(Source: Harvard University Press)
Next month,
Harvard University Press will publish Bruce Ackerman’s third volume of “We the People”. The 3rd volume focuses on the Civil Rights Revolution of
the 20th century in the United States.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Civil Rights
Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman’s sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional
history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. From Rosa
Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I
Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme
Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end
racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution.
Ackerman anchors
his discussion in the landmark statutes of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Act of
1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Challenging conventional legal analysis and arguing instead that constitutional
politics won the day, he describes the complex interactions among branches of
government—and also between government and the ordinary people who participated
in the struggle. He showcases leaders such as Everett Dirksen, Hubert Humphrey,
and Richard Nixon who insisted on real change, not just formal equality, for
blacks and other minorities.
The Civil Rights
Revolution transformed the Constitution, but not through judicial activism or
Article V amendments. The breakthrough was the passage of laws that ended the
institutionalized humiliations of Jim Crow and ensured equal rights at work, in
schools, and in the voting booth. This legislation gained congressional
approval only because of the mobilized support of the American people—and their
principles deserve a central place in the nation’s history. Ackerman’s
arguments are especially important at a time when the Roberts Court is actively
undermining major achievements of America’s Second Reconstruction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Ackerman
is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
Confronting the Twentieth Century
I. Defining the
Canon
1. Are We a
Nation?
2. The Living
Constitution
3. The
Assassin’s Bullet
4. The New Deal
Transformed
5. The Turning
Point
6. Erasure by
Judiciary?
II. Landmarks of
Reconstruction
7. Spheres of
Humiliation
8. Spheres of
Calculation
9. Technocracy
in the Workplace
10. The
Breakthrough of 1968
III. Dilemmas of
Judicial Leadership
11. Brown’s Fate
12. The Switch
in Time
13. Spheres of
Intimacy
14. Betrayal?
Notes
Index
More information
with the
publisher
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