Sublime

“We knew that there was no way in hell we could muster the necessary votes to defeat the civil rights bill, but we thought we could filibuster long enough to get the other side to agree to amendments that would make it less offensive,” is the way Russell’s Georgia colleague, Herman Talmadge, puts it. Johnson refused to compromise. In public, in ans

Color blindness can be admirable, as when a governmental decision maker refuses to give in to local prejudices. But it can be perverse, for example, when it stands in the way of taking account of difference in order to help people in need. An extreme version of color blindness, seen in certain Supreme Court opinions today, holds that it is wrong fo

With the raising of the jury issue, the civil rights battle at once became even more complicated—a tangle now not only of legal and parliamentary complications but of moral complications as well. No longer was all the right clearly on the side of the liberals. Even Hubert Humphrey, who was to stand fast against the amendment because “you could not

Angela Davis (1943–present) spent the next four decades opposing the racial discriminators who learned to hide their intent, denouncing those who promoted end-of-racism fairytales while advocating bipartisan tough-on-crime policies and a prison-industrial complex that engineered the mass incarceration, beatings, and killings of Black people by law

Not only did the protesters distrust his policies, many of them distrusted him. Although some civil rights leaders were now convinced of Lyndon Johnson’s good faith, others were not, for they remembered his record—not the short record but the long one. He had been a Congressman, beginning in 1937, for eleven years, and for eleven years he had voted

The majority opinion, written by Judge Vito Titone, established new criteria—along the lines Rubenstein suggested—for determining what a family is.

colloquy:

Wilbert Tatum, the editor and publisher of the Amsterdam News, tried to explain to Kurtz how, in his view, Sharpton had been cast as “a caricature of black leadership”:

of racial inequities.