Abstract
Late one fall night in 1967, a group of men placed a bomb under the floor of a parsonage connected to St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Laurel, Mississippi. The men then moved a safe distance away and lit the fuse. The bomb exploded and the kitchen and dining area were blown apart.
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Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).
The LA Riots, as they are known, began April 29, 1992, and lasted six days. Fifty-three people were killed (ten of whom were killed by the police) and millions of dollars were lost in property damage from the looting and arson that took place during this period of unrest. The riots stemmed from a jury acquitting one Hispanic and three white police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department who has been videotaped beating a black motorist, Rodney King, after a traffic stop. Mr. King was tasered, beaten with a baton, and kicked in the head during the beating that was videotaped for ten minutes. For an in-depth discussion of the Los Angeles riots, see The Staff of the Los Angeles Times, Understanding the Riots: Lost Angeles before and after the Rodney King Case (Los Angeles Times Syndicate Books, 1996).
Race-based affirmative action was abolished in California. This has changed the campus very significantly. At University of California, Berkeley, for example, the minority share of entering freshmen at Berkeley fell from 22 percent in fall 1997 (the last class admitted with race preferences) to 12 percent in 1998. David Card and Alan B. Krueger, “Would the Elimination of Affirmative Action Affect Highly Quali fied Minority Applicants? Evidence from California and Texas,” Industrial & Labor Relations Review 58 (2005): 417.
Orenthal James Simpson, or O. J. Simpson, is a former NFL football player who is African-American. In 1995, he was acquitted of the murder of his white ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Because of his fame as a football star, Mr. Simpson’s criminal trial was televised. Because of his connections and wealth and the high-profile nature of his case, Mr. Simpson had a high-priced legal team and his trial was dubbed, “The Trial of the Century” by many. It is reported that more than half of Americans watched the not guilty verdict. Views on his guilt seemed to come down to race with white Americans largely believing Mr. Simpson had killed his ex-wife and had gotten away with murder, while black Americans believing that a racist Los Angeles Police Department was to blame for his having been accused of the murder. For more information on Mr. Simpson or his trial, see Jeffrey Toobin, The Run of his Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997).
Unit 32 has been closed. Erica Goode, “Prisons Rethink Isolation, Saving Money, Lives and Sanity,” New York Times, March 10, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/us/rethinking-solitary-confinement.html?pagewanted=all.
According to the 2010 census, black people make up just 3.9 percent of the population of San Francisco. Macio Lyons, “Black Population Drops to 3.9 percent in San Francisco,” San Francisco Bay View, February 4, 2011, http://sfbayview.com/2011/black-population-drops-to-3–9-in-san-francisco/.
The numbers are even more astonishing now. African-Americans now comprise more than 60 percent of those in prison from San Francisco and black women make up 67 percent of the female prison population. Editorial, “Alarming Percentage of African Americans in San Francisco Jails,” Fog City Journal (blog), May 5, 2008, http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/401/alarming-percentage-of-african-americansin-san-francisco-jails/.
Laura E. Glaze, Correctional Population in the United States, 2010 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2011), 7, app. table 2.
Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, “Incarceration & Social Inequality,” Dædalus (Summer 2010): 9.
For a powerful discussion of the phenomenon, please see, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, (New York: The New Press, 2010).
Marc Mauer and David Cole, “Five Myths about Americans in Prison,” Washington Post, June 17, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-incarceration/2011/06/13/AGfIWvYH_story.html.
Ian Ayres and Jonathan Borowsky, A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department, (ACLU of Southern California, October 2008).
Marc Mauer, “Addressing Racial Disparities in Incarceration,” The Prison Journal Supplement 91 (3) (2011), 88S.
Alfred Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura, “Paying a Price, Long after the Crime,” New York Times, January 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/paying-a-price-long-after-the-crime.html.
There are more than 38,000 punitive provisions that apply to people convicted of crimes, pertaining to everything from public housing to welfare assistance to occupational licenses. More than two-thirds of the states allow hiring and professional-licensing decisions to be made on the basis of an arrest alone. Rabiah Alicia Burks, “Laws Keep Ex-Offenders from Finding Work, Experts Say,” American Bar Association News Service July 26, 2011, http://www.abanow.org/2011/07/laws-keep-ex-offenders-from-finding-work-experts-say/.
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© 2013 Abbe Smith and Monroe H. Freedman
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Johnson, V.B. (2013). Defending Civil Rights. In: Smith, A., Freedman, M.H. (eds) How Can You Represent Those People?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311955_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311955_7
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