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Brown, Massive Resistance, And The Lawyer's View: A Nashville Story, Daniel Sharfstein
Brown, Massive Resistance, And The Lawyer's View: A Nashville Story, Daniel Sharfstein
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Every grassroots story complicates what we already know, and the history of Cecil Sims and his world48 stands out in at least two important ways. First, Sims's work on issues relating to segregated education predates Brown. In the late 1940s, as Southern states responded to Supreme Court decisions desegregating graduate education, Sims assumed a central role in developing nominally race-neutral proposals that involved a series of complex transactions and legal forms. Just as the Civil Rights Movement began years before Brown and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Sims is emblematic of the segregated South's "long history" of resistance to civil rights. …
The Secret History Of Race In The United States, Daniel J. Sharfstein
The Secret History Of Race In The United States, Daniel J. Sharfstein
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
"Spencer v. Looney" was one of dozens of cases decided in the eras of slavery and segregation that hinged on the question of whether a plaintiff or defendant was white or black. During the past decade, legal historians have begun to excavate these bygone disputes, which involved wills, marriage and divorce, transportation, immigration and naturalization, and libel and slander. With few exceptions, two goals have motivated recent scholarship: proving that race is a social construction and showing how courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped build America's racial infrastructure. This Essay presents a more complex picture of race …