Law Commons^™

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

Michelle S Jacobs

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, Professor Johnson …

Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical, Judith Smith

Judith E. Smith

A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II—from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael—Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.

In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive …

Making Sure We Are True To Our Founders: The Association Of The Bar Of The City Of New York, 1970-95, Jeffrey Morris

Jeffrey B. Morris

No abstract provided.

Troubled Waters: Mid-Twentieth Century American Society On "Trial" In The Films Of John Waters, Taunya Lovell Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

In this Article Professor Banks argues that what makes many of filmmaker John Waters early films so subversive is his use of the “white-trash” body—people marginalized by and excluded from conventional white America—as countercultural heroes. He uses the white trash body as a surrogate for talk about race and sexuality in the early 1960s. I argue that in many ways Waters’ critiques of mid-twentieth century American society reflect the societal changes that occurred in the last forty years of that century. These societal changes resulted from the civil rights, gay pride, student, anti-war and women’s movements, all of which used …

Yick Wo Re-Revisited: Nonblack Nonwhites And Fourteenth Amendment History, Thomas W. Joo

Thomas W Joo

The 1886 Supreme Court case Yick Wo v. Hopkins is often viewed as a precursor of the racial civil rights era represented by Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, the case was primarily about economic rights. In a new article, Unexplainable on Grounds of Race: Doubts About Yick Wo, forthcoming in the Illinois Law Review, Professor Gabriel Chin argues that Yick Wo "is not a race case at all." I argue that it is a "race case" because the Court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to vindicate economic rights necessarily entangled economic rights with race--in an ultimately pernicious way. …

Buffalo's "Prophet Of Protest": The Political Leadership And Activism Of Reverend Dr. Bennett W. Smith, Sr., Sherri Wallace

Sherri L. Wallace

Are Asians Black?: The Asian-American Civil Rights Agenda And The Contemporary Significance Of The Black/White Paradigm, Janine Young Kim

Janine Kim