Race and the Constitution

Abstract

When asked by the staff of the Law Review for a working title for my talk, I volunteered "Race and the Constitution," one that suggests that I have come prepared to rehearse the history of racial discrimination from the arrival ofAfrican slaves atJamestown, Virginia in 1619 to the current national debate over the issue of racial profiling. That, I want to assure you, is not what I plan to do this afternoon given the limited time I have available. Rather, I want to talk about race in particular and civil rights in general, and how we find some of us, in the year 2000, fearful that the Supreme Court is on the brink of destroying much ofwhat Congress has contributed to the cause of civil rights over the past fifty years.