Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in …

The Progressives: Racism And Public Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

American Progressivism inaugurated the beginning of the end of American scientific racism. Its critics have been vocal, however. Progressives have been charged with promotion of eugenics, and thus with mainstreaming practices such as compulsory housing segregation, sterilization of those deemed unfit, and exclusion of immigrants on racial grounds. But if the Progressives were such racists, why is it that since the 1930s Afro-Americans and other people of color have consistently supported self-proclaimed progressive political candidates, and typically by very wide margins?

When examining the Progressives on race, it is critical to distinguish the views that they inherited from those that …

Social Science And Segregation Before Brown, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The courts must bear a heavy share of the burden of American racism. An outpouring of historical scholarship on racism and the American law reveals the outrageous and humiliating extent to which American lawyers, judges, and legislators created, perpetuated, and defended racist American institutions. The law is not autonomous, however, particularly in areas of explicit public policy making. Lawyers did not invent racism. Rather they created racist institutions because society was racist and racism was implicit in its values. The trend in scholarship on the legal history of American racism, however, has been to place most of the blame for …