Annotation. This analysis of the nearly 300 appealed court cases that decided the "race" of individual Americans may be the most thorough study of the legal history of the U.S. color line yet published.

New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

"Rather than simply engaging in a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement are shunned alike, Disabilities of the Color Line argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed disability as a part of Black social life in varied and complex ways. Sometimes their affirmation of disability serves to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been and are made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and society. Sometimes their assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of commonality and community that comes not only from a recognition of the shared subjection of blackness and disability but also from a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order. Through the work of David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley, Disabilities of the Color Line examines how Black writer-activists have engaged in an aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that show how Black communities have rigorously acknowledged disability as a response to forms of racial injury and in the pursuit of racial and disability justice"--

An examination of the laws of each state regarding civil rights, segregation, interracial marriage and other issues.

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools -- with its emphasis on great men in high places -- to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles -- the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. Revised, updated, and featuring a new after, word by the author, this special twentieth anniversary edition continues Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.

DIVThis ms studies class and race boundaries, and interracial political coalitions, in two significant 19th century social movements--the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement./div

“Heartbreaking and uplifting… a searing book about race and prejudice in America… brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit.”—Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black. In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each. Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Originating as three lectures delivered at the U. of Missouri in April 1992 (just one day after the "not guilty" verdict was returned in the trial of Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King), distinguished historian Franklin reflects on the most tragic and persistent social problem in American history--racism. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In a largely previously untold story, from 1865 to 1950, black litigants throughout the South took on white southerners in civil suits. Drawing on almost a thousand cases, Milewski shows how African Americans negotiated the southern legal system and won suits against whites after the Civil War and before the Civil Rights struggle.

At last a history of Australia in its dynamic global context. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to the mobilisation and mobility of colonial and coloured peoples around the world, self-styled 'white men's countries' in South Africa, North America and Australasia worked in solidarity to exclude those peoples they defined as not-white--including Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Pacific Islanders. Their policies provoked in turn a long international struggle for racial equality. Through a rich cast of characters that includes Alfred Deakin, WEB Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, Lowe Kong Meng, Tokutomi Soho, Jan Smuts and Theodore Roosevelt, leading Australian historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell a gripping story about the circulation of emotions and ideas, books and people in which Australia emerged as a pace-setter in the modern global politics of whiteness. The legacy of the White Australia policy still cases a shadow over relations with the peoples of Africa and Asia, but campaigns for racial equality have created new possibilities for a more just future. Remarkable for the breadth of its research and its engaging narrative, Drawing the Global Colour Line offers a new perspective on the history of human rights and provides compelling and original insight into the international political movements that shaped the twentieth century.