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407 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1973)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0407 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE This volume on blacks and the law barely scratches the surface of the subject, and it could not do more. Although most of the topics treated in this issue of THE ANNALS were legal abstractions twenty years ago-one year before the decision in Brown v. Board of Education-today a number of the subjects fill volumes of law books and have had major impact on society that has not even begun to be analyzed. For example, there are now six or more large volumes consisting only of fair employment decisions, regulations, and other law. There is a comparable body of legal materials in the fair housing area. There have been hundreds of school integration decisions. Capital punishment as a racial issue was barely perceived two decades ago, and the capital punishment litigation, as well as the Supreme Court decisions outlawing it, could not have been foreseen. Although the Fifteenth Amendment and implementing legislation are more than a century old, the right to vote became reality only following the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and now there are hundreds of southern black elected officials; the number in the North has grown greatly as well. There is no space to consider the criminal law, except in the most general way, or to discuss welfare, or equalization of municipal facilities, or prisoners' rights, or the immense changes in the law governing public demonstrations that came out of the sit-ins and freedom rides, or innumerable other areas where law is significant with regard to race. Nor could any of the treated areas be covered with the detail it deserves. Moreover, there has been no opportunity to approach the issues we dealt with from all of the perspectives that might be inter- esting or instructive. The volume is heavily weighted with the views of lawyers, although they are not the conventional private practicing lawyers. And the rhetoric of some of the pieces is less detached than is conventional in academic journals. A comprehensive treatment would have views from the various social sciences, government officials, civil rights leaders, and others. A study of blacks and the law today, if really comprehensive, would constitute an encyclopedia of virtually all of American life today. Nevertheless, this volume does give a good indication of how much race relations has changed in two decades and where some aspects of it stand today. Judge Higginbotham's article describes the predisposition of many judges on racial questions from 1619-1896. It was they who wrote much of the law we are still trying to change. Judge Hastie's article describes the legal campaign, in which he was a participant, that led to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Marian Wright Edelman writes of how the Brown deci- sion, interacting with political developments in the country, has affected desegre- gation of the schools. She, too, is a participant in the developments of which she writes. And Robert L. Herbst describes the litigation strategy involved in the effort to apply Brown to northern, often called de facto, school segregation. Albert J. Rosenthal and William B. Gould tell of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They have worked on some of the important cases in which it has developed. Originally placed in the 1964 Act over the objections of the Kennedy administration, Title VII may be having considerable force in upgrading the status of blacks in employment, although this assessment is admittedly one of general impression, and there has not yet been a statistical measure of the dif- ference. Robert McKay details the history of voting rights, the impact of the 1965 legislation, and the spinning out of the implications of voting law for black ix

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