Law Commons^™

Reform Or Retrenchment: Single Sex Education And The Construction Of Race And Gender, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As parents, policymakers, and educators search for solutions to the crisis in the nation's public schools, single sex education emerges time and again as a promising strategy, particularly for African American students. This article argues that, in order to comprehend fully the implications of single sex schooling in inner city schools, examining the history of sex-based and race-based segregation in education is essential.

History demonstrates that sex and racial segregation in education has supported gender and hierarchies and the attendant subordination of African Americans and white women. For example, when public education became available for Blacks, its primary purpose was …

Resisting Retreat: The Struggle For Equity In Educational Opportunity In The Post-Brown Era, Lia Epperson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Brown And The Desegregation Of Virginia Law Schools, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

One-half century ago, the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional racially segregated public elementary and secondary schools in Brown v. Board of Education. The pathbreaking opinion culminated a three-decade effort that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("NAACP") and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund ("LDF"), an independent litigating entity, had orchestrated. An important feature of the evolving NAACP and LDF tactical approach was to contest the segregation of government-sponsored professional and graduate education, particularly implicating law schools in jurisdictions bordering the South, namely Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. These pioneering attorneys and the …

Comparing Remedies For School Desegregation And Employment Discrimination, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: Ten years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, now a symbol of the beginning of the end of racial discrimination, Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII opened the workplace to all races and women in ways that had not previously existed. While discrimination in the workplace has not disappeared in the forty years since Title VII's enactment, one sees minorities and women in a greater variety of jobs, and at higher levels, than one would have seen a generation ago. The promise of Brown, however, has not been …

Precursors Of Rosa Parks: Maryland Transportation Cases Between The Civil War And The Beginning Of World War I, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

When Rosa Parks refused to move to a seat in the back of the bus in Montgomery, it sparked the boycott and was a critical event in the Civil Rights movement. But Mrs. Parks was the culmination of a long tradition of resistance to segregation. Many teachers, ministers, businessmen and ordinary citizens refused to accept second class treatment on the railways and waterways of Maryland between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, and took their protest to the courts. Facing hostile state courts after the Civil War, African-American plaintiffs needed to access the …

To Be Brown In Brazil: Education And Segregation Latin American Style Colloquium - Relearning Brown: Applying The Lessons Of Brown To The Challenges Of The Twenty-First Century, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

As a scholar who studies civil rights movements from a comparative perspective, the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education1 decision causes me to query the power of Brown as a symbol of equality outside of the United States. Because there is a larger community of African descendants living in Latin America and the Caribbean than there is in the United States, examining the role of Brown in Latin America and the Caribbean is particularly worthwhile. Furthermore, focusing on the Latin American and Caribbean contexts is also relevant due to the significant influence of the …

The Turner Thesis, Black Migration, And The (Misapplied) Immigrant Explanation Of Black Poverty, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

Underlying most debates of racial inequality is the tacit reference to the Immigrant Tale, a story of “natural” class ascension of immigrant groups in the “land of opportunity.” This tale is affirming, celebrating the assimilation of ethnic immigrants in the American “melting pot.” It is also optimistic, implying social integration and economic parity of currently dissipated immigrant communities. “Its thrust is to defend the individualistic view of the American system because it portrays the system as open to those who are willing to work hard and pull themselves over barriers of poverty and discrimination.”

But there is an unsavory element …

Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Under the doctrine of reverse incorporation, generally identified with the Supreme Court's decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, equal protection binds the federal government even though the Equal Protection Clause by its terms is addressed only to states. Since Bolling, however, the courts have almost never granted relief to litigants claiming unconstitutional racial discrimination by the federal government. Courts have periodically found unconstitutional federal discrimination on nonracial grounds such as sex and alienage, and reverse incorporation has also limited the scope of affirmative action. But in the presumed core area of preventing federal discrimination against racial minorities, Boiling has virtually no …

Derechos Y Honra Públicos: Louis Martinet, Plessy Contra Ferguson Y El Acceso A La Ley En Luisiana, 1888-1917, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Rebecca J. Scott explores the historical context of Plessy v. Ferguson to two ends. First, Scott argues that that the historical situation, including everyday legal practice, helps us understand the source of the arguments in the case. In particular, the plaintiffs based their understanding of their rights in the French revolution, the Louisiana Constitution, and their experience exercising their rights through notaries. Second, Scott argues that the plaintiffs and defendants sought to frame the case with different rights. For the plaintiffs, the issue with the Separate Car Act was "public rights" and "the dignity of citizenship." The defendants instead framed …

The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."

The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …