicial system, from Reconstruction
Congressman John R. Lynch to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall
Harlan to W. E. B. Du Bois, and he shows that, ironically, it was
the conservative Supreme Court of the 1930s that began the attack
on school segregation, and overturned the convictions of African
Americans in the famous Scottsboro case. But today racial bias
still dominates the nation, Higginbotham concludes, as he shows how
in six recent court cases the public perception of black
inferiority continues to persist.
In Shades of Freedom, a noted scholar and celebrated jurist offers
a work of magnificent scope, insight, and passion. Ranging from the
earliest colonial times to the present, it is a superb work of
history--and a mirror to the American soul.
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