|
Product Description
On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality.
The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Studies in Postwar American Political Development)
- Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring
- Bill of the Century
- All for Civil Rights: African American Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868-1968 (Southern Legal Studies Ser.)
- Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown V. Board of Education
- Law and Society
- The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
- Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago Series in Law and Society)
- Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals
- Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution
*If this is not the "The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (Chicago Series in Law and Society)" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 23, 2024 12:43 +08.