Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How The Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System

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)