E-Books →The Dark Past The US Supreme Court and African Americans, 1800–2015

The Dark Past offers a historical overview and interpretive guide to all the major cases decided by US Supreme Court that have affected the freedom and rights of Black Americans since 1800. It lends coherence to what could otherwise be a disjointed chronicle of cases and connects the events of the past to the current era of racial inequality-most recently exhibited in the Shelby County v. Holder (2015) decision, which hobbled the Voting Rights Act. Throughout the six hundred volumes of the United States Reports the justices have almost never alluded to the reality of racism or used words that denote it. Only once has the phrase "white supremacy" appeared in an opinion of the Court, and only thirty or so times has a member of the Court referred to "racism." The Dark Past, on the other hand, incorporates structural racism as a principal definition of inequality in the contemporary Black legal experience as it updates and enlarges our understanding of how the legal foundations of inequality structure American society.