Faculty Bibliography
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Recent conflicts on campus have featured as antagonists proponents of racial justice versus proponents of civil liberties. Many in both camps identify as liberals. A dose of recollection might help dissipate this avoidable and politically destructive strife.
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A great many Americans, especially African Americans, are in a mood of despair upon witnessing a president of the United States winking at neo-Confederates, neo- Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen, and doing everything in his power to expunge the achievements of his predecessor, a man who came to be known less for his race than for his decency, dignity, and honor. Far too little notice, for example, was given to the remarkable May 19 speech by Mayor Mitch Landrieu explaining the decision of the New Orleans municipal government to remove from places of public honor three monuments celebrating Confederate generals and one celebrating the violent overthrow of the state's multiracial Reconstruction government. Folks numbering in the millions and of all complexions are selfconsciously engaging in countless acts of protest: marching, organizing study groups, volunteering legal expertise, donating money to institutions dedicated to the preservation of threatened values-the NAACP, the ACLU, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice-and resolving in numberless diverse ways to become more active, informed, influential.
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The article discusses the history and legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court case Walker v City of Birmingham, particularly its significance to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jim Crowism in Alabama under then-governor George Corley Wallace.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Judge J. Skelly Wright and the Racial Desegregation of Louisiana, 61 Loy. L. Rev. 57 (2015).
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According to Joseph, "’What We Want’ intellectually disarmed some of Carmichael’s fiercest critics and in the process announced SNCC’s Chairman as a formidable thinker." According to Joseph, Black Power is a "still-powerful diagnosis of America’s tortured racial history" and "an intellectually rigorous and theoretically subtle political treatise whose unexpected breadth and depth surprised critics." Devoting less than a page to this episode, Joseph alludes to it as if readers should be so familiar with the dispute that further elaboration isn’t needed. [...]whether or not readers are familiar with it, the contest between Lewis and Carmichael was so important and remains sufficiently divisive that it warrants comprehensive evaluation. According to Bloom and Martin: Police officers reacted, several flipping loose the little straps that held their pistols in their holsters.
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This essay contends that, despite its revisionist ethos, Professor Ackerman’s We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution is conventional in its assessment of Brown v. Board of Education. Ackerman praises Brown as “the greatest judicial opinion of the twentieth century.” But the Supreme Court in Brown evaded offering a candid explanation of the white supremacist purpose animating de jure racial segregation. Absent from the most honored race relations decision in American constitutional law is any express reckoning with racism.
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For Discrimination is at once the definitive reckoning with one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues and a principled work of advocacy for clearly defined justice. What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy gives us a concise and deeply personal overview of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations.
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Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency. Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency. Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history. Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.
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Kennedy grapples with a stigmatized phrase: "selling out," or racial betrayal, a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the changing meanings of the term and shows how its usage bedevils blacks and whites. He begins his exploration with a historical definition of the "black" community, accounting for who is considered black and who is not. He looks at the ways in which prominent members of that community--Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama, among others--have been stigmatized as sellouts. He outlines the history of the suspicion of racial betrayal among blacks, shows how current fears of selling out are expressed in thought and practice, and offers a case study of the quintessential "sellout"--Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most vilified black public official in American history.
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The article discusses Virginia Senator George Allen's troubled history with the "N" word. Allen has denied multiple reports that he commonly used the word in college. The "N" world is the subject of considerable debate and cultural prescriptions concerning its usage are predicated on a racial basis. Allen is likely in so much trouble for his past because of past and present racist actions.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Finding a Proper Name to Call Black Americans, J. Blacks Higher Educ. 46 (2005).
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Kennedy reviews Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger and From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Michael J. Klarman.
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Reviews the books "Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for equality," by Richard Kluger and "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and The Struggle for Racial Equality," by Michael J. Klarman.
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Randall L Kennedy, Schoolings in Equality: What Brown Did and Did Not Accomplish, New Republic, July 5, 2004, at 29 (reviewing Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (2004)).
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Randall L. Kennedy, Introduction in, Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy (William Lewis Burke & Belinda Gergel eds., 2004).
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Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy chronicles the life and accomplishments of the attorney who led the struggle for desegregation in South Carolina, served as a primary legal advocate in the national civil rights movement, and became South Carolina’s first African American U.S. District Court judge. In this volume, scholars of the civil rights era, fellow civil rights activists, jurists, attorneys, a governor, and an award-winning photojournalist join together to produce a multilayered biography of Matthew J. Perry. Collectively they bring to light the remarkable achievements of a man well known in his home state but sometimes obscured on the national stage by the shadows of Thurgood Marshall, J. Waties Waring, and Charles Hamilton Houston.This volume tells the story of Perry’s life, including his humble beginnings in Columbia, his service to the nation during wartime, his remarkable career as a creator of positive social change, and, finally, his achievements as a respected member of the federal judiciary. The contributors describe Perry’s courage, skills as an orator, quick legal mind, and genteel nature. They set his story in the turbulent civil–rights–era South, revealing how broad social, historical, and legal issues affected Perry’s life and shaped the trajectory of his activist and professional life. The volume underscores how Perry enabled his home state to escape from Jim Crow’s clutches with much less turmoil than many of its neighbors.Published in concert with the dedication of the Matthew J. Perry, Jr. United States Courthouse in Columbia, South Carolina, this life story portrays an esteemed juror whose grace and resiliency led South Carolina into the twentieth century.
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The article reviews the books "Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin," by John D'Emilio, and "Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin," edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise.
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Randall L. Kennedy, A Hard Lesson on Language, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 19, 2003 at B3.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Black and White: Interracial intimacy is a great step forward in building multiracial democracy, Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), Jan. 19, 2003.
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In Interracial Intimacies, Randall Kennedy hits a nerve at the center of American society: race relations and our most intimate ties to each other. Writing with the same piercing intelligence he brought to his national bestseller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Kennedy here challenges us to examine how prejudices and biases still fuel fears and inform our sexual, marital, and family choices. Analyzing the tremendous changes in the history of America’s racial dynamics, Kennedy takes us from the injustices of the slave era up to present-day battles over race matching adoption policies, which seek to pair children with adults of the same race. He tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics, the historic role of legal institutions in policing racial boundaries, and the real and imagined pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy. A bracing, much-needed look at the way we have lived in the past, Interracial Intimacies is also a hopeful book, offering a potent vision of our future as a multiracial democracy.
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Americans are already what racial purists have long feared: a people characterized by a great deal of racial admixture, or what many in the past referred to distastefully as "mongrelization." In pigmentation, width of noses, breadth of lips, texture of hair, and other telltale signs, the faces and bodies of millions of Americans bear witness to interracial sexual encounters. Some were joyful, passionate, loving affairs. Many were rapes. Others contained elements of both choice and coercion. These different kinds of interracial intimacy and sexual depredation all reached their peak in the United States during the age of slavery, and following the Civil War they decreased markedly. Since the end of the civil-rights revolution interracial dating, interracial sex, and interracial marriage have steadily increased, as has the number of children born of interracial unions. This development has prompted commentators to speak of the "creolization" or "browning" or "beiging" of America.
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Randall L. Kennedy, The Word 'Minority' Isn't Pejorative, Boston Globe, Jan. 8, 2002.
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The Boston City Council voted in December without dissent in favor of an ordinance that would have banned the use of the word “minority” from official city documents. City Council President Charles Yancey justified the ordinance on the grounds that the offending term "implies inferiority and inequity among Americans," that growing numbers of people within racial "minority" groups object to the word, and that the term is inaccurate, at least in Boston where blacks, Asians, and Hispanics now constitute the majority of the city population. The term [minority] is anachronistic and demeaning," Yancey is reported to have asserted. Another motivation is a desire to reject customs of identification that are designed to insult. Until the 1930s, even major newspapers and the United States Government Printing Office federal spelled "Negro" with a small "n" in deference to racial mores that minimized the social status of Negro Americans. Not until 1963 did the Board on Geographic Names remove "nigger" from federal government maps that previously bore such place names as Nigger Lake, Niggerhead Hill, and Old Nigger Creek. Contrary to what has been asserted by champions of this dubious linguistic reform, there is little evidence that substantial numbers of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, white Americans or any other sort of Americans object to the term. In August a news report in this newspaper asserted that the term "minority" is encountering "a growing chorus of criticism across the country."
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It’s "the nuclear bomb of racial epithets," a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it. Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence.
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"The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was the country's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. With perhaps 150 dead, 30 city blocks burned to the ground, and more than a thousand families homeless, the riot represented an unprecedented breakdown of the rule of law. It left the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma reduced to rubble." "In Reconstructing the Dreamland, Alfred Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Brophy offers a gut-wrenching portrait of mob violence and racism run amok, both on the night of the riot and the morning after, when a coordinated sunrise attack, accompanied by airplanes, stormed through Greenwood, torching and looting the community. Equallty important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted the looting, shootings, and burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it. The police department, fearing that Greenwood was erupting into a "negro uprising" (which Brophy shows was not the case), deputized white citizens haphazardly, gave out guns and badges with little background check, or sent men to hardware stores to arm themselves. Likewise, the Tulsa-based units of the National Guard acted unconstitutionally, arresting every black resident they could find, leaving Greenwood property vulnerable to the white mob, special deputies, and police that followed behind and burned it."--Jacket.
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Randall L. Kennedy, The N-Word Adjudicated, Am. Law., Feb. 2002, at 65.
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Randall L. Kennedy, The Case for Borking, Am. Prospect, July 2, 2001, at 26, 27.
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As the battle over the federal judiciary heats up, progressives must convince the general public of a basic proposition--the judiciary is an inescapably political branch of government whose agents, the judges, should be viewed in much the same way other politicians are. Progressives should strive to shape the judiciary in such a way that will produce good, sound, progressive rulings.
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Randall L. Kennedy, In Extremis, Am. Prospect, Feb. 26, 2001, at 14, 15.
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The reluctance of Senate Democrats to block John Ashcroft's nomination for Attorney General in President George W. Bush's administration highlights the weakness of the party as a vehicle for liberal politics. Many Democrats fear that Ashcroft will allow his fundamentalist religious beliefs to interfere with his ability to perform the job.
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