Person: Mack, Kenneth
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Mack
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Kenneth
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Mack, Kenneth
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Publication The Two Modes of Inclusion(2016-05-10) Mack, KennethThis paper argues that, as the civil rights movement emerged and began to make its claims for inclusion of African Americans in institutions of higher education, two modes of inclusion emerged — two ideas of what it might mean to “include” previously excluded groups within educational institutions. The first mode of inclusion meant simple participation in, rather than alteration of, main- stream institutions of life. While first-mode inclusion might require the removal of certain formal barriers to participation and good treatment of the included persons, it did not appear to threaten the larger community’s basic social organization. However, in the background there remained a second, far more disruptive idea: that inclusion required the transformation of some of the fundamental rules that governed educational institutions themselves and of the larger society that surrounded them. Civil rights claims often styled themselves in the language of the first mode, but when they were done being articulated and defined by those who pushed for inclusion, they often, subtly but inexorably, slid into the second. This paper argues that the same tension between first- and second-mode inclusion claims has emerged repeatedly since that time as various groups have invoked the legacy of the civil rights movement, including in the activities of those who have recently styled themselves advocates of racial inclusion, and of intellectual diversity, in higher education.Publication Critical Race Theory and Scholarly Analyses of Race in France(Harvard Law School, 2021-12-13) Mack, KennethAbstract: This preface to a special issue on Race and the Law of La Revue des Droits de l'Homme, presents a genealogy of Critical Race Theory, framed in light of the tendency in France to avoid fulsome scholarly discussions of racial identity, racial inequality and racial attitudes. The preface also frames its genealogy in light of political attacks on CRT that have been launched both in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Its genealogy frames the origins of CRT in the context of increased scholarly interest in race as a social construction during the 1980s and 1990s, and in the additional context of 1970s, 80s, and 90s scholarship that questioned universalizing and colorblind legal regimes of nations that purported to guarantee equality without regard to race. It also locates CRT within the larger universe of Critical Theory, including Critical Legal Studies, and examines concepts such as social construction, intersectionality, whiteness, structural racism and identity performance.Publication A Social History of Everyday Practice: Sadie T.M. Alexander and the Incorporation of Black Women into the American Legal Profession, 1925-1960(Cornell Law Review, 2002) Mack, KennethPublication The Obama Phenomenon: How Past and Present Resonate(Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 2004) Mack, KennethPublication Law and Local Knowledge in the History of the Civil Rights Movement(Harvard Law Review Pub. Association, 2012) Mack, KennethBook Review Essay focusing on Tomiko Brown Nagin's Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and The Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2012), which assesses recent political science-oriented scholarship that argues that Brown v. Board of Education had little effect on the civil rights movement and was counterproductive in the short term. The review argues that this scholarship is ahistorical and that Courage to Dissent serves as a useful corrective.Publication Bringing the Law Back into the History of the Civil Rights Movement(Cambridge University Press, 2009) Mack, KennethIt is a pleasure to comment on Nancy MacLean's hugely important book Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace as an example of what I might call “bringing the law back in” to the history of the civil rights movement. A generation ago, the idea that law needed to be introduced into this history would have seemed nonsensical. At that time, law provided one of the central touchstones in the historical narrative of the struggle for racial equality in American life. Scholarship in this area built on C. Vann Woodward's pioneering work on the rise of Jim Crow, which itself was written shortly after Woodward's participation in the Brown v. Board of Education litigation. The dominant narrative began with the legal construction of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century and continued with the founding of the NAACP. Other actors came along at various points in the story, prominent among them New Deal–era racial liberals, World War II–era activists, midcentury social scientists, Southern civil rights leaders and movements, and eventually black power. The end point was marked by the litigation and legislative victories of the 1950s and '60s, which finally wrote back into law what had been taken away by segregationist white Southerners and a compliant Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century. The implicit methodological take on law was that state and federal statutes, as well as court decisions, provided an important impetus, or at the very least a validation, for racial change—first for white Southerners as they created the Jim Crow legal regime and later for segregation's opponents as they reinscribed racial equality onto the core narrative of American life.Publication Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931-1941(Organization of American Historians -- Oxford Journals, 2006) Mack, KennethWhat was the role of law and lawyers in the civil rights movement? Recent work has emphasized a tension between the legal strategies of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a commitment to mass movement politics and economic populism. This article takes up that question by examining the everyday lives and litigation performances of depression-era black lawyers affiliated with the NAACP, arguing that the scholarly debate should be reframed through attention to the role of courtroom performances as crucial sites where race and professional identity was made and remade for civil rights lawyers such as Charles Houston, Raymond Pace Alexander, William Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall. Responding to the critics on their left, the lawyers fashioned a new professional identity that melded the NAACP's traditional approaches and concerns with a commitment to mass democratic politics.Publication The Myth of Brown?(Yale Law School, 2005) Mack, KennethThis Article argues that scholarly accounts of civil rights lawyering and politics have emphasized, incorrectly, a narrative that begins with Plessy v. Ferguson and ends with Brown v. Board of Education. That traditional narrative has relied on a legal liberal view of civil rights politics—a view that focuses on court-based and rights-centered public law litigation. That narrative has, in turn, generated a revisionist literature that has critiqued legal liberal politics. This Article contends that both the traditional and revisionist works have focused on strains of civil rights politics that appear to anticipate Brown, and thus have suppressed alternative visions of that politics. This Article attempts to recover these alternatives by analyzing the history of civil rights lawyering between the First and Second World Wars. It recovers debates concerning intraracial African-American identity and anti-segregation work, lawyers’ work and social change, rights-based advocacy and legal realism, and the legal construction of racial and economic inequality that have been elided in the existing literature. It thus contends that the scholarly inquiries that have been generated in both the traditional and the revisionist work should be reframed.Publication The Roots of Clarence Thomas' Black Burden(2012) Mack, KennethPublication Law, Society, Identity and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation on Tennessee Railroads, 1875-1905(1999) Mack, KennethThis article reexamines the well-known debate over the origins of de jure segregation in the American South, which began in 1955 with the publication of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Arguing that the debate over Woodward's thesis implicates familiar but outmoded ways of looking at socio-legal change and Southern society, the article proposes a reorientation of this debate using theoretical perspectives taken from recent work by legal historians, critical race theorists, and historians of race, class, and gender. This article examines the advent of railroad segregation in Tennessee (the state that enacted the nation's first railroad segregation statute) in order to sketch out these themes, arguing that de jure segregation was brought about by a dialectic between legal, social, and identity-based phenomena. This dialectic did not die out with the coming of de jure segregation; rather it continued into the modem era.