Friday, May 8, 2026

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES (Originally posted on April 24, 2025)

 
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on April 24, 2025):
 
Thursday, April 24, 2025
 
The Fascist and Clearly Anti-Black WAR that the Scumbag-in-Chief and his White Supremacist, Sexist, and Xenophobic Minions, Flunkies, Acolytes, and Fellow Reactionary Apparatchiks in the GOP, MAGA, and Beyond Are Waging And Are Absolutely Intent On Continuing To Destroy This Country No Matter What​
 
​"What's Past is Prologue..."
 
"The most deadly, dangerous, and powerful enemy of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in general, Women in general, the poor in general, the working class in general, children in general, Freedom in general and Democracy in general in American society today is the truly heinous Republican Party and their endless number of severely bigoted and demagogic minions, mentors, sponsors, and supporters. Anyone who doesn't know or believes this blatantly obvious fact is not only a hopeless FOOL but ultimately deserves their "fate.”
—Kofi Natambu, July 15, 2009

"The Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history. 'Has there ever been an organisation in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organised human life on Earth?' Not that I'm aware of."
--Noam Chomsky, April 24, 2017
 
"Trump is not just an ethically dead aberration. Rather, he is the successor of a long line of fascists who shut down public debate, attempt to humiliate their opponents, endorse violence as a response to dissent and criticize any public display of democratic principles. The United States has reached its endpoint with Trump, and his presence should be viewed as a stern warning of the nightmare to come. Trump is not an isolated figure in US politics; he is simply the most visible and popular expression of a number of extremists in the Republican Party who now view democracy as a liability."
--Henry A. Giroux, "Fascism in Donald Trump's United States", December 8, 2015

"Like all fundamentally authoritarian and fascist expressions the political, social, economic, and cultural triumph of sheer hatred, greed, stupidity, cruelty, resentment, corruption, ignorance, paranoia, indifferance, psychosis, sadism, cowardice, hypocrisy, cultism, idolatry, and various forms of racial, gender, and class based violence promoted AS PUBLIC POLICY AND IDEOLOGICAL PLATFORM is what the Scumbag-in-Chief fully embodies and represents, and most importantly is what the great overwhelming majority of his over 63 million voters from 2016 most love, respect, encourage, endorse, and support about their very own national zombie cult "leader”. This is the clear and present danger on both an empirical and existential level that we are all up against and absolutely must defeat and remove from power in 2020 and beyond at all cost.”
—Kofi Natambu, December 22, 2019

 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE 77 MILLION AMERICANS WHO ACTUALLY VOTED FOR A FASCIST FOR PRESIDENT AND THUS A FASCIST GOVERNMENT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN JUSTICE

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TRUTH
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN FACTS
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THE CONSTITUTION
 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THE RULE OF LAW
 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY
 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE MORE THAN 77 MILLION AMERICANS WHO VOTED IN 2024 FOR A FASCIST PRESIDENT AND THUS A FASCIST GOVERNMENT MEANS THAT EVERYTHING THEY STAND FOR, REPRESENT, AND EMBODY IS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THIS SOCIETY AND THE WORLD

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/trump-doj-civil-rights.html
 
Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division Pushes Trump’s Culture War Agenda
 
The head of the division directed its staff to focus on enforcing edicts on transgender women in sports and other issues, shifting from its founding purpose of fighting race-based discrimination.

Listen to this article · 5:08 minutes

Learn more


Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has taken steps to reverse a handful of high-profile Biden-era actions focused on addressing racial discrimination. Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, via Getty Images


by Glenn Thrush
Reporting from Washington
April 18, 2025
New York Times


The head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division has rewritten a mission statement to prioritize enforcement of President Trump’s culture war edicts, including participation of transgender women in sports, in a sharp break from its founding purpose of fighting race-based discrimination.
 
In an email, Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative activist close to the White House who leads the unit, directed the division’s career work force to pursue the president’s agenda, outlined in executive orders and presidential memorandums, or face unspecified consequences. The revised statement encouraged investigations into antisemitism, anti-Christian bias and noncompliance with a range of Trump executive fiats.
 
“The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires the full dedication of this section’s resources, attention and energy to the priorities of the president,” Ms. Dhillon wrote. The memo, obtained by The New York Times, was addressed to the division’s enforcement arm responsible for prohibiting discrimination by recipients of federal funds — nearly every local government entity in the country.
 
In a separate mission statement sent to the division’s voting rights unit, Ms. Dhillon directed department lawyers to root out voter fraud and prosecute undocumented immigrants who tried to vote in U.S. elections. Both are rare events, despite efforts by Trump Republicans, including Ms. Dhillon, to portray them as a major threat to election integrity.

A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

She did not explicitly say she would not open investigations into racial discrimination, but Ms. Dhillon and the interim leadership that preceded her arrival this month have already moved to reverse a handful of high-profile Biden-era actions.

Last week, she nullified a 2022 agreement with an impoverished Alabama county intended to address troubling disparities in the quality of drinking water, infrastructure to protect residents from flooding and sewer systems for Black and white residents.

“The D.O.J. will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, D.E.I. lens,” Ms. Dhillon said in a statement announcing the action last week. “Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”
 
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On March 27, the department’s political leadership repurposed a pivotal tool used to address police violence against minorities — so-called pattern-or-practice investigations — to challenge gun control measures enacted by Los Angeles, which, in the administration’s view, violated residents’ Second Amendment rights.

In her email this week, Ms. Dhillon directed her staff to pursue cases based on seven executive orders dealing with a range of culture war issues, including three addressing transgender women’s participation in sports and another declaring English to be the country’s official language.

The executive branch, as the Justice Department’s “sole client,” had an obligation to “administer and enforce” all directives from the White House without dissent, Ms. Dhillon wrote.

Ms. Dhillon’s marching orders, while expected, represent an abrupt U-turn for a celebrated division that has been at the center of fights for racial equality for decades.

Since its creation in 1957, the division — working closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders during the apex of its influence in the 1960s and ’70s — was instrumental in dismantling Jim Crow segregation, prosecuting crimes against Black people and other minorities, and expanding voting rights.

Its muscle has often grown under Democratic presidents, then waned under Republican administrations. What appears different this time is the determination of Ms. Dhillon, whose law firm supported Mr. Trump’s legal effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, to repurpose its mission to serve the president’s agenda in a more vigorous way, according to current and former department officials.

Much of the division’s leverage comes from a section of the 1964 civil rights law, Title VI, that allows the federal government to withhold funding from localities that violate the constitutional rights of their citizens.

Ms. Dhillon’s shift “fundamentally alters the mission” of the division by pressuring career lawyers to pursue political objectives, said Vanita Gupta, a former head of the unit under President Barack Obama who served as a top Justice Department official in the Biden administration.

“It is highly significant and represents the weaponization of the Justice Department against the very civil rights principles that undergirded Title VI, in pursuit of a highly politicized and anti-civil-rights agenda,” she said in an interview.

Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting from New York.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Justice Department, Joe Biden, Vanita Gupta, Donald Trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/18/justice-department-civil-rights-division-trump


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/18/justice-department-civil-rights-division-trump

Trump administration

Trump ally pushes DOJ unit to shift civil rights focus, new messages show

Internal mission statements from Harmeet Dhillon pivots division’s priorities away from marginalized groups’ rights

by Sam Levine in New York
Fri 18 April 2025
The Guardian (UK)

The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.

The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them give only glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section.

The mission statement for the voting section, for example, barely mentions the Voting Rights Act and instead says the section will focus on preventing voter fraud – which is exceedingly rare – and helping states find noncitizens on their voter rolls (noncitizen voting is also exceedingly rare). The guidance for the Housing and Civil Enforcement section does not make a single mention of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark 1968 civil rights law that has long been a central part of the department’s work.​​

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“It’s absolutely astonishing,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, a former appellate lawyer in the justice department’s civil rights division. “This reflects the complete abdication of the core responsibilities of each of these sections.”

The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision to send new mission statements to the sections is itself unusual. While the priorities of the sections often change from administration to administration, the core work often remains the same and the department’s career attorneys are expected to be apolitical. Trump has moved to end the independence of the justice department and use it as a tool to further his political goals and punish rivals.

“To me, these new mission statements signal a significant change in the priorities that each of these sections will be expected to pursue,” said Jocelyn Samuels, who led the civil rights division from 2013 to 2014. “Some of this is explicit – where, for example, the new statements specifically call out enforcement of some of the president’s executive orders as the guide for the section’s work. Some of it is a matter of omission.

“I suspect that the descriptions don’t themselves dictate what the sections will do, but they certainly manifest the expectations that leadership of the division will impose,” added Samuels, who is currently suing the Trump administration for firing her from her position on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The justice department has already begun to pull back on its civil rights cases. It has withdrawn from several of the voting cases filed under Joe Biden’s administration, terminated an environmental justice settlement on behalf of Black residents in Alabama, and dropped a pay discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a Black lawyer against the Mississippi senate.

The primary focus of the department’s voting section has long been ensuring that voting laws and practices aren’t tainted with discrimination. The new guidance this week shifts that focus and echoes Trump’s rhetoric around fraud.

“The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion,” the new mission statement says. “The Section will work to ensure that only American citizens vote in US federal elections and do so securely. Other section priorities include preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error. All attorneys within the Voting Section will advocate with zeal on behalf of the United States of America in furtherance of all objectives as tasked.”

It also says the voting section will work with the Department of Homeland Security to help states access citizenship data so that they can remove noncitizens from their voter rolls. The section will also “vigorously enforce the statutes, orders, and priorities” in a recent Trump executive order that requires states to require proof of citizenship to vote and to decertify voting machines. Several civil rights groups are already challenging that order in court and say it is illegal.

“What’s missing from here is the idea that we’re going to protect the right to vote on a nondiscriminatory basis,” Samberg-Champion said. “Silly me, I always thought that was the core purpose of the voting section and the core purpose of the Voting Rights Act.”

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and a top official in the civil rights division during the Obama administration, noted that federal law puts certain restrictions in place “before anybody in the federal government, civil rights division included, can lawfully touch state database information”.

Noting that much of the language in the mission statement was broad, Levitt said he would be watching to see how it was implemented.

“Read through the lens of all of the rest that the administration is doing, this is a further example of how off-course the administration is. This isn’t the statement that any administration in the last 68 years would have written,” he said in an email. “But the way this gets cashed out is far more important.”

The new mission statement for the Housing and Civil Enforcement section says the section will focus on protecting the rights of members of the military and enforcing the Religious Land Use And Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which prevents zoning discrimination. “The aggressive and even-handed deployment of RLUIPA to restore religious liberty will be a top priority,” the document says.

The guidance also says the section will “focus on challenges to racially discriminatory lending programs”. Samberg-Champion said that was a “code red”.

“They’re going to look for opportunities to challenge special purpose credit programs and other lending programs that are meant to enhance credit opportunities for people who have been starved of credit historically,” said Samberg-Champion, who served as deputy general counsel for enforcement and fair housing during the Biden administration. “It’s just astonishing that what they’re trying to do is actually diminish the availability of credit for people and go after banks, go after lenders who presumably are trying to make their credit availability fairer.”

Guidance for the educational opportunities section focuses on preventing discrimination against white applicants and cites the supreme court’s 2023 ruling saying that affirmative action programs are unconstitutional. It also says the department will focus on anti-transgender issues.

“This mandate includes protecting the rights of women and girls to unfettered access to programs, facilities, extracurricular activities, and sports or athletic opportunities that exclude males from presence or participation,” the statement reads. “The mandate also includes preventing racial discrimination in school admissions policies and preventing antisemitism in education wherever it is found.”

The new mission statement for the disability rights section appears to have nothing to do with disability. “The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires dedication of the section’s resources, actions, attention, and energy to the priorities and objectives of the President,” the guidance says. It then goes on to list a series of executive orders that target transgender Americans.

Eve Hill, who served as a top lawyer in the civil rights division under the Obama administration, said she wasn’t “overly alarmed” by the message to the disability rights section.

“It’s hard to tell what effect it will have other than preventing [the disability rights section] from working for people with the disability of gender dysphoria. Which is important, but they hadn’t done much work in that space anyway,” she said.

Several of the mission statements include a similar line that says attorneys are expected to enforce the law “faithfully and zealously”.

That language is significant, Samberg-Champion said.

“They’re anticipating – and I think correctly – that they’re going to get considerable pushback from the career staff as to what they’re being asked to do,” he said. “This reflects their understanding that they are radically changing what each of these sections historically has understood its mission to be. And that this is not going to go over well with the people who have made it their life’s work to enforce these important laws.”

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https://www.anativeson.org/p/american-undone-by-its-own-racism

American Undone by Its Own Racism with Prof. Eddie Glaude

A recording from Eddie and THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali's

Guest: Eddie Glaude, Jr.


THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali
 
April 16, 2025
Native Son

VIDEO: To access this video please click on the following link: https://www.anativeson.org/p/american-undone-by-its-own-racism


https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-department-reassigns-about-dozen-civil-rights-attorneys-amid-shakeup-2025-04-22/

US Justice Department reassigns about a dozen civil rights attorneys amid shakeup, say sources

by Sarah N. Lynch and Dan Levine
April 23, 2025
Reuters​

 
​A U.S. Justice Department logo or seal showing Justice Department headquarters, known as "Main Justice," is seen behind the podium in the Department's headquarters briefing room, January 24, 2023. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Summary

--About a dozen senior career Civil Rights Division being reassigned
--Reassignments include working on FOIA and internal discrimination complaints

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is reassigning about a dozen senior career attorneys from its civil rights unit, four people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, as President Donald Trump's administration steers the division away from its historic priorities.

At least three senior career attorneys -- nonpolitical employees who typically remain in their jobs from administration to administration -- who managed offices that investigated abuse by police and handled violations of voting and disability rights, have been ordered to take other assignments, said three of the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss moves that had not been made public.


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The changes are part of a wave of reassignments and resignations affecting at least another nine attorneys, including people who worked on probes of employment or educational discrimination, abuses inside correctional facilities, and voting rights cases, the people said.


Founded in 1957 following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the division initially focused on protecting the voting rights of Black Americans. Over the decades that followed, Congress expanded its responsibilities to include protecting Americans from discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and military status.


The changes are part of a shakeup by Trump's pick to lead the Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. The division has paused probes of alleged police abuse, launched its first investigation into whether Los Angeles violated gun rights laws, and following Trump's lead, changed the department's stance on transgender rights and probed alleged antisemitism at U.S. colleges involving pro-Palestinian protesters.


"When I assumed my duties as Assistant Attorney General, I learned that certain sections in Civil Rights had substantial existing caseloads and backlogs, and that formed the basis of temporary details to assist those sections in getting, and staying, caught up," Dhillon said in a statement to Reuters.


Division employees are also being urged to take advantage of a new wave of deferred resignation offers that were rolled out early last week, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal memos seen by Reuters.


Dhillon said the deferred resignation options are being offered throughout the government and provide a "unique, generous, and voluntary opportunity" for people to pursue their passions elsewhere. She declined to comment on the specific numbers of staff affected by the changes.


The reassignments for the senior attorneys include handling public records requests or adjudicating internal discrimination complaints, the people said.


In emails sent late last week, Dhillon gave each section in the Civil Rights Division a new "mission statement" that she told employees would "define our expectations going forward."


The Educational Opportunities Section, for example, was told that part of its mandate is to protect the rights of girls and women to have "unfettered access" to sports programs "that exclude males from presence or participation," according to an email seen by Reuters.


The Immigrant and Employee Rights Section was told it should investigate companies that "unlawfully discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa workers."


"They are going to eliminate the Civil Rights Division as it was built to exist," one former department employee familiar with the changes told Reuters. "The only purpose now will be to victimize the very people it was created to protect."


Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and Dan Levine in San Francisco; Editing by Scott Malone and Leslie Adler


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Sarah N. Lynch


Thomson Reuters


Sarah N. Lynch is the lead reporter for Reuters covering the U.S. Justice Department out of Washington, D.C. During her time on the beat, she has covered everything from the Mueller report and the use of federal agents to quell protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, to the rampant spread of COVID-19 in prisons and the department's prosecutions following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: This is the REAL Relationship Between 'Race and Class' in American Politics Whether We Honestly Acknowledge and Deal with It Or Not. The Bedrock Reality is that The Central Structural, Institutional, and Systemic Role Of the Ideology of White Supremacy Is Absolutely Never Separate From The Reality of Class Or Gender Or the Content and Expression Of Domestic And Foreign Policy in the United States

The Quietest Coup in American History Is Happening Right Now ft. Elie Mystal | Native Land Pod



Native Land Pod

Premiered 16 hours ago

VIDEO: 

Native Land Pod

On episode 130 of Native Land Pod, hosts Angela Rye, Andrew Gillum, and Bakari Sellers are joined by guest Elie Mystal. Elie Mystal is an author, commentator, and the justice correspondent for The Nation. His fiery prose on the Supreme Court and legal issues writ large are unmatched, and in a seismic week for voting rights America, it’s a good time to welcome Elie home. The Supreme Court has fast-tracked their recent ruling which gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. They are allowing Southern states to change their electoral maps BEFORE the midterm elections, which will almost certainly dilute Black voting power.


Our SCOTUS expert, Elie Mystal, weighs in. FOR YOUR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: 1. Primary Results in Ohio and Indiana test President Trump’s influence on Republican Primaries. 2. The Detroit News caught a Michigan Senate candidate calling for intimidation at Detroit polling precincts. 3. Trump’s Medicaid cuts are becoming a reality in Nebraska, where they went into effect on May 1st. It will be the first test of how many people lose their insurance due to new work requirements. 4. Trump Praises the Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, and says that he almost won the Civil War. 5. South Carolina State University rescinded an invitation to SC’s Lt. Governor Pamela Evette to speak at graduation. In response, South Carolina Republican officials threatened to pull SCSU’s funding. 6. On Sunday, a federal judge reinstated New Orleans Court Clerk, Calvin Duncan. But then Louisiana won an appeal with the 5th US Circuit Court to keep Duncan out of office… for now. Calvin Duncan was democratically elected, winning 68% of the vote. 
 
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https://www.democracydocket.com/news-...


Bakari on SCSU v. the Lt. Governor
 
If you’d like to submit a question, check out our tutorial video: / c5j_obxlig0 and send to @nativelandpod. We are 180 days away from the midterm elections. Welcome home y’all!


Contents: 00:00:00

Start 00:02:30

FYSA Headlines 00:18:00

NOLA Court Clerk Gets Un-Elected 00:29:45

SCOTUS Redistricting Update w/Elie Mystal 00:55:15 Tennessee Redistricting 01:12:10


Watch full episodes of Native Land Pod here on YouTube. Native Land Pod is brought to you by Reasoned Choice Media. Thank you to the Native Land Pod team: Angela Rye as host, executive producer, and cofounder of Reasoned Choice Media; Andrew Gillum as host and producer, Bakari Sellers as host and producer, and Lauren Hansen as executive producer


FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Outstanding Political Journalist, Social Theorist, Critic, Historian, Author, and Activist Jamelle Bouie On the Real Meaning and Stark Implications Of the Destruction of the Voting Rights Act Imposed by the utterly corrupt and oppressive White Supremacist Edict of the Most Reactionary Right Wing Supreme Court in the United States Since the Civil War era

Jamelle Bouie: The Supreme Court Is Corrupt | The Moment

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Supreme Court's Deadly Role in the Present Ongoing Constitutional Crisis Generated And Enforced by the Administration of the New Fascist State As Defined by the Donald Trump and Elon Musk Regime and the Necessary Historical Critique of These Dictatorial Structural and Institutional Traditions by Such Major and Legendary Black Lawyers, Judges, Activists and Scholars As Charles Hamilton Houston and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

 
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-supreme-courts-deadly-role-in.html 

FROM THE PANOPTICON ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on February 24, 2025):

Monday, February 24, 2025

The Supreme Court's Deadly Role in the Present Ongoing Constitutional Crisis Generated And Enforced by the Administration of the New Fascist State As Defined by the Donald Trump and Elon Musk Regime and the Necessary Historical Critique of These Dictatorial Structural and Institutional Traditions by Such Major and Legendary Black Lawyers, Judges, Activists and Scholars As Charles Hamilton Houston and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall 


https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2026/05/important-new-books.html

“WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE…”

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2012/12/statement-on-founding-fathers-slavery.html 

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on December 5, 2012):


Wednesday, December 5, 2012


STATEMENT ON THE 'FOUNDING FATHERS', SLAVERY, AND THE U.S. CONSTITUTION BY THE LATE, GREAT THURGOOD MARSHALL (1908--1993)


Thurgood Marshall in 1936 after he joined the NAACP.

"I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever "fixed" at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

For a sense of the evolving nature of the Constitution we need look no further than the first three words of the document's preamble: 'We the People." When the Founding Fathers used this phrase in 1787, they did not have in mind the majority of America's citizens. "We the People" included, in the words of the Framers, "the whole Number of free Persons." On a matter so basic as the right to vote, for example, Negro slaves were excluded, although they were counted for representational purposes at threefifths each. Women did not gain the right to vote for over a hundred and thirty years.

These omissions were intentional. The record of the Framers' debates on the slave question is especially clear: The Southern States acceded to the demands of the New England States for giving Congress broad power to regulate commerce, in exchange for the right to continue the slave trade. The economic interests of the regions coalesced: New Englanders engaged in the "carrying trade" would profit from transporting slaves from Africa as well as goods produced in America by slave labor. The perpetuation of slavery ensured the primary source of wealth in the Southern States."

Despite this clear understanding of the role slavery would play in the new republic, use of the words "slaves" and "slavery" was carefully avoided in the original document. Political representation in the lower House of Congress was to be based on the population of "free Persons" in each State, plus threefifths of all "other Persons." Moral principles against slavery, for those who had them, were compromised, with no explanation of the conflicting principles for which the American Revolutionary War had ostensibly been fought: the selfevident truths "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

--Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1908-1993, Remarks delivered in speech on the "Framers/Founding Fathers", the U.S. Constitution, and Slavery" on May 6, 1987 in Maui, Hawaii

THURGOOD MARSHALL (1908-1993)

Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Thurgood Marshall was the grandson of a slave. His father, William Marshall, instilled in him from youth an appreciation for the United States Constitution and the rule of law. After completing high school in 1925, Thurgood followed his brother, William Aubrey Marshall, at the historically black Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

His classmates at Lincoln included a distinguished group of future Black leaders such as the poet and author Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician Cab Calloway. Just before graduation, he married his first wife, Vivian “Buster” Burey. Their twenty-five year marriage ended with her death from cancer in 1955.

In 1930, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied admission because he was Black. This was an event that was to haunt him and direct his future professional life. Thurgood sought admission and was accepted at the Howard University Law School that same year and came under the immediate influence of the dynamic new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, who instilled in all of his students the desire to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans.

Paramount in Houston’s outlook was the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson which established the legal doctrine called, “separate but equal.” Marshall’s first major court case came in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray. Applauding Marshall’s victory, author H.L. Mencken wrote that the decision of denial by the University of Maryland Law School was “brutal and absurd,” and they should not object to the “presence among them of a self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college.”

Thurgood Marshall followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston to New York and later became Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During this period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of Ghana and what is now Tanzania. It was felt that the person who so successfully fought for the rights of America’s oppressed minority would be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the White citizens in these two former European colonies. After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues. Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, “none of his (Marshall’s) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court.” In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Indeed, Thurgood Marshall represented and won more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other American.

Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall established a record for supporting the voiceless American. Having honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall leaves a legacy that expands that early sensitivity to include all of America’s voiceless. Justice Marshall died on January 24, 1993.

Posted by Kofi Natambu at 9:41 AM

 
Labels: 1787, Constitutional Law, Critical theory, Declaration of Independence, Founding Fathers, Law and Ideology, Slavery, The Framers, The Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall

https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/charles-hamilton-houston

 
NAACP History: Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950)


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Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895-April 22, 1950) was a legendary black lawyer and teacher who helped play a major role in dismantling the national Jim Crow laws and helped train and mentor future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow”, he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston’s brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine (from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education in the United States was the master stroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.

“This fight for equality of educational opportunity (was) not an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie in together and support one another. . .We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Houston prepared for college at Dunbar High School in Washington, then matriculated to Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1915.

From 1915 to 1917, Houston taught English at Howard University. From 1917 to 1919, he was a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. Houston later wrote:

“The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”

In the fall of 1919, he entered Harvard Law School, earning his Bachelor of Laws degree 1922 and his Doctor of Laws degree in 1923. In 1922, he became the first African American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.


After studying at the University of Madrid in 1924, Houston was admitted to the District of Columbia bar that same year and joined forces with his father in practicing law. Beginning in the 1930s, Houston served as the first special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and therefore was involved with the majority of civil rights cases from then until his death on April 22, 1950.

He later joined Howard Law School’s faculty, establishing a long-standing relationship between Howard and Harvard law schools. While at Howard, he was a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education and was later appointed to the Supreme Court.

Houston used his post at Howard to recruit talented students into the NAACP’s legal efforts (among them Marshall and Oliver Hill, the first- and second-ranked students in the class of 1933, both of whom were drafted into organization’s legal battles by Houston).

By the mid-1930s, two separate anti-lynching bills backed by the NAACP had failed to gain passage, and the organization had won a landmark victory against restrictive housing covenants that excluded blacks from particular neighborhoods only to see the achievement undermined by subsequent legal precedents.

Houston struck upon the idea that unequal education was the Achilles heel of Jim Crow. By demonstrating the failure of states to even try to live up to the 1896 rule of “separate but equal,” Houston hoped to finally overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had given birth to that phrase.

His target was broad, but the evidence was numerous. Southern states collectively spent less than half of what was allotted for white students on education for blacks; there were even greater disparities in individual school districts. Black schools were equipped with castoff supplies from white ones and built with inferior materials. Black facilities appeared to be part of a crude segregationist satire – a design to make black education a contradiction in terms.

Houston designed a strategy of attacking segregation in law schools – forcing states to either create costly parallel law schools or integrate the existing ones. The strategy had hidden benefits: since law students were predominantly male, Houston sought to neutralize the age-old argument that allowing blacks to attend white institutions would lead to miscegenation, or “race-mixing”. He also reasoned that judges deciding the cases might be more sympathetic to plaintiffs who were pursuing careers in law. Finally, by challenging segregation in graduate schools, the NAACP lawyers would bypass the inflammatory issue of miscegenation among young children.

The successful ruling handed down in the Brown decision was testament to the master strategy formulated by Houston.

Houston was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.

Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1950 and, in 1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His importance became more broadly known through the success of Thurgood Marshall and after the 1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil’s Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.


Houston is the namesake of the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, which opened in the fall of 2005. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him.

Related Articles:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_houst.html
http://www.charleshamiltonhouston.org



29 December 2008

Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow

Skilled litigator and legal educator launches the assault on segregation


The skilled litigator and legal educator Charles Hamilton Houston launched the legal assault on “Jim Crow” laws.

This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).

Charles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. A brilliant student, he graduated as a valedictorian from Amherst College at the age of 19, then served in a segregated U.S. Army unit during the First World War. After his brush with racism in the Army, Houston determined to make the fight for civil rights his life’s calling. Returning home, he studied law at Harvard University, becoming the first African-American editor of its prestigious law review. He would go on to earn a PhD in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor of civil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain.

Houston believed that an attorney’s proper vocation was to wield the law as an instrument for securing justice. “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society,” he argued. In 1924, Houston began teaching part time at Howard University Law School, the Washington, D.C. institution responsible by some accounts for training fully three-fourths of the African-American attorneys then practicing. By 1929, Houston headed the law school.


PHOTO:  Thurgood Marshall (left) and Houston (center), with Donald Gaines Murray, plaintiff in a key civil rights case.

In just six years, Houston radically improved the education of African-American law students, earned full accreditation for the school, and produced a group of lawyers trained in civil rights law. In the book Black Profiles, George R. Metcalf writes that Houston took the job to turn Howard into “a West Point [a popular name for the United States Military Academy] of Negro leadership, so that Negroes could gain equality by fighting segregation in the courts.”

Meanwhile, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was laying the groundwork for a legal challenge to the separate-but-equal doctrine approved in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision. On Houston’s recommendation, the organization engaged former U.S. Attorney Nathan Ross Margold to study the practical workings of separate but equal in the South. Margold’s report — 218 legal-sized-pages long — was completed in 1931. It documented woeful inequality in state expenditures between white and black segregated schools.

In 1934, Houston accepted the position of NAACP special counsel. He surrounded himself with a select group of young, mostly Howard-trained lawyers, among them James Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, A. Leon Higginbotham, Robert Carter, William Hastie, George E.C. Hayes, Jack Greenberg, and Oliver Hill. With his young protégé Thurgood Marshall often in tow, Houston began to tour the South, armed with a camera and a portable typewriter. Marshall later recalled that he and Houston traveled in Houston’s car: “There was no place to eat, no place to sleep. We slept in the car and we ate fruit.” This could be dangerous work, but the visual record Houston compiled and the data amassed by Margold would anchor a new legal strategy: If the facilities allocated to blacks were not equal to those afforded whites, Houston reasoned, segregationist states were not meeting even the Plessy standard. Separate but equal logically required those states either to improve drastically the black facilities, a hugely expensive undertaking, or else integrate.

This equalization strategy bore fruit in 1935, when Houston and Marshall prevailed in a Maryland case, Murray v. Pearson. The African-American plaintiff challenged his rejection by the segregated University of Maryland law school. The university’s lawyers argued that the school met the separate but equal requirement by granting qualified black applicants scholarships to enroll at out-of-state law schools. The state courts rejected this argument. While they were not yet prepared to rule against segregated public schools, they did hold that Maryland’s out-of-state option was not an equal opportunity. Maryland’s law school was ordered to admit qualified African-American students. The triumph was especially sweet for Marshall, who numbered himself among the qualified blacks rejected by the school.

Houston retired from the NAACP in 1940 because of ill health, and he died in 1950. “We owe it all to Charlie,” Marshall later remarked. While Houston’s prize student would lead the final legal assault on segregation, it was Houston, the teacher, who devised the strategy and illuminated the path.
 


Charles Hamilton Houston

The first general counsel of NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston exposed the hollowness of the "separate but equal" doctrine and paved the way for the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation. The legal brilliance used to undercut the "separate but equal" principle and champion other civil rights cases earned Houston the moniker "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow."

"This fight for equality of educational opportunity (was) an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie in together and support one another. . .We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might."

Early years

Houston's experience in the racially segregated U.S. Army, where he served as a First Lieutenant in World War I in France, made him determined to study law and use his time "fighting for men who could not strike back."

"The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back."

Houston returned to the U.S. in 1919 and entered Harvard Law School, becoming the first Black student to be elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating from Harvard with a Doctor of Laws degree in 1923 and studying at the University of Madrid in 1924, Houston was admitted to the District of Columbia bar and joined forces with his father in practicing law.

Later, as dean of the Howard University Law School, Houston expanded the part-time program into a full-time curriculum. He also mentored a generation of young Black lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become a United States Supreme Court justice.

Houston's stroke of genius

Houston left Howard University to serve as the first general counsel He played a pivotal role in nearly every Supreme Court civil rights case in the two decades before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Houston worked tirelessly to fight against Jim Crow laws that prevented Blacks from serving on juries and accessing housing.

However, it was in the fight against school segregation that Houston came up with the clever argument that would make him famous. His ingenious legal strategy was to end school segregation by unmasking the belief that facilities for Blacks were "separate but equal" for the lie it was.

In a 1938 Supreme Court case concerning the admission of a Black man to the University of Missouri, Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for the state to bar Blacks from admission since there was no "separate but equal" facility. At the time, Southern states collectively spent less than half of what was allotted for white students on education for Blacks. Houston's intention was to make it too expensive for facilities to remain separate.

His ingenious legal strategy was to end school segregation by unmasking the belief that facilities for Blacks were "separate but equal" for the lie it was. Houston's shrewd strategy worked, effectively paving the way for desegregation.

While not rejecting the premise of "separate but equal" facilities, the Supreme Court ruled that Black students could be admitted to a white school if there was only one school. Houston's shrewd strategy worked, effectively paving the way for desegregation.

Houston's legacy

Sadly, Houston would not live to see segregation declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. He died in 1950 from a heart attack.

Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1950 and the main building of the Howard University School of Law was named Charles Hamilton Houston Hall in 1958. Harvard Law School named a professorship after him and in 2005, opened the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.






IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Backtalker: An American Memoir
by
 
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw 
Simon & Schuster, 2026

[Publication date: May 5, 2026]
 Backtalker bookcover
One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas.

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.

Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.

In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America—at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.



REVIEWS:

"Backtalker charts Crenshaw’s extraordinary journey from precocious child to renowned public intellectual. . . . A rousing call to see the story of the future as one in which ‘the spirit of freedom was nurtured by talking back.’” -- Colin Grant ― The New York Times

"[Crenshaw] frames her life and her remarkably influential career as one long fight against various forms of exclusion and unfairness. . . . The reasonable conclusions of a clear-eyed intellectual who simply refused to shut up about what she witnessed and experienced." -- Kelefa Sanneh ― The New Yorker

“A beautifully written, compelling and insightful memoir from the extraordinary intellectual, activist and scholar who has shaped critical discourse in America. A moving and powerful read.”—Bryan Stevenson

“A searing, defiant and deeply inspiring memoir for our times from one of America's greatest architects of justice.”—V (formerly Eve Ensler)

“It is rare that creators of movements that shake the world use the memoir form to honestly and precisely explore how their will to change was created. Kimberle Crenshaw has made a fleshy piece of theory, a foundational book for this nation, a moving memoir that will continue to build on the monumental work Crenshaw has already done. We will thankfully be feeling the work of this book for generations.”—Kiese Laymon

“Kimberlé Crenshaw is one of America’s most original legal thinkers, a pioneering theorist whose scholarship has transformed the way we think about race, gender, and the law. Now in Backtalker, her powerful new memoir, she reminds us of the greatest teacher of all: experience. Here is a compelling account of the making not only of a visionary mind on the front lines of change, but of the ‘we’ that binds us to one another in families, communities, and in the nation as a whole.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“Her ideas have shaped generations of thinkers and activists globally. Now, with Backtalker, we come to understand the people and contexts that have given shape to Kimberlé Crenshaw, her values and her sensibilities. This in-depth self-portrait reveals a woman of great depth, courage, and conviction—a truth teller and justice seeker. It is a tale as unique and compelling as its author, a much needed story for our times and beyond.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms., hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, and has appeared as a commentator on media outlets including MSNBC and NPR.

Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights
 
by Lisa Graves
Bold Type Books, 2025


[Publication date: September 30, 2025]
 
In the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.

Without Precedent explodes the falsehood that Roberts is a fair-minded institutionalist who works to blunt the worst impulses of other Republican appointees to the court when, in fact, he has led the rightward transformation of the court’s jurisprudence while presiding over the most corrupt and corrupted Supreme Court in American history.

Informed by Lisa Graves’s experience working on judicial issues for all three branches of the federal government, and based on years of intensive research, Without Precedent not only exposes Roberts as the reactionary politician in robes he has always been but delivers a vigorous plan of judicial reform designed to overcome the divisive, discriminatory, destructive, and anti-democratic machinations of the Roberts court.
 

REVIEWS:

“A brilliant explanation of how conservative big money and a long-term strategy changed American politics, and a detailed account of the way political conservatives, inside and outside government, have shaped the Supreme Court and other federal courts since 1991.”―Los Angeles Review of Books

“Graves writes clearly and with a clear sense of outrage at what the Supreme Court has become under Roberts’s stewardship.”―Times Literary Supplement

“A well-researched, cogently analyzed, and eye-opening chronicle of Roberts and his seemingly compromised Supreme Court.”―Booklist (starred)

“A captivating cri de coeur from an up-close spectator to U.S. democracy’s downward spiral.”―Publishers Weekly (starred)

“A vigorous takedown of the chief justice of the United States.”―Kirkus

“Lisa Graves is a dazzlingly brilliant sleuth of the dark-money apparatus that has corrupted the Supreme Court. Graves’ Without Precedent reveals how Chief Justice Roberts and the other right-wing justices mangled the Constitution in service to a group of shadowy billionaire extremists.”―Sheldon Whitehouse, U.S. Senator, Rhode Island

“A devastating, passionate takedown of Chief Justice John Roberts's Supreme Court by a Washington insider, progressive activist, and eyewitness to Roberts' rise to power. As a top Democratic lawyer to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lisa Graves was 'in the room where it happened,' for many of the most hard-fought battles over America's highest court. Now she tells the inside story. Anyone concerned about justice in America should read it.”―Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, Chief Washington Correspondent, The New Yorker Magazine

“No one combines legal expertise and peerless investigative talent like the brilliant and brave Lisa Graves, who proves beyond reasonable doubt that Justice John Roberts has acted as a political animal throughout his career. An eye-popping can’t-put-it-down account, Without Precedent is a must-read for everyone who knows something has gone terribly wrong with the U.S. Supreme Court yet doesn’t understand why. I had to remind myself to breathe while reading this tour de force about the near ruin of our country that Roberts and his Federalist Society supermajority have wrought.”―Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Lisa Graves is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the right-wing influence on the US Supreme Court and other levers of power. She leads True North Research and co-hosts Legal AF. She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government, including as chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Patrick Leahy. She resides in Superior, Wisconsin.

The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader
by Melissa Murray
37 Ink, 2026
 
[Publication date: May 5, 2026]
 
From a #1 New York Times bestselling author, podcast host,and legal expertcomes an accessible and modern guide on how to read and understand the U.S. Constitution.

Think of this as the U.S. Constitution explained by America’s favorite law professor, Melissa Murray. On her podcast, Strict Scrutiny, Murray and her cohosts, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, provide in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities.

On that podcast, on MSNOW—where she is a frequent contributor—in opinion pieces, and when providing commentary as she did in a recent New York Times piece on Justice Brown Jackson, Murray spends an awful lot of time demystifying laws for everyone else. In this book, she tackles one of the founding American documents: the Constitution. Each amendment will be annotated with some historical context provided, as well as examples of how it is relevant to our present day.

More necessary than ever, as we look to the Supreme Court and their interpretation of the Constitution as the last institution upholding our democracy, this book is an indispensable read for every thinking American.

REVIEWS:

"At long last, we have an annotated and explanatory guide to our Constitution that ordinary people, lawyers, and democracy advocates can understand. Constitutional law scholar Melissa Murray does the hard work of distilling the meaning of our Constitution into a book that should be in every home library, on every desk, and in every school. This is a critical work for our time."—Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel Emeritus, The Legal Defense Fund

"With this timely and readable annotated Constitution, Prof. Melissa Murray has yet again done what she does best: Locating current disputes over constitutional powers, authority and limits within her expansive knowledge of history, caselaw, legal movements and daily headlines. Equal parts legal doctrine and owners manual, this deep dive into the founding documents serves as a vital reminder that it is emphatically the province of the people to know what the law is, so that they can defend it and also build it to serve its highest purposes."—Dahlia Lithwick, author of the New York Times bestseller Lady Justice and host of Amicus

"Murray is without peer in her ability to translate the law to a general audience. With this book, Murray convincingly and succinctly explains how under the Constitution, the people are supreme and empowers us all to claim the Constitution as our own, to hold the government to account, and to continue the Constitution's project of becoming a more perfect Union."—Leah Litman, author of the New York Times bestseller Lawless

"Murray does so much more than annotate the Constitution, she illuminates it, and in the process exposes its dark secrets and hidden myths. She tells us not only what the Constitution says, but what it really means."—Elie Mystal, Justice Correspondent for The Nation Magazine


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University’s School of Law. She is the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary, cohost of a top-ranked podcast, Strict Scrutiny—which is about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it—and a regular commentator on MSNBC. Her writing appears regularly in major national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The Nation. She is frequently called upon by national media outlets such as NPR and PBS to offer expert—yet accessible—commentary on the Supreme Court’s decisions and other pressing legal matters of national importance. Her academic publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Murray was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law. Murray is a member of the New York bar. She lives in New York City with her family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved

1. Preamble PREAMBLE

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Preamble in a Nutshell

The Preamble is the introductory statement that precedes the various provisions of the Constitution. In it, the Framers announced their goals for the Constitution as a governing document and the values underlying its provisions. The Preamble makes clear that the Constitution’s power and authority proceed from the American people.

Origin Story

It is not surprising that the Framers chose to introduce the Constitution with a preamble. Preambles were common features of legal documents, including the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, and other documents that informed the Framers’ understanding of constitutionalism. Indeed, the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that preceded the Constitution, contained a preamble that declared the end of the thirteen colonies and the birth of a new “Confederation and perpetual Union.”

Today, the Preamble is arguably the part of the Constitution that most Americans know best. Yet the question of whether to include a preface—and if so, what that prefatory text would say—was not a topic of debate at the Constitutional Convention. Indeed, it was late in the drafting stage when Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph mused that “[a] preamble seems proper.”1 From there, the Preamble underwent various iterations, ultimately settling on a statement articulating the purposes of the new governing charter (and by implication, outlining the failures of the predecessor Articles of Confederation). Ironically, the Preamble’s famous opening line, “We the People,” was something of an afterthought.

Commentary

We the People…

An initial draft of the Preamble, which identified all of the thirteen states by name, was unanimously approved by all the delegates at the Constitutional Convention. However, when this draft was referred to the Committee of Style—a smaller subset of the convention delegates who were charged with editing the document—the committee eliminated the names of the thirteen states, replacing them with “We the People.” The convention records are silent as to the exact rationale for the change, but the records of the various state ratification conventions suggest that the shift was not merely rhetorical. When the Constitution was submitted for ratification, a number of Anti-Federalists raised objections to the use of “We the People.” As they argued, the states, rather than the people, were the “soul of a confederation” and for that reason, the true “agents of this compact.”2 Prominent Federalists, like John Marshall (later a chief justice of the Supreme Court), countered by noting that the powers of the states and the federal government were themselves derived from the consent of the people.3

… in Order to form a more perfect Union,…

The need to form “a more perfect Union” responded directly to the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the United States’ first governing charter. Adopted in 1777 by the Continental Congress, the Articles established a “league of friendship” between the thirteen states, but this loose framework was incapable of constructing a strong national government that could mediate interstate conflicts, wage war, negotiate peace, and manage foreign commerce and diplomacy. When the war ended, the states sent delegates to Philadelphia for the purpose of amending the Articles. But it immediately became clear that modification would not cure what ailed this first charter. So, the delegates pivoted and began to draft a new governing document from scratch.

… establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,…

In The Federalist Papers, a series of essays arguing for ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, under the pseudonym “Publius,” emphasized the threat of interstate conflicts as evidence of the need for a strong federal government.

… provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,…

Fresh from the Revolutionary War with Britain, it is unsurprising that national security was a critical concern for the Framers—indeed, John Jay addressed the subject in Federalist 25.4 The Preamble’s references to the “common defence” and “general Welfare” reflect the language of the Articles of Confederation, which made similar stipulations. However, the Articles of Confederation did not make provisions for federal or national authority to provide for either. Instead, the effort was a cooperative endeavor among the thirteen states. The prospect of relying on the states to “crowdsource” the national defense struck Alexander Hamilton as wrongheaded. In Federalist 23, he dismissed as “ill-founded and illusory”5 the hope that the states might secure the nation’s defense and welfare. Responsibility for protecting the “national interests,” Hamilton maintained, must rest with the federal government.

… and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…

The reference to “Posterity” underscores the Constitution’s status as the oldest written Constitution in continuous use in world history. In memorializing the Constitution as a written document, the Framers struck an immediate contrast with Great Britain and its unwritten constitution. As the Framers intended, the written Constitution has endured as a guiding charter of American government. Its example, too, has inspired other nations to set down their own governing principles in writing.



Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, 2026


[Publication date: ‎February 3, 2026]

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity—these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

REVIEWS:
 
“There is intellectual pleasure to be had in Morrison’s exacting, appreciative readings of Twain, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. . . . The effect of . . . Language as Liberation is to bring her from dull, sanctified solitude into the busy fold of canonized American writers, whose difficult books demand to be plumbed and debated and compared, and, most of all, to be reread."—Wall Street Journal

“We’ve long known the late Toni Morrison as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and an astute cultural critic. Here we engage her as a scholar in a collection of Princeton University lectures enriched by marginalia, a beguiling testament to a prodigious mind in motion. American literature has been shaped by streams of influences from an array of continents and peoples, a ‘chaos’ of imagery and rhythms as vibrant and volatile as the nation itself. Taking stock of works from writers like Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein, Morrison probes the ‘powerful presence of Africanist personae, discourse, and narrative’ within our emerging canon.”—TIME Magazine

“Provides unprecedented insight into Morrison’s roles as cultural critic and thought leader. . . . Morrison inverts our understanding of classic American literature. . . . An insightful invitation to revisit the familiar with new eyes.”—Booklist

“Deeply insightful investigations of major works.”—Kirkus
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 
TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
 
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Image of Blacks in Western Art
 
Studies in American Africanism is an investigation into two principal areas of discursive practice: one area involves the ways in which a non-­white, Africanist presence and persona was constructed in the United States; the second area involves the ways in which that fabricated “presence” served the literary imagination in its exploration of American identity.

The course uses the terms “Africanism” and “Africanist” to suggest the mythic construct of a denotative and connotative blackness, and an entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and mis-­readings of African peoples and their descendants in this country. Africanism is also the process of alienizing and exoticizing one’s own experience of Black people in order to know and therefore own that experience. [caveat] The course is not limited to an investigation of what might be called racist or non-­racist literature. Nor does the course take or encourage a position that confines itself to measuring the quality of a work based on the attitudes of the author, or the representations he or she makes of another racial or ethnic group. Such judgments can and are being made in recent literary criticisms. (For example, the critical scholarship of Ezra Pound, [Louis-­Ferdinand] Céline, George Jean Nathan, Paul de Man, etc.; and we know books are constantly being banned from library shelves for these alleged attitudes or representations or sensibilities regardless of past evaluations of the quality of the text. In fact, the argument has been advanced that, in the case of Paul de Man, say, or Mark Twain, the work can have no unmitigated quality precisely because the work—­or in some cases not the work but the author—­has been found to reveal insensitivity to ethnic, religious, sexual, or racial groups.)

However, although those judgments are within the reach of this course, they are not within its purview. One of the reasons the course does not close with analyses leading toward conclusions about a work’s being racist or non-­racist is that such an analysis can be an intellectual cul-­de-­sac—­once the evidence is in, there is nothing more to be said about the work.

What we propose to do is a series of close readings of traditional American fiction in order to discover what impact notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability have had on the literature. We will describe and analyze how this literature has behaved in its encounter with racial ideology and discover in what ways the literature has been shaped by that encounter.

Now in order to do this we will have to identify the instances during which American literature has been complicit in the development of racialism, and when it has intervened in racial discourse to undermine or explode it; but we will want to move beyond stark identification to the further investigation of what Africanism has meant for the work/product of the writer’s imagination. How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanistic “other”? What does the encounter with Africans and/or African-­Americans do to and for the work? How does one describe the rhetorical struggle that follows? Our study averts the gaze from the racialized object to the racialized subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers.

If Africanism is a construct, if “blackness” has “meaning,” then so does “whiteness.” One goal, then, becomes to discover how the concept of “whiteness” was built/invented/produced and what it is for. The insights we come up with may help us to discover not only the nature—­even the cause of “whiteness”—­but also the part that its development played in the evolution of something known, loosely, as an American. Reading and critiquing American literature from this point of view may also release the literature from the incoherence that the studied indifference and historical evasion in criticism has imposed on it. In other words, we will regard the literary engagements with Africanism as self-­reflexive—­as ways to talk about, imagine, and set forth/assert the deep concerns white writers have about themselves and the world they inhabit. Further, we will regard the presence of Africanism in a work as an impinging force in the execution of that work’s structure and figurative language.

The suspicion of the course is that the intrusion or inclusion of Africanistic characters is significant. That the writer’s choice to include or the necessity of inclusion can be shown sometimes to throttle the text, destabilize it, and, far more frequently than one would think, it can be shown to liberate it, to provide and force astonishing kinds of artistic creativity, astonishing leaps into otherwise forbidden territory, and that in the wake of this imaginative encounter, some interesting patterns emerge—­patterns that should be included in the history of American literature as part of its distinguishing features.

Two points require underscoring (one about knowledge and imagination, the other about language):

1) Although we will see that “knowing” the “other”—­the conviction that one “knows” Africans and African-­Americans—­is central to the construction of “whiteness” (knowing is, after all, the demonstration of power), we should not ever assume that the Africans and African-­Americans encountered in this fiction are in fact known—­they are imagined. Sartre’s description of colonialist language captures the point: “These phrases (terminology for the suborned natives) were never the translation of a real, concrete thought; they were not even the object of thought . . . they have not by themselves any meaning, at least in so far as they claim to express knowledge about the colonialized.” So we will not be looking for “real” or realistic representations of blacks within a construct based on stereotypes. (“Representation is how we make our will known.”) In the absence of race-­neutral knowledge, or open-­minded inquiry about Africans and African-­Americans, and in the presence of ideological and imperialistic rationales for oppression, an invented, fictive Africanist persona emerged, and flourished because of its serviceability. Political serviceability, of course, and economic serviceability, etc.; but it is the literary serviceability that we will focus on.

The Matter of Africanism, by which I mean the fabrication of an Africanistic Presence that would support, promulgate, and enhance the institution of slavery and the hierarchy of race, seems to be a dominant figuration within American literature. And it is important to remember that under the constraints of this fabrication, we can be only secondarily concerned here with the way Africans really were—­what their various cultures, laws, languages, and art forms were; nor with what African-­Americans were or are really like—­what kind of cultural, linguistic, artistic, and social forms they either preserved or created in the New World. “Real” Blacks “out of the loop.” In short, we are not concerned here, except indirectly, with all of what was available for these writers to see and interpret, but rather with what they believed they saw, or wished to see, and how in fact they did interpret a black “other” in their midst.

We will try to discover how the variables of racism—­biologic, economic, ideological, metaphoric, metaphysical—­can be understood in each of these formulations to be insistently self-­referential for both the racist and the non-­racist alike.

Because our route takes us repeatedly to and through economical, ideological, iconographical, and figurative racism, the order of the readings is not based on a work’s date of publication or progressive literary periods. I don’t want linear or chronological time to suggest a conventional “progress” in these matters. Or lead us to believe that because the language and iconography of Africanism has altered, that its force is weakened in the literature.

Roughly put, we will treat the content of sample literature like the results of a Rorschach test, the meditation on a black spot that appears in any of an unlimited variety of shapes, and hazard some speculations about what that meditation reveals about the viewer, and how he or she translates these meditations into art. Writers produce meaning in their work—­and we want to note how. In some instances the act of imagining blacks produces language and images reinforced by received, unquestioned, culturally informed perceptions—­perceptions, biases, and evaluations already established as “knowledge” and distributed as such. In other instances the presence of Africans and/or African-­Americans alters the work—­forces it away from its announced and/or hidden course and yields fresh insights that are at odds with racial cliché. In all instances, the act of imagining Africanist personae tells its own story, a story often at variance with the responses it intended to call forth.

2)The second point to be stressed is that although the language used to accommodate this Africanist persona may be overt or encoded, covert and self-­reinforcing, it is also powerfully revealing. The close readings we do will decode this language. I will come back to this point about how language can sabotage or negotiate content. But first I want to put our study into historical context.

When we look at the beginnings of American literature we should remember that nineteenth-­century writers were mindful of the presence of blacks; they had personal and political responses to the “problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic resting on and committed to a slave population. The alertness to this slave population did not confine itself to personal encounters with blacks or not. Nor to their familiarity with the publishing boom that slave narratives fed. The press, the political campaigns, the policy platforms of various parties and elected governments are rife with the slave/free discourse. It would have been an isolated individual indeed who was unaware of one of the single, if not the single, most explosive of issues in the nation. How could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, of progress, of suffragism, of Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, of education, of transportation—­freight and passengers—­neighborhoods, quarters, the military—­of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—­without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants? It was not possible. What did happen, frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary designed to disguise and displace the subject. It was not always successful, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence was a master narrative (or a term I like better—­white discourse) that spoke for the African and/or his descendants, and of him. Whatever popularity slave narratives had, a slave’s own narrative did not destroy the master narrative, for the master narrative could accommodate many shifts, several adjustments to keep itself intact. Enforced silence from the object was needed and a kind of tacit-­manipulative silence of the subject as well.
 
Some of the silences were broken, of course, and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the narrative. What we are interested in here are the strategies for maintaining the silence and those for breaking it. The thesis of the course is that our founding writers engaged, imagined, employed, and created an Africanistic presence and persona in several ways, and that more recent literature has followed in their footsteps.
 
In the Hour of Chaos: Art and Activism with Public Enemy's Chuck D
by Chuck D 
University of California Press, 2026

[Publication date: ‎ February 10, 2026]

A profound meditation on hip hop’s transformative power, In the Hour of Chaos takes us deep into the mind of the genre’s most unabashed revolutionary.

This book is not an autobiography. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a razor-sharp investigation into hip hop and rap music by searing lyricist and global music icon Chuck D of Public Enemy.

Engaging with some of the world’s leading thinkers on hip hop, “Professor Chuck” sets out on a journey that celebrates fifty years of hip hop and charts paths forward for its future. Exploring the intersections of hip hop with Black radicalism and feminism, media and technology, and globalization and politics, this curated collection shows the power of culture and the arts not only to bring people together but to bring about political change in this current hour of chaos.

Features conversations with leading thinkers, including Robin D. G. Kelley, H. Samy Alim, Jeff Chang, Davey D, Scot Brown, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Bryonn Bain, Maya Jupiter, Adam Bradley, Joan Morgan, and more.
 

REVIEWS:


"[Chuck D is] neither snootily professorial nor just an OG unspooling war stories. Rather, he’s a thoughtful interlocutor . . . . a valuable chronicle of the genre’s role in troubled times―and how the times have always been troubled. Smart and chatty hip-hop history." ― Kirkus Reviews

“Anyone even slightly familiar with the work of P.E. will know that Chuck D is a gifted lyricist, capable of boiling down very real experiences into lines that have the greatest impact―an attribute he shares with the likes of Dylan, Guthrie, and Marley. So, it’s not at all surprising that his book packs a genuine punch. The man can write.” ― Music Connection

"The book presents a razor-sharp investigation into hip hop and rap music from the searing lyricist and global music icon, engaging with some of the world's leading thinkers on the genre. 'Professor Chuck' sets out on a journey that celebrates fifty years of hip hop and charts paths forward for its future." ― That Eric Alper

"Public Enemy fans and rap aficionados who want to delve into Chuck D’s contention that hip hop was the ‘Black CNN,’ or learn how ‘Fight the Power’ sprang from the Isley Brothers, or examine the Black Panthers' influence on the group’s public persona, will be rewarded." ― California Magazine

"The Public Enemy frontman has always been one of rap music’s most articulate advocates, but in 2022 he shifted career from MC to university lecturer. . . . [In] In The Hour of Chaos, Chuck D talks about the cultural politics of hip hop and what it means for the future." ― The Quietus 

From the Back Cover:
 
"Chuck D is a stone-cold genius in every sense of the word. In the Hour of Chaos is an integration of the significance of the culture by someone who was inside the music in conversation with a range of brilliant thinkers. It is a breakthrough in hip hop studies, in Black studies, in music studies, and across the humanities."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

"Chuck D doesn’t just talk about the importance of culture but teaches us the importance of making change. This book is a gift to future generations of artists, activists, and academics, and to all those who love hip hop."—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

"Chuck D is the best person to lead us on this journey because it’s rare to find someone who has literally laid the foundation of the culture and grounded us through its difficult periods—massive capitalist growth, the really terrible bouts of misogyny, and regional and global shifts. We need his voice now more than ever."—Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

"To have the kind of longevity Chuck D has is a testament to his artistry and his dedication to the craft, to always evolving, to being in context. This book gives us a rare window into his intellectual brilliance."—Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 

Chuck D is the Grammy-winning leader of the hip hop group Public Enemy. A rapper, lyricist, producer, visual artist, and author, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2022, he was the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative’s Inaugural Artist-in-Residence and currently serves on its National Advisory Board.