Winner, 2017 Missouri Conference on History Book Award In 1936, Lloyd Gaines’s application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university’s decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. Before he could attend law school, he vanished. This is the first book to focus entirely on the Gaines case and the vital role played by the NAACP and its lawyers—including Charles Houston, known as “the man who killed Jim Crow”—who advanced a concerted strategy to produce political change. Horner and Endersby also discuss the African American newspaper journalists and editors who mobilized popular support for the NAACP’s strategy. This book uncovers an important step toward the broad acceptance of racial segregation as inherently unequal. This is the inaugural volume in the series Studies in Constitutional Democracy, edited by Justin Dyer and Jeffrey Pasley of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

The Hunt v. Arnold decision of 1959 against the state of Georgia marked a watershed moment in the fight against segregation in higher education. Though the Supreme Court declared school segregation illegal in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Georgia was among many southern states that refused to abide by the Court’s ruling. In 1956, the Georgia State College of Business (now Georgia State University) denied admission to nine black applicants. Three of those applicants—lead plaintiff Barbara Pace Hunt, Iris Mae Welch, and Myra Elliott Dinsmore—coordinated with the NAACP and local activists to win a groundbreaking lawsuit against the state of Georgia and its Board of Regents. Hunt v. Arnold became the NAACP’s first federal court victory against segregated education in Georgia, establishing key legal precedents for subsequent litigation against racial discrimination in education. With Ground Crew, Maurice Daniels provides an intimate and detailed account that chronicles a compelling story. Following their litigation against the all-white institution, Hunt, Welch, and Dinsmore confronted hardened resistance and attacks from white supremacists, including inflammatory statements by high-profile political leaders and personal threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Using archival sources, court records, collections of personal papers, news coverage, and oral histories of that era, Daniels explores in depth the plaintiffs’ courageous fight to end segregation at Georgia State. In lucid prose, Daniels sheds light on the vital role of community-based activists, local attorneys, and the NAACP in this forgotten but critical piece of the struggle to end segregation.

Like most of the nation during the 1930s, St. Louis, Missouri, was caught in the stifling grip of the Great Depression. For the next thirty years, the "Gateway City" continued to experience significant urban decline as its population swelled and the area's industries stagnated. Over these decades, many African American citizens in the region found themselves struggling financially and fighting for access to profitable jobs and suitable working conditions. To combat ingrained racism, crippling levels of poverty, and sub-standard living conditions, black women worked together to form a community-based culture of resistance -- fighting for employment, a living wage, dignity, representation, and political leadership. Gateway to Equality investigates black working-class women's struggle for economic justice from the rise of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Author Keona K. Ervin explains that the conditions in twentieth-century St. Louis were uniquely conducive to the rise of this movement since the city's economy was based on light industries that employed women, such as textiles and food processing. As part of the Great Migration, black women migrated to the city at a higher rate than their male counterparts, and labor and black freedom movements relied less on a charismatic, male leadership model. This made it possible for women to emerge as visible and influential leaders in both formal and informal capacities. In this impressive study, Ervin presents a stunning account of the ways in which black working-class women creatively fused racial and economic justice. By illustrating that their politics played an important role in defining urban political agendas, her work sheds light on an unexplored aspect of community activism and illuminates the complexities of the overlapping civil rights and labor movements during the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1946 a young woman named Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1924–1995) was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law because she was African American. The OU law school was an all-white institution in a town where African Americans could work and shop as long as they got out before sundown. But if segregation was entrenched in Norman, so was the determination of black Oklahomans who had survived slavery to stake a claim in the territory. This was the tradition that Ada Lois Sipuel sprang from, a tradition and determination that would sustain her through the slow, tortuous path of litigation to gaining admission to law school. A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education—the first book to tell Fisher’s full story—is at once an inspiring biography and a remarkable chapter in the history of race and civil rights in America. Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley gives us a richly textured picture of the black-and-white world from which Ada Lois Sipuel and her family emerged. Against this Oklahoma background Wattley shows Sipuel (who married Warren Fisher a year before she filed her suit) struggling against a segregated educational system. Her legal battle is situated within the history of civil rights litigation and race-related jurisprudence in the state of Oklahoma and in the nation. Hers was a test case organized by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, as precedent, strike another blow against “separate but equal” public education. Fisher served as both a litigant, with Thurgood Marshall for counsel, and, later, a litigator; both a plaintiff and an advocate for the NAACP; and both a student and, ultimately, a teacher of the very history she had helped to write. In telling Fisher’s story, Wattley also reveals a time and a place undergoing a profound transformation spurred by one courageous woman taking a bold step forward.

2004 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's unanimous decision to end segregation in public schools. 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, moving 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?

Social Identity and the Law: Race, Sexuality and Intersectionality is an important resource for inquiry into the relationship between law and social identity in the contexts of race, sexuality and intersectionality in the United States. The book provides a systematic legal treatment of selected historical and contemporary civil rights and social justice issues in areas affecting African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and LGBTQ persons from a law and politics perspective. It covers topics such as the legal and social construction of social identity, slavery and the rise of Jim Crow, discrimination based on national origin and citizenship, educational equity, voting rights, workplace discrimination, discrimination in private and public spaces, regulation of intimate relationships, marriage and reproductive justice, and criminal justice. Lecturers will benefit from: Fifty-seven excerpted cases accompanied with engaging questions presented at the beginning of each case to stimulate class discussion. An eResource including 129 supplemental case excerpts and case briefs for all excerpted cases appearing in the book. Suggested reading lists at the end of each chapter recommending key articles and books to help students survey the academic literature on the topics. With a logical chapter structure and accessible writing style, this textbook is an essential companion for use on undergraduate courses on American constitutional law, civil liberties and civil rights, social justice, and race and law.

How the 1863 elections in Perry County changed the course of Alabama's role in the Civil War In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry county, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions. English contends Perry County was a relatively tranquil place with a set of extremely influential African American businessmen, clergy, politicians, and other leaders during Reconstruction. Together with egalitarian or opportunistic white citizens, they headed a successful campaign for black agency and biracial cooperation that few counties in Alabama matched. English also illustrates how a significant number of educational institutions, a high density of African American residents, and an unusually organized and informed African American population were essential factors in forming Perry's character. He likewise traces the development of religion in Perry, the nineteenth-century Baptist capital of Alabama, and the emergence of civil rights in Perry, an underemphasized center of activism during the twentieth century. This well-researched and comprehensive volume illuminates Perry County's history from the various perspectives of its black, interracial, and white inhabitants, amplifying their own voices in a novel way. The narrative includes rich personal details about ordinary and affluent people, both free and unfree, creating a distinctive resource that will be useful to scholars as well as a reference that will serve the needs of students and general readers.