In the first comprehensive accounting of the US Supreme Court's race-related jurisprudence a
distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted
by racial injustice. The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended
segregation was a guarantor of fair trials and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this
narrative derives mostly from a short period from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then
the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights while the fifty years
since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice. From the Cherokee
Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act
historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light
on the Court's race record--a legacy at times uplifting but more often distressing and
sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century
Reconstruction amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the
twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights.
Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court's race jurisprudence.
Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America's racial minorities the authors probe
the parties involved the justices' reasoning and the impact of individual rulings. We learn
of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall villains including Roger Taney and enigmas like Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the
Supreme Court but as this sweeping history also reminds us the justices still have the power
to make good on the country's promise of equal rights for all.
