Virtual Library

Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!" 

Here, in a concise, compelling narrative, Bancroft Prize-winning historian James T. Patterson takes readers through the dramatic case and its fifty-year aftermath. A wide range of characters animates the story, from the little-known African-Americans who dared to challenge Jim Crow with lawsuits (at great personal cost); to Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Justice himself; to Earl Warren, who shepherded a fractured Court to a unanimous decision. Others include segregationist politicians like Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon; and controversial Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Most Americans still see Brown as a triumph—but was it? Patterson shrewdly explores the provocative questions that still swirl around the case. Could the Court—or President Eisenhower—have done more to ensure compliance with Brown? Did the decision touch off the modern civil rights movement? How useful are court-ordered busing and affirmative action against racial segregation? To what extent has racial mixing affected the academic achievement of black children? Where indeed do we go from here to realize the expectations of Marshall, Ellison, and others in 1954?

Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.

On January 20, 1942, black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman in her home and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob then hauled Wright out of jail and dragged him through the streets of Sikeston, Missouri, before burning him alive.

Wright's death was, unfortunately, not unique in American history, but what his death meant in the larger context of life in the United States in the twentieth-century is an important and compelling story. After the lynching, the U.S. Justice Department was forced to become involved in civil rights concerns for the first time, provoking a national reaction to violence on the home front at a time when the country was battling for democracy in Europe.

Dominic Capeci unravels the tragic story of Wright's life on several stages, showing how these acts of violence were indicative not only of racial tension but the clash of the traditional and the modern brought about by the war. Capeci draws from a wide range of archival sources and personal interviews with the participants and spectators to draw vivid portraits of Wright, his victims, law-enforcement officials, and members of the lynch mob. He places Wright in the larger context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history during the most important crisis of the twentieth-century.

A study of real accounts of the everyday violence experienced by emancipated African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. Despite the trauma it could incur, many African Americans opted to publicize their experiences by testifying about the violence they endured and witness.

In this evocative and deeply moving study, Kidada E. Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. In the years between Emancipation and the Progressive Era, victims and witnesses verbally described acts of violence to friends, family, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau and members of Congress. For those who could read and write, testimonies appeared in black newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, African Americans and their allies hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence that federal officials and the American people would be inspired to bear witness to their suffering and support their demands for justice. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.

Across Latin America, the 1990s saw an increase in popular lynchings of suspected criminals at the hands of large crowds. Although it is often assumed that these incidents involve random, regrettable, and relatively spontaneous acts of violence or throwbacks to the past, I argue in this article that these represent purposeful, powerful, and deeply political acts. Most literature on the region tends to regard contemporary violence as a predominantly “top-down” phenomenon—by state against citizen, landowner against peasant, mestizo against Indian—yet these incidents reveal a new sort of violence that originates at the bottom. I argue that the lynchings suggest an attempt by embattled communities to reassert their autonomy after decades of repeated assault by state armies, local elites, the globalized economy, and other adversaries. By enacting these highly ritualized, unequivocally public displays of “justice,” marginalized communities seek not only to punish and to deter criminal activity, but perhaps more importantly, to reassert themselves collectively as agents rather than victims. In this way, lynchings may reveal a dark side of what passes for “democracy” in the region.

In recent years, I have been led to think that the juridical - understood in the guise of the judiciary, with its written laws, its tribunals, its judges, and the pronouncement of the sentence in which the law is said - offered the philosopher the opportunity to reflect on the specificity of law, in its proper place, halfway between morality and politics. To give a dramatic turn to the opposition that I am making here between a political philosophy where the question of law is obscured by the fear of the incoercible presence of evil in history, and a philosophy where law is recognized in its specificity not violent, I propose to say that war is the haunting theme of political philosophy, and peace that of the philosophy of law.