Their accomplices wore robes How the Supreme Court chained black America to the bottom of a racial caste system

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Legal scholar Starkey (In Defense of Uncle Tom) delves into the Supreme Court's role in enabling American racism in this searing survey that paints the court as complicit in centuries of discrimination. Though the Reconstruction amendments--the 13th, 14th and 15th, which Starkey labels "the constitutional Trinity"--should have yielded real freedom for Black Americans, they didn't, and Starkey points to Supreme Court decisions as the main reason why, contending that the judicial branch, more so than the executive or legislative branches, was the federal government's "most indispensable ally of caste preservationism." The court's post-Reconstruction backlash began with the unanimous 1880 decision Rives v. Virginia, which held that even if Black defendants were indicted and tried by whites-only juries, and even if the county where they stood trial had never had any Black jurors, those facts alone would not amount to an equal protection violation; instead, proof must be provided to show that a discriminatory result was intentional--a requirement not included in the Trinity, and which had lasting impacts. Other examples range from 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, which approved "separate but equal" facilities based on race, to 2013's Shelby v. Holder majority opinion, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Vividly narrated and astute, this is a damning reassessment of the judicial branch's civil rights legacy. (June)

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Review by Library Journal Review

The success and the sustainability of democracy in the United States is based on shared and common goals of all its citizens. One is the balance of power of the three branches of government: the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The other is representation and self-governance through voting. Legal scholar Starkey (In Defense of Uncle Tom) precisely outlines, within the historical context of the United States, how the Supreme Court has repeatedly and specifically denied or significantly delayed full rights of citizenship to Black people, including refusing to acknowledge illegality of the U.S. institution of enslavement. Faced with Constitutional amendments that were designed to protect formerly enslaved Black Americans during Emancipation and Reconstruction, the court has interpreted them in ways that significantly hampered their effectiveness. Starkey asserts that the Supreme Court is a partner in establishing and preserving a racial caste system in the U.S., enshrining white Americans' power and economic advantages through enslavement and the exploitation of Black labor. He does so with the full backing of his extensive research, whose findings may be shocking and disturbing to some audiences. VERDICT Starkey masterfully uses a unique blend of storytelling and legal documentation to share his declarations excellently.--Laura Ellis

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A searing indictment of judicially condoned--and even enshrined--racism in American law. Former Villanova law professor Starkey, author ofIn Defense of Uncle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty (2015), here proposes that what he calls "the constitutional Trinity--the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments" might have been enough to ensure "complete Black freedom" had the Supreme Court not consistently aligned itself with "caste preservationists" who, from the time of Reconstruction onward, have created laws and policies that support the subordination of Black Americans. One early test concerned whether now-emancipated Blacks could serve on juries, which West Virginia had banned. In Starkey's extensive account of the legal arguments that followed, West Virginia's highest court had ruled that the inability to serve on a jury did not mean "the denial of equal protection of the laws," a neat bit of semantic parsing that provides the basis for Starkey's revealing analysis of how the law both interprets and constructs the Constitution: "The country's foundational text includes a guarantee of equality powerful enough to combat any pathogen of oppression. What it achieves depends on interpretation." One leg of interpretation is intent, he adds, and intent is always difficult to establish. From that carefully elaborated starting point, Starkey moves on to examine some of the most critically important legal cases touching on racial justice, among themPlessy,Brown, andBakke, always with twists of judicial interpretation that, he argues convincingly, never quite deliver promised equality to Black stakeholders in the polity. Indeed, since the Reagan era, the ascendant conservative moment has insisted that whites are the victims in "affirmative action, quotas, and other race--conscious programs geared toward atoning for past racial injustices that needed no atoning," and the tenor of current politics suggests that no improvement is in the offing. A powerfully argued study of a legal system that favors those who "persevere in undermining Black freedom." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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