Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable
by Joanna Schwartz
Viking, 2023
[Publication date: February 14, 2023]
An
urgent and definitive examination of how the legal system prevents
accountability for police misconduct, from one of the country's leading
scholars on policing
In recent years, the
high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others
have brought much-needed attention to the pervasiveness of police
misconduct. Yet it remains nearly impossible to hold police accountable
for abuses of power—the decisions of the Supreme Court, state and local
governments, and policy makers have, over decades, made the police all
but untouchable.
In Shielded,
University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Joanna Schwartz
exposes the myriad ways in which our legal system protects police at all
costs, with insightful analyses about subjects ranging from qualified
immunity to no-knock warrants. The product of more than two decades of
advocacy and research, Shielded is a timely and necessary investigation
into why civil rights litigation so rarely leads to justice or prevents
future police misconduct. Weaving powerful true stories of people
seeking restitution for violated rights, cutting across race, gender,
criminal history, tax bracket, and zip code, Schwartz paints a
compelling picture of the human cost of our failing criminal justice
system, bringing clarity to a problem that is widely known but little
understood. Shielded is a masterful work of immediate and enduring consequence, revealing what tragically familiar calls for “justice” truly entail.
REVIEWS:
“A
rigorous examination of why, most of the time, dirty cops get away with
violating their badges. . . . [T]old with passion and eloquence . . .
[E]xceptionally lucid and well-argued.”
—The Washington Post
“Hopeful.”
—The Atlantic
"Schwartz maintains that while the concern that ‘public safety will be
imperiled by too much oversight’ has always accompanied the desire to
hold the police accountable, it is now nearly an unquestioned assumption
that lawsuits against the police exact too high a price. . . . But this
assumption, Schwartz contends, is a myth that has distorted the civil
justice system by persuading judges of the need to insulate the police
from accountability.
—New York Review of Books
"[L]ucid, compelling, and powerful . . . Schwartz’s book and its
subject matter demand our collective attention: we must understand how
and why there is so little accountability for police excessive force if
we are ever to address it. And make no mistake: we must address it, in
our nation, our state, and our cities.
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Rigorous research, in-depth analysis, and poignant case studies make this a must-read study of an urgent social issue.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review, Top 10 Politics Science/Current Affairs Books of Spring 2023
“Engaging . . . Shielded is a meaningful, well-researched and readable work that will open many discussions about this important social issue.”
—Bookpage, starred review
“A well-reasoned case for reforms to create a better system of police accountability.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Shielded
is truly a must read for anyone who wants to understand why we lack an
effective system of legal accountability for police violence and
misconduct in our country. By unsparingly sharing the stories of just a
few of the innocent victims whose lives have been devastated by police
violence, Schwartz reveals how the civil rights legal regime designed to
provide recourse to individuals subjected to unwarranted state violence
has been disabled by more than a century of restrictive judicial
decision-making and lawmaker inaction. Once you understand how we got
here, Schwartz’s smart, pragmatic proposals for change ring clear and
true.”
—Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
“Through deep research and gripping storytelling, Schwartz reveals a
broken legal system in which justice so often remains elusive for those
whose lives have been shattered by police violence. Cutting through
polemics and misinformation, Shielded
is both a searing indictment of our current system and a clear-eyed
roadmap for change. This is a profound and indispensable work that will
shape the national discussion around police accountability for years to
come.”
—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
“Every day brings another example of an abusive police officer avoiding
punishment. How exactly do the police keep getting away with it? What
are the laws and policies that protect them? And, most crucially, how
can we change this system? Full of human stories, detailed data, and
powerful arguments, Shielded
will answer these urgent questions and should be on the reading list of
every legislator, policymaker, and ordinary citizen. We need this book,
and we need it now.”
—James Forman Jr., Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
“Through meticulous research and compelling human stories, Shielded
reveals how police misconduct impacts everyone, and how our legal
system is designed to prevent accountability at every turn. With clarity
and purpose, Schwartz takes aim at the profound flaws in how we deal
with police violence, showing the ways in which our judiciary is
designed to fail the most vulnerable among us—and how another way
forward is possible.”
—Kimberlé Crenshaw, cofounder of the African American Policy Forum and #SayHerName campaign
“Whatever you believe about the police in the United States, you need to read Shielded.
It is eye-opening and cracklingly clear about why it's so hard to hold
them accountable when they hurt people—and how to fix that problem. This
book is an essential tool for addressing one of the country's most
pressing and wrenching problems.”
—Emily Bazelon, author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration
“A magnificent but sobering account of the reality of the many
obstacles to holding police accountable in our legal system. The book is
compelling in telling human stories about the effects of police
misconduct on people’s lives and at the same time presenting her
original research on how rarely the law succeeds when there is police
misconduct. Shielded is a must read for all who care about policing in the United States, which should be all of us.”
—Erwin Chemerinsky, author of Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights
“A beautifully written and harrowing account of how justice is so often
denied to the victims of police abuse. Schwartz shows that the Supreme
Court and police department practices have erected so many barriers to
accountability that police officers are largely indifferent to lawsuits,
victims are only rarely compensated, and abuse continues. A devastating
critique that demands our attention.”
—David Cole, national legal director, American Civil Liberties Union
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joanna Schwartz
is a professor of law at UCLA, where she teaches civil procedure and
courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. Her
writing, commentary, and research about police misconduct, qualified
immunity, indemnification, and local government budgeting have been
featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Christian Science Monitor, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
How We Got Here
In
the early hours of October 29, 1958-sixty years before Captain Cody and
his team invaded Onree Norris's home-James Monroe, his wife, Flossie,
and their six children woke to the sounds of men breaking into their
basement apartment on the West Side of Chicago. The intruders were
twelve police officers and Frank Pape-the department's chief of
detectives, who was known for taking pictures of himself with the
corpses of men he killed and whom local newspapers referred to, with
reverence, as "Chicago's Toughest Cop." A few hours earlier, a white
woman, who claimed her husband had been killed by two Black men, picked
James Monroe's photo out of a pile of mug shots. As it happened, James
had nothing to do with the crime: the woman had persuaded her lover to
murder her husband, hoping to cash in on his $25,000 life insurance
policy. But even if the officers had had the right man, their actions on
the morning of October 29 were unconscionable.
The officers
entered the Monroes' home-without a warrant-and ordered Flossie and
James out of bed at gunpoint, threatening to shoot if they didn't move
quickly. Both were forced to stand in the center of their living room,
naked, while the officers ransacked their home, dumping the Monroes'
possessions out of their closets and drawers and slitting their
mattresses top to bottom with razor blades. Frank Pape repeatedly struck
James in the stomach with a flashlight, yelling accusations about the
murder interspersed with odious racial slurs. When the children screamed
and cried, they were assaulted as well. An officer tripped the Monroes'
four-year-old boy as he tried to run to his parents. Detective Pape hit
two of James's teenage stepchildren, knocking them to the floor.
That
horrific morning marked the seventeenth birthday of Flossie Monroe's
eldest son, Houston. More than sixty years later, Houston recalled that
he and his brothers and sisters yelled at the tops of their lungs to
alert the neighbors that officers had broken into their home. He
believes that noise might have saved his stepfather's life. "Those were
killer cops that raided us," Houston remembered. "If it wasn't for the
kids, they probably would have killed him."
James was taken from
the apartment and held at the station house for ten hours without being
allowed to see a judge or call a lawyer. He was released when the white
woman who accused him of murder couldn't pick him out of a lineup. The
woman's lover later confessed to the murder and testified against her;
he received a life sentence and she was sentenced to sixty years in
prison. James was never charged with any crime.
The Monroes
decided to sue. An attorney at the Illinois branch of the ACLU agreed to
represent them. The Monroes could have filed a lawsuit alleging assault
and battery against the officers in Illinois state court-the same type
of case that James could have brought against a neighbor who punched him
during a backyard birthday party. But such a case brought by a poor
Black family against white law enforcement officers, heard by a state
court judge in Chicago-or by a state court judge anywhere else, for that
matter-was considered at that time destined to fail. As the Monroes'
attorney, Donald Page Moore, later explained, "I suspect that any
realistic trial lawyer with experience in this kind of litigation
anywhere in the country would tend to agree with me that when a
penniless Negro family attempts to sue a politically potent high ranking
police officer who is white, he is more likely to obtain a fair and
impartial trial of his case from a federal judge."
So, Moore and
the Monroes pursued a novel legal strategy. They filed the lawsuit in
federal court and argued that a rarely used statute enacted by Congress
almost a century earlier, in the wake of the Civil War, allowed the
Monroes to sue Frank Pape and the other Chicago police officers for
violating their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court agreed, and its
decision in Monroe v. Pape, issued in 1961, breathed new life into that
statute-42 U.S.C. § 1983, now commonly referred to as Section 1983.
Monroe v. Pape also resurrected a long-standing debate about how much
power Section 1983 should have.
Periodically over the past 150
years, courts and legislatures have made it easier to bring lawsuits
against police and other government officials, in recognition that such
suits are critically important tools for accountability and justice. But
each time the judicial and legislative scaffolding behind the right to
sue has been strengthened, it has thereafter been whittled away by
powerful (if unsupported) claims that the federal courts are
overreaching, that police can manage themselves, and that public safety
will be imperiled by too much oversight. Only by understanding how this
debate has been waged in the Supreme Court, in federal and state
legislatures, and within public discourse over the past century and a
half will it become clear why the power to sue government has waxed and
waned, why there are so many limits on the right to sue today, and how,
almost exactly sixty years after the Supreme Court recognized the right
to sue police for violating the Constitution in Monroe v. Pape, a case
like Onree Norris's could be kicked out of court.
Congress
first enacted the law that became Section 1983 during the bloody years
of Reconstruction. In the five years after the Civil War ended, between
1865 and 1870, Congress passed and the states ratified three
constitutional amendments intended to guarantee the freedoms and civil
rights of formerly enslaved people: the Thirteenth, ending slavery; the
Fourteenth, prohibiting states from denying people due process and equal
protection of the laws; and the Fifteenth, prohibiting states from
denying people the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude. Between 1866 and 1875, Congress also
enacted a slew of statutes that created civil and criminal penalties for
violations of these Reconstruction Amendments. One of those statutes
was the Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. At
the time, Black people across the South were being tortured and killed
by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, and
local law enforcement officials were either participating in the
violence or standing idly by. Section 1 of the Ku Klux Klan Act-what
would become Section 1983-permitted people to sue in federal court if
their constitutional rights were violated by people acting “under color”
of state law.
Congressmen who spoke in favor of the Ku Klux Klan
Act recounted stories that sound eerily familiar to the Monroes', of
Black men and their wives and children being pulled from their beds in
the dead of night and brutally assaulted, if not raped or killed. These
families could theoretically file lawsuits against Klan members in state
court, alleging assault, battery, and false arrest. But the congressmen
knew that state courts were hostile places for Black people; in many
state court cases, they were not even allowed to testify. Vitally
important then-just as it was almost a century later, when the Monroes
filed their lawsuit-the Ku Klux Klan Act would allow Black people to
bring their cases in federal court and have them heard by federal judges
and juries, who supporters of the Act considered more independent and
"able to rise above prejudices or bad passions or terror more easily."
The
Ku Klux Klan Act also had critics. Congressmen opposed to the Act did
not frame their objections as an endorsement of racial violence or
resistance to civil rights. Instead, they said they opposed the Act
because it gave too much power to the federal courts to resolve disputes
that should be left to states. Indiana representative Michael Kerr
described the Act as a "covert attempt to transfer a large portion of
jurisdiction from the State tribunals, to which of right it belongs, to
those of the United States." Congressmen predicted that lawyers would
abuse that expansive federal jurisdiction to weasel their way into
federal court with exaggerated claims that their clients' constitutional
rights had been violated. Senator Allen G. Thurman of Ohio, speaking
against the Act, warned that a constitutional violation "may be of the
slightest conceivable character, the damages in the estimation of any
sensible man may not be five dollars or even five cents . . . and yet by
this section jurisdiction of that civil action is given to the Federal
courts instead of its being prosecuted as now in the courts of the
States."
After heated debate, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan
Act and President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law. But almost a
century passed before the Supreme Court acknowledged, in the Monroes'
case, that Section 1983 could be used to sue police officers for
violating the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. It was the
Supreme Court's decisions that rendered Section 1983 largely powerless
for its first ninety years of existence.
In 1873, just two years
after the Ku Klux Klan Act became law, the Supreme Court interpreted the
Fourteenth Amendment narrowly to protect only rights related to federal
citizenship-such as the right to vote for federal office, or to
assemble and petition the federal government for redress of grievances.
By this view, the Fourteenth Amendment could not be used to contest the
very torture and killing of Black people that had inspired its creation.
Then, in a handful of decisions in the 1870s and 1880s, the Supreme
Court held that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted Congress
authority only to address civil rights abuses by state actors-which
meant that the laws passed by Congress to give teeth to the
Reconstruction Amendments could not be used to combat private actors'
violence and discrimination. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme
Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit racial
segregation so long as the available facilities were "separate but
equal." Congress didn't push back against any of these
decisions-instead, in 1894, southern Democrats who had regained control
of the House and Senate, and the presidency, repealed most of the
Reconstruction-era statutes that remained. With this decisive retreat
from the federal enforcement of civil rights, Jim Crow laws pervaded the
South, Black people were disenfranchised, Klan violence resurged, and
the federal government did little to intervene.
In the early
twentieth century, in the wake of the courts' and Congress's abandonment
of the goals of Reconstruction, civil rights groups including the NAACP
began to form, and they protested, lobbied, and litigated against
discriminatory laws and practices. This same period marked the beginning
of the Great Migration as millions of Black Americans made their way
north to escape the Klan and police violence. In fact, sixteen years
before Flossie and James Monroe were pulled out of their bed at gunpoint
in Chicago, Flossie-along with her first husband and their infant son,
Houston-was run out of Opelika, Alabama, by the town's sheriff.
Flossie's then husband was accused of throwing popcorn at a white man
from the balcony of a segregated movie theater, and he punched the usher
who ejected him from the theater. The sheriff and his posse arrested
Flossie's husband and took him back behind the jailhouse. Flossie's
sister, who had also been at the theater, ran to get Flossie's husband's
father, who was, in Houston's words, a "well-respected" and "important
person around town." Flossie's father-in-law raced to the jailhouse to
beg the sheriff for his son's life, and the sheriff told him that
Flossie's husband had to leave town by sundown. So Flossie's husband
boarded the Illinois Central that day and headed to Chicago. Flossie and
Houston soon followed. As Houston later described it, his family
"escaped from behind the Cotton Curtain. That was fascism living in the
South."
When Black people arrived in places like Chicago, New
York City, and Detroit, they quickly came to learn that the South did
not have a monopoly on discrimination, mob violence, and police abuse.
In the summer of 1919, after a seventeen-year-old Black boy's raft
veered into the "whites only" part of Lake Michigan, a white beachgoer
pelted him with rocks until he fell off his raft and drowned. Chicago
erupted into violence, with Black people suffering the lion's share of
injuries and death. When the Chicago Commission on Race Relations
investigated the Chicago riot, they found Black people's distrust of the
police was widespread and well earned; as Maclay Hoyne, Cook County
state's attorney, testified before the commission, police had "shut
their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very
vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get."
The
first federal government report documenting widespread police misconduct
was published in 1931. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover had convened
the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, known as the
Wickersham Commission, to examine the impact of Prohibition on police
tactics. Two years later, the commission issued a report called
Lawlessness in Law Enforcement that concluded, based on evidence from
more than a dozen cities across the country, that "the third degree-that
is, the use of physical brutality, or other forms of cruelty, to obtain
involuntary confessions or admissions-is widespread." Following
uprisings in Harlem and Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s, investigations
found that police were regularly and egregiously violating Black
people's rights. During this same period, and particularly as Black men
were returning home after serving in World War II, there were growing
calls to end segregation, discrimination in employment, and police
abuse.
As the civil rights movement began to pick up steam, the
Supreme Court came to revisit its narrow interpretation of the
Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts. A key decision marking
that shift and setting the stage for the revitalization of Section 1983
was Screws v. United States, issued in 1945, which forced the Supreme
Court to confront the gravity of police violence and the need for
federal intervention.
Sheriff M. Claude Screws of Baker County,
Georgia, along with a policeman and deputy, arrested thirty-year-old
Robert Hall at his home late one night for allegedly stealing a tire.
After driving Hall to the courthouse, Sheriff Screws and the officer and
deputy beat Hall with their fists and a two-pound blackjack until he
was unconscious, then dragged him through the courthouse yard to the
jail floor. Hall was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he died.
The sheriff and officers on the scene offered an excuse that sounds all
too familiar today: they claimed that they had beaten Hall only after he
had reached for a gun. But this explanation hardly made sense given
that Hall was handcuffed the whole time.
Although Georgia
prosecutors declined to bring charges against Sheriff Screws or the
officers, federal prosecutors-part of the newly formed Civil Rights
Section of the Department of Justice-pursued a case under a criminal law
also enacted during Reconstruction. The federal indictment charged that
the men, "acting under color of the laws of Georgia, 'willfully' caused
Hall to be deprived of 'rights, privileges, or immunities secured or
protected' to him by the Fourteenth Amendment." A jury found them
guilty.
Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences
by Joan Biskupic
William Morrow, 2023)[Publication date: April 4, 2023]
New York Times Editor's Choice"Biskupic,
an accomplished and well-sourced journalist, knows the court as well as
anyone now covering it... In her new book Biskupic has done something
different and a good deal harder. She has written a group narrative that
combines close accounts of the court's public business in the Trump
years with a history of its private dramas and conflicts... The deeper
message of 'Nine Black Robes' is that even with a new president in
office we remain captive to the Age of Trump... A quiet urgency ripples
through this informative, briskly paced and gracefully written book." —New York Times Book Review
"Biskupic
opens a window onto the opaque, insular world of the justices to show
an institution sinking gradually into crisis . . . Biskupic is a
longtime chronicler of the court, and "Nine Black Robes" puts on display
her connections within its chambers." —Washington Post
"[Biskupic]
knows how to make news and illuminate the personalities atop the
judicial org chart . . . The book reveals unseen sausage-making . . ." —Wall Street Journal
"Fascinating
and informative . . . [Biskupic's] long experience covering the court .
. . has put her in an incomparable position to comment on its make-up,
historical positions and direction. It has also made her privy to many
significant, little-known secrets about Supreme Court personalities and
their historical behaviors." —The National Book Review
CNN
Senior Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic provides an urgent and
inside look at the history-making era in the Supreme Court during the
Trump and post-Trump years, from its seismic shift to the Right to its
controversial decisions, including its reversal of Roe v. Wade, based on
access to all the key players.
Nine Black Robes
displays the inner maneuverings among the Supreme Court justices that
led to the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade and a half century of women’s
abortion rights. Biskupic details how rights are stripped away or,
alternatively as in the case of gun owners, how rights are expanded.
Today’s bench—with its conservative majority—is desperately ideological.
The Court has been headed rightward and ensnared by its own intrigues
for years, but the Trump appointments hastened the modern
transformation. With unparalleled access to key players, Biskupic shows
the tactics of each justice and reveals switched votes and internal
pacts that typically never make the light of day, yet will have
repercussions for generations to come.
Nine Black Robes is the definitive narrative of the country’s highest court and its profound impact on all Americans.
REVIEWS: "Biskupic,
an accomplished and well-sourced journalist, knows the court as well as
anyone now covering it... In her new book Biskupic has done something
different and a good deal harder. She has written a group narrative that
combines close accounts of the court's public business in the Trump
years with a history of its private dramas and conflicts... The deeper
message of Nine Black Robes
is that even with a new president in office we remain captive to the
Age of Trump... A quiet urgency ripples through this informative,
briskly paced and gracefully written book." — New York Times Book Review
"Biskupic
opens a window onto the opaque, insular world of the justices to show
an institution sinking gradually into crisis . . . Biskupic is a
longtime chronicler of the court, and Nine Black Robes puts on display her connections within its chambers." — Washington Post
"[Biskupic]
knows how to make news and illuminate the personalities atop the
judicial org chart . . . The book reveals unseen sausage-making . . ." —
Wall Street Journal
"This is the story of the Trump transformation of the Court—and perhaps America. Joan Biskupic is one of our great Supreme Court reporters and here, in Nine Black Robes, she skillfully blends the public record with her own reporting from a majority of the justices." — Bob Woodward, Washington Post reporter and author or co-author of 15 #1 New York Times bestselling books
"Fascinating
and informative . . . [Biskupic's] long experience covering the court .
. . has put her in an incomparable position to comment on its make-up,
historical positions and direction. It has also made her privy to many
significant, little-known secrets about Supreme Court personalities and
their historical behaviors." — The National Book Review
“Piece
by piece in her meticulously crafted books and newspaper coverage, Joan
Biskupic has built a reputation as the nation's most astute observer of
the Supreme Court. All of that seemed in preparation for Nine Black Robes,
a seminal work that reveals in sharp detail the atomization and
politicization of a once-revered institution in the Trump era.” — David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer
"The best Supreme Court reporter in the country has done it again. In Nine Black Robes,
Joan Biskupic brings readers into their cloistered chambers, details
motivations and maneuvering, life stories and leadership, with scoop
after scoop on the internal machinations that have led to decisions with
very real consequences for the American people." — Jake Tapper, host of The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN
“Joan Biskupic’s Nine Black Robes
takes us unsparingly through the most devastating and consequential
period in modern Supreme Court history. Biskupic’s fact-rich, detailed
reporting demands that we confront how drastically the Court, led by a
relentlessly determined conservative super-majority, has aggressively
reframed and diminished the boundaries of rights and protections that
Americans have enjoyed for decades. And Biskupic’s sober review makes
clear that the consequences of the “Trump effect” on our Court are far
from over.” — Sherrilyn Ifill, Former President & Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc.
"[A]
classic insider's story, filled with personal details and
behind-the-scenes stories . . . Biskupic makes a worthy contribution to
the genre." — Financial Times
"Comprehensive and accessible, this is a valuable overview of a profound shift in American jurisprudence." — Publishers Weekly
"[A]n
up-to-the-minute, laser-focused examination of the Court . . . Devoted
Court-watchers will devour this behind-the-scenes expose." — Booklist (starred review)
"Court watchers and civil rights activists alike will find this essential—and disturbing—reading." — Kirkus Reviews
[E]ven-handed, well-written . . . U.S. Supreme Court watchers will appreciate an inside look at recent momentous decisions." — Library Journal
"[Nine Black Robes]
details how Chief Justice John Roberts lost control of an increasingly
conservative US Supreme Court as it moved to overturn the constitutional
right to abortion last year." — Bloomberg
"Biskupic
has borne witness to some of the most disruptive, unprecedented changes
of the legal guard and resulting shifts in democracy the United States
has ever witnessed . . . Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences, invites us to sit alongside her perch in the Supreme Court during the past six years and all its tumult." — Shondaland
"New Supreme Court Tell-All Reveals Shady Tidbits about the Conservative Justices." — Jezebel
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joan Biskupic
is CNN's Senior Supreme Court Analyst. Before joining CNN in 2017, she
was an editor in charge for legal affairs at Reuters and was previously
the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today.
Biskupic was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory
journalism in 2015. In addition to her biography of John Roberts, The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts,
Biskupic is the author of books on Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia,
and Sonia Sotomayor. She also holds a law degree from Georgetown
University.
Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies
Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Haymarket Books, 2023
[Publication date: July 4, 2023]
The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike
against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight
back. And when we fight, we win." —Colin Kaepernick
Since
its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless
attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and
neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was
born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to
remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted
in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick,
Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings
together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those
excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.
Featuring
writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora
Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June
Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara,
bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen,
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many
others.
Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts
readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law,
psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist
theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by
editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and
pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson
detailing how we can fight back.
To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is
to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we
can collectively work toward freedom for all—through abolition,
feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination,
desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Colin Kaepernick is a Super Bowl quarterback and New York Times bestselling author who fights oppression globally. He founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which advances the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown people through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
