In this comprehensive overview of how the law has been used to combat racism, author Christopher Waldrep points out that the U.S. government has often promoted discrimination. A veritable history of civil rights, the story is told primarily through a discussion of key legal cases.

"Racial Violence on Trial" also presents 11 key documents gathered together for the first time, from the Supreme court's opinion in "Brown v. Mississippi" to a 1941 newspaper account entitled The South Kills Another Negro, to a 1947 "New Yorker" piece, Opera in Greenville, about a crowd of taxi drivers who...

In 1906 a white lawyer named Dabney Marshall argued a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court demanding the racial integration of juries. He carried out a plan devised by Mississippi's foremost black lawyer of the time: Willis Mollison. Against staggering odds, and with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, he won. How Marshall and his allies were able to force the court to overturn state law and precedent, if only for a brief period, at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court is the subject of "Jury Discrimination," a book that explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on...

Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place.

Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume--such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically)...