The Dark Past

We need this book. The Dark Past brilliantly exposes the US Supreme Court’s historic role in sustaining slavery, segregation, racial discrimination and inequality, and white supremacy. It is depressing-and indispensable. * Laura Kalman, Distinguished Research Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara *William M. Wiecek’s coverage of the US Supreme Court’s rulings involving African Americans is comprehensive, and he displays a command over vast swaths of Supreme Court and constitutional history. His ability to synthesize massive amounts of scholarship is astounding. This book is an important scholarly contribution and a valuable resource. * Christopher W. Schmidt, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States, Chicago-Kent College of Law *The Dark Past deftly documents how the US Supreme Court has surreptitiously transformed the Constitution’s promise of racial equality into a tool that preserves white supremacy by denying the legal relevance of structural discrimination against non-whites. I was surprised by how many new facts and insights I discovered in this engaging narrative, which illuminates the personalities, alliances, and strategies of the Justices in their infamous past decisions and identifies the contemporary echoes of those decisions in the current Court’s efforts to ensure that genuine racial equality remains hopelessly out of reach. * Girardeau A Spann, James and Catherine Denny Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center *

William M. Wiecek is Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, where he was appointed the Congdon Professor of Public Law, with a joint appointment in the history department of the Maxwell School. He is the author of The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 and The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886-1937, among other titles.