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Title details for On Account of Race by Lawrence Goldstone - Available

On Account of Race

The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights

by Lawrence Goldstone
Rhett Samuel Price
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today.
Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and what seemed to be the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so a half million African Americans across the South who had risked their lives and property to be allowed to cast ballots were stricken from voting rolls by white supremacists. This vacuum allowed for the rise of Jim Crow. None of this was done in the shadows—those determined to wrest the vote from black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution.
On Account of Race tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away. It is a warning that the right to vote is fragile and must be carefully guarded and actively preserved lest American democracy perish.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 25, 2020

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781094411859
      • File size: 275572 KB
      • Duration: 09:34:06

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 2, 2020
      The 1965 Voting Rights Act guaranteeing African-Americans “equal access to the ballot” was necessitated by post–Civil War U.S. Supreme Court decisions that allowed “white supremacist” state governments in the South to deny blacks their constitutional rights, according to this lucid legal history. Novelist and historian Goldstone (Stolen Justice) critiques the “sham neutrality” of Supreme Court justices in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases decision undermining the “privileges and immunities” clause of the 14th Amendment; United States v. Reese (1874), which weakened federal protections for black voting rights; and a series of turn-of-the-century cases upholding state laws that required voters to pass literacy tests and pay poll taxes. Due to these and other rulings, African-Americans were unable to prevent state legislatures from passing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. Though the Voting Rights Act “has been widely considered the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation,” Goldstone writes, the court ruled one of its key provisions unconstitutional in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder (2013). He sketches the contours and ramifications of each case skillfully, boldly critiquing the legal reasoning behind the majority opinions. This well-sourced and accessible account makes a convincing case that America’s highest court played a key role in stalling black progress for a century.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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