Stolen justice : the struggle for African American voting rights

Author

Lawrence Goldstone

Call Number

• 324.62 G6248 TEEN (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Scholastic Focus, 2020.

Physical Description

xxx, 257 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Audience

Grades 9-12.

Summary

"Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction era raised a new question to those in power in the US: Should African Americans, so many of them former slaves, be granted the right to vote? In a bitter partisan fight over the legislature and Constitution, the answer eventually became yes, though only after two constitutional amendments, two Reconstruction Acts, two Civil Rights Acts, three Enforcement Acts, the impeachment of a president, and an army of occupation. Yet, even that was not enough to ensure that African American voices would be heard, or their lives protected. White supremacists loudly and intentionally prevented black Americans from voting -- and they were willing to kill to do so. In this vivid portrait of the systematic suppression of the African American vote, critically acclaimed author Lawrence Goldstone traces the injustices of the post-Reconstruction era through the eyes of incredible individuals, both heroic and barbaric, and examines the legal cases that made the Supreme Court a partner of white supremacists in the rise of Jim Crow. Though this is a story of America's past, Goldstone brilliantly draws direct links to today's creeping threats to suffrage in this important and, alas, timely book"--

Contents

• Prologue: overthrow
• Who votes?
• Hodgepodge
• Two amendments
• ...and a third: equal rights comes to the ballot box
• Power in black and white: the klan
• To the court
• Any way you slice it: the slaughter-house cases
• Interlude: precedent and politics
• Equality by law: the Civil Rights Act of 1875
• The uncertainty of language: United States v. Reese
• Rutherfraud ascends, but not equal rights
• The court giveth...: Strauder v. West Virginia
• ...and the court taketh away: Virginia v. Rives
• Bad science and big money
• Strangling the constitution: the civil rights cases
• The window cracks open: the curious incident of the Chinese laundry and equal protection
• Corrupt redemption: the 1890 Mississippi constitution
• The crusader: Williams v. Mississippi
• The window slams shut: Giles v. Harris
• Epilogue: stolen justice.