Description
Book SynopsisMost observers and historians rarely acknowledge the history of civil rights predating the twentieth-century. The book Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era pays significant scholarly attention to the intellectual fermentlegal and politicalof the nineteenth-century by tracing the history of black Americans' civil rights to the postbellum era. By revisiting its faulty foundational history, this book lends itself to show that, after emancipation, national and local struggles for racial equality had led to the encoding of racism in the political order in the American South and the proliferation of racism as an American institution.Vanessa Holloway draws upon a host of historical, legal, and philosophical studies as well as legislative histories to construct a coherent theory of the law's relevance to the era, questioning how the nexus of race and politics should be interpreted during Reconstruction. Anchored in the Reconstruction Amendments, Supreme Court decisions and landmark statutes
Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction. Unwelcome Changes Part I. Initial Legal Barriers to Racial Equality, 1865-1868 Chapter 1: Thirteenth Amendment Chapter 2: Black Codes Chapter 3: Freedmen’s Bureau Chapter 4: Civil Rights Act of 1866 Chapter 5: Reconstruction Acts of 1867 Chapter 6: Fourteenth Amendment Part II. Other Legislative and Constitutional Issues, 1870-1876 Chapter 7: Fifteenth Amendment Chapter 8: Enforcement Acts of 1870-71 Chapter 9: Civil Rights Act of 1875 Appendix I. Reconstruction Era Congresses and U.S. Presidents Appendix II. Federal Constitutional Amendments, Acts and Cases Selected Bibliography
