San Antonio College Library

Unavailable for a decade, now completely updated to the 1990s, this landmark book is a powerful indictment of federal use of the Constitution to maintain a racist status quo. Constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry analyzes the reasons why millions of African Americans whose lives have improved enormously, both socially and economically, are still at risk of police abuse and largely unprotected from bias crimes. From the arrival of the first twenty...

The United States has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's incarcerated. We have more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. There are more jails and prisons than degree-granting colleges and universities, and in many places more people live behind bars than on college campuses. Mass incarceration has become a lucrative industry, and the criminal justice...

Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, this book lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts. The author's analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug...

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller "Devil in the Grove" comes a gripping story of sex, race, class, corruption, and the arc of justice. In December 1957, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wealthy young wife of a citrus baron, is raped in her home while her husband is away. Journalist Mabel Norris Reese and an inexperienced young lawyer pursue the case, winning unlikely allies and chasing down leads until at long last they begin...

The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black boy who whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955, was a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement. Although Till's killers were apprehended, they were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury and proceeded to sell their story to a journalist, providing grisly details of the murder. Three months after Till's body was recovered, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.