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Racial Justice blog
Reconstruction's Black Lawmakers and the Backlash That Ended Their Era How hundreds of Black men won office across the South after the Civil War, what they built, and how violence, fraud and federal retreat drove them out within a generation. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and the Chicago Neighbors Who Won It How a West Side Chicago homemaker and a coalition of block clubs forced Congress to make banks disclose where they lend, then lend where they take deposits. Allen v. Milligan, Alabama's Second Black District and the Ruling of June 2023 The Supreme Court told Alabama in June 2023 to draw a second district where Black voters could elect a candidate. The state refused, and a court-drawn map finally did it. April 25, 2014, the Day Flint Switched Its Water Source How a cost-saving decision made under a state-appointed emergency manager poisoned a Michigan city's water, why the warnings were ignored for 18 months, and what changed afterward. Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington's Organizer Kept Offstage The man who planned the 1963 March on Washington was a gay Quaker pacifist with an arrest record. Here is how he built the march, why he was kept in the background, and what he believed came next. Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Law Signed Five Months Later On March 7, 1965, Alabama troopers beat marchers on a Selma bridge. Five months later the Voting Rights Act was law. How one afternoon became a statute, and what courts have done to it since. Brown Was Decided in 1954, and Making It Real Took Much Longer Brown v. Board ended legal school segregation on paper in 1954. Turning the ruling into integrated classrooms took troops, new laws and decades of local fights. Bryan Stevenson and the Memorial to Lynching Victims in Montgomery How a death penalty lawyer in Alabama came to build a memorial to thousands of lynching victims, and why he insists the history of racial terror and today's prisons belong in one story. California's Reparations Task Force and the Report It Delivered in 2023 What California's first-in-the-nation reparations task force found, what it recommended in its 2023 final report, and why so little of it has become law. College Admissions After the Supreme Court Ended Race-Conscious Policies What the 2023 SFFA decision actually forbids, what colleges may still weigh, what happened to enrollment afterward, and why the essay question and legacy preferences now carry so much weight. Diane Nash and the Nashville Sit-Ins That Desegregated Lunch Counters How a Fisk student's question to Nashville's mayor helped end lunch-counter segregation in 1960, and how the same students kept the Freedom Rides alive the next year. Evanston's Housing Reparations Program and the Lawsuit Against It How an Illinois suburb funded the first local reparations program with cannabis tax money, how its housing grants work, and what the 2024 federal lawsuit argues. Executive Order 9066 and the Immigrants Barred From Citizenship Why the Japanese immigrants imprisoned in 1942 could not have been citizens even if they wanted to be, how the law stripped them of farms first, and how the country finally apologized. Fannie Lou Hamer's Televised Testimony and the 1964 Convention Credentials Fight A Mississippi sharecropper told the Democratic credentials committee what voting had cost her. The president tried to bury it; the party ended up rewriting its rules because of it. Freedom Summer 1964 and the Mississippi Volunteers Who Changed the Rules How a summer of voter registration and Freedom Schools in Mississippi, begun with three murders in Neshoba County, forced the country and the Democratic Party to change their rules. From Bakke to Grutter, the Long Legal Life of Affirmative Action How one justice's solo opinion in 1978 made 'diversity' the legal basis for race-conscious admissions, how that rationale survived for 45 years, and why it was always fragile. George Floyd's Murder and the Police Reform Laws That Followed From a Minneapolis street corner on May 25, 2020, to statehouses and a stalled Senate deal: what changed in American policing law after George Floyd, and what was left by 2026. Guinn v. United States and the 1915 Ruling Against the Grandfather Clause How Oklahoma's 1910 grandfather clause worked, how a young NAACP filed its first Supreme Court brief against it, and why the 1915 victory was followed by a quieter trick that took decades to undo. How the Voting Rights Act's Preclearance Worked Before Shelby County For nearly fifty years, some states needed federal approval before changing a voting rule. How that system worked, why the Supreme Court switched it off in 2013, and what states did next. Ida B. Wells and the Pamphlet That Made Lynching a National Scandal After a mob killed her friend Thomas Moss in 1892, Ida B. Wells counted the dead, published the numbers, lost her press and changed how America saw lynching. Levittown Sold the Postwar Dream and Wrote Black Buyers Out of It Levittown made the suburban house affordable for millions of white veterans while its contracts and federal mortgage rules kept Black families out. The gap it built never closed. Medgar Evers and the NAACP Field Office in Jackson, Mississippi How Medgar Evers built the NAACP's Mississippi operation from one office in Jackson, what he was organizing when he was killed in 1963, and why it took 31 years to convict his killer. Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s and the Citizens Sent Away During the Depression, raids and relief offices pushed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them citizens, out of the US. Mona Hanna-Attisha and the Blood-Lead Data That Exposed Flint A Flint pediatrician compared children's blood tests before and after the city's water switch, went public in 2015, and was attacked by the state until its own numbers proved her right. Prince Edward County Closed Its Schools Rather Than Integrate Them In 1959 a Virginia county stopped funding public schools instead of desegregating them. How massive resistance worked, what five lost years cost Black children, and what repair looked like. Robert Bullard and the Research Behind Dumping in Dixie A 1979 Houston lawsuit needed a sociologist to map the city's garbage dumps. Robert Bullard's answer launched a career, a landmark book and a field of research that still guides policy. Sharon Lavigne, St. James Parish and the Fight Against a Plastics Complex A retired special-education teacher in Louisiana built a faith-based group that took on one of the largest proposed plastics plants in the country. How she did it, and what it teaches organizers. Shelley v. Kraemer and the Racial Covenants Still Written in Old Deeds A Black family bought a St. Louis house in 1945 and was sued by the neighbors. How the 1948 ruling ended court enforcement of racial covenants, and why the words remain in deeds today. The 100-to-1 Crack Disparity and the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 How a 1986 law punished crack cocaine a hundred times more harshly than powder, why the gap fell hardest on Black defendants, and how the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act narrowed it to 18 to 1. The 1924 Immigration Act and the Quotas That Lasted Four Decades How the Johnson-Reed Act used old census numbers and eugenic theory to rank the world's peoples, what it did to refugees in the 1930s, and why it took until 1965 to undo. The 1963 March Was for Jobs and Freedom, and the Jobs Part Still Matters The 1963 March on Washington printed ten demands, including a two-dollar minimum wage and a jobs program. The argument: economic and civil rights were always one program. The 1987 Report That Mapped Toxic Waste by Race In 1987 a church commission published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. How a ZIP-code study turned scattered local fights into national evidence, and why its methods still matter. The 1991 Summit That Wrote the Principles of Environmental Justice In 1991 grassroots leaders adopted 17 principles of environmental justice. What they said, why big green groups were unsettled, how organizers use them. The Black Panther Party's Free Clinics and Its Sickle Cell Campaign In 1971 the Black Panther Party launched a national sickle cell testing campaign from free clinics in cities across the country. What it did and why it matters. The Case for Reparations and the Strongest Objections to It What H.R. 40 would actually do, the strongest arguments against reparations for slavery and its aftermath stated fairly, and how supporters answer each one. The Chinese Exclusion Act and the First Law to Bar a People by Name How the 1882 law that barred Chinese workers built the paperwork, inspectors and court doctrines that still shape American immigration enforcement today. The Elaine Massacre of 1919 and the Sharecroppers' Union Meeting in Arkansas How a meeting of Black cotton farmers who wanted an honest accounting became a massacre in Arkansas, and how their trials changed what due process means. The Fair Housing Act Passed One Week After Dr. King Was Killed Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in the week after Dr. King's assassination, then gave it almost no teeth. How enforcement stayed weak for twenty years and what changed after. The Freedmen's Bureau Schools and the Rush to Learn After Emancipation After the Civil War, freed people, aid societies and a new federal bureau built schools across the South. How that rush to learn seeded public schools and Black colleges. The Little Rock Nine and the Morning at Central High In September 1957 nine Black teenagers tried to enter Little Rock Central High. How a governor, a mob and a president turned a school morning into a test of federal law. The Redlining Maps of the 1930s and the Neighborhoods They Shaped The Home Owners' Loan Corporation colored American neighborhoods red and green. Economists still argue over whether those maps caused decline or recorded it, and why the answer matters. The Social Security Act at Ninety and the Workers It First Left Out Social Security began by leaving out farm and domestic workers, which shut out most Black workers in the South. How that happened, how it was fixed, and who is still left out. The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Wealth That Burned on Greenwood What a white mob destroyed in Tulsa's Greenwood district in 1921, how insurers and the city refused to make it whole, and why the fight for repair has lasted more than a century. The Wilmington Coup of 1898 and an Elected Government Driven Out by Force How an armed white mob overthrew Wilmington, North Carolina's elected biracial government in November 1898, why no one was punished, and what it teaches about protecting elections. Warren County, 1982, and the Protest That Named Environmental Racism In 1982, residents of a mostly Black county in North Carolina lay down in front of trucks carrying PCB-laced soil. How their protest gave a movement its name and its first national evidence. Why an 85-Mile Stretch of the Mississippi Became Known as Cancer Alley How the river towns between Baton Rouge and New Orleans filled with chemical plants, why a 2023 federal lawsuit over one of them was dropped, and what residents still want.