BOOK REVIEW

Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases by Viet Thanh Nguyen,  Jacqueline Woodson, and 39 more. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020. 336 pages. hardcover. $27.99.

and

Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America by Ellis Cose. The New Press. 480 pages. hardcover. $29.99. To be published August 4, 2020.

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union is publishing these two histories. Both are well worth reading.

Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases was curated in cooperation with the ACLU by authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. It is an anthology of essays about important cases in the organization’s history that includes prominent cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona, as well as others whose outcomes influenced the law and living. For example, Hector Tobar discusses Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the Miranda rights. There also are essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and others. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America is a history of the ACLU by the nationally celebrated journalist, bestselling author (The Rage of a Privileged Class, The End of Anger), and the ACLU's first official writer-in-residence.

The book tells the story of the ACLU as well as the fight for rights that were legal but not enjoyed by all. It chronicles the ACLU's involvement in work around World War I, the Red Scare, the Scottsboro Boys’ trials, Japanese American internment, McCarthyism, Vietnam, 9/11, Edward Snowden, and the current American President. 

BOOK REVIEW

Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Kerri K. Greenidge. Liveright, 2019. 432 pages. hardcover. $35.00.

Interesting biography of William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934) who founded the Boston-based black weekly newspaper The Guardian in the first three decades of the 20th century. Instead of the accomodationist racial policies of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated a radical vision of black liberation that eventually produced leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. The the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key at Harvard University, he also was active in protest movements for civil rights during the 1900s and 1910s. During a 1914 meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, he protested Wilson's introduction of racial segregation into the federal workplace. He joined with W. E. B. Du Bois in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The author teaches in Tufts University’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. She also is director of Tufts' program in American studies and co-director of the African American Trail Project.

Selected in the New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2019.

Recommended.

J. Charles Jones, Civil Rights Activist, 82

A lawyer, Jones led in the early 1960s multiple lunch-counter sit-ins and voter-registration drives in various Southern states and protested discriminatory housing practices near military bases around Washington, DC and suburban Maryland and Virginia. 


A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which linked young people with the larger civil rights movement, Jones organized some of the first lunch-counter sit-ins in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

In the early 1960s, Jones was one of the Freedom Riders, a group that protested racial segregation on interstate buses in the South. He led voter-registration efforts in Georgia and Mississippi. 

Jones' work in housing discrimination also produced change. As the president of ACCESS — the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs — Jones identified dozens of apartment buildings and housing developments that forbade black residents, despite when they were members of the military. In 1966, Jones walked the entire length of the Capital Beltway, carrying a sign reading “End Apartment Segregation.” In 1966, after a 14-mile march to protest discriminatory housing policies in Northern Virginia, police were needed to keep Jones and his group separate from members of the Ku Klux Klan and others wearing Nazi swastikas. His advocacy worked. In 1967, US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's order prohibiting military personnel from living in segregated housing within about three miles of Maryland's Andrews Air Force Base. 

Jones was arrested multiple times at demonstrations, including twice with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., with whom he was on a first-name basis.

Read the January 18, 2020 Washington Post article.

Watch a 2012 interview with Jones on YouTube.

MARYLAND STATE HOUSE HONORS VERDA FREEMAN WELCOME, A CIVIL RIGHTS FIGHTER

Welcome becomes the first black person to have her portrait hung in a State House chamber. Her portrait (above) replaced a 115-year-old canvas of a white former governor born when slavery was legal.

In 1962, Welcome was the first black woman in US elected to a state senate. Representing Baltimore, she fought for making interracial marriage legal, equal pay for woman, outlawing the harassment of welfare recipients, and forbidding racial discrimination in public places.

Before her political service, Welcome had been a teacher in the Baltimore public schools for 11 years. A Democrat, she was elected to the House of Delegates in 1958. She served until she retired in 1982.

Read the January 19, 2020 Washington Post article.

Read the Maryland General Services article.

Read Welcome's April 25, 1990 New York Times obituary.

Book Review

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

Spiegel & Grau, 2015. 368 pages. $17.00 paperback.

This highly praised reprinted book recently was featured in the HBO documentary "True Justice," and is being made into a film starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. It is, as the Amazon blurb states: " Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice." The book also is a winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction.

Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He has cases for many condemned prisoners, argued five times before the US Supreme Court, and won praise for his work fighting bias against the poor and people of color. 

NEW HUD PROPOSAL WILL WEAKEN FAIR HOUSING ENFORCEMENT EVEN MORE

According to a story in the Washington Post on January 3, 2020, the Trump administration will propose a new rule as early as January 6th that would reduce the requirement of local governments to meet fair housing obligations.

Among the changes sought by HUD are "redefining what it means to promote fair housing, eliminating the assessment used to address barriers to racial integration, and encouraging cities to remove regulations that stand in the way of affordable housing, according to the proposed rule obtained by The Washington Post."

The proposed rules are intended to increase so-called “fair housing choice” by providing more housing along with safe and sanitary housing conditions that supposedly will better allow families to live where they want — instead of racially integrating neighborhoods and communities.

HUD also wants to rank communities based on housing costs and fair market rents, and then award the best performers priority status for federal housing grants. These incentives are intended to increase the availability of affordable housing.

The proposed rules will be published in the Federal Register ahead of a 60-day public comment period.

Attorney General Frosh Joins Twenty-State Coalition Opposing Federal Efforts to Put Haitian-Born Residents at Risk of Deportation

Attorneys General Argue that Termination of Temporary Protected Status

for Haiti is Illegal

Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh joined on December 30, 2019 a group of state attorneys general in challenging the Trump administration’s effort to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian nationals.  If the administration is allowed to move forward, Haitian TPS holders in Maryland, other states, and the District of Columbia would lose their legal status, leaving them vulnerable to deportation. 

In an amicus brief filed in support of the plaintiffs in Saget v. Trump before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the coalition argue that the administration did not have a reasonable reason for the move, which they hold violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).  The brief urges the Court of Appeals to affirm the lower court’s ruling and uphold a nationwide injunction against the termination to prevent widespread harm -  deportation - in the amici states.

In the brief, the attorneys general argue that the District Court’s rejection of the administration’s decision should be upheld because: The administration did not justify its decision to revoke TPS for Haiti. Ending TPS for Haiti would harm tens of thousands of American families. Separating families creates a significant economic burden for states. State economies and critical industries would suffer if Haitian residents lose TPS. Public safety would be harmed if these residents are worried about deportation. In addition to Maryland, the brief was joined by the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. (From a press release by the Attorney General, December 30, 2019.)

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