Rick,
Why is it preferable to attack felon disfranchisement in only one
arena? Why not several simultaneously -- state courts, federal
courts, state legislatures, congressional hearings, etc.?
I've long been working on 19th century legislation and litigation
about racial discrimination in schools. In state after state, city
after city, the story is the same: petitions to school boards, if
unsuccessful, led to legal cases. If those were unsuccessful, many
of the same agitators turned to the state legislature. After
legislation was passed, which often took many years, activists had to
petition school boards or infiltrate them. If that failed, it was
back to court. The point is that even before the 14th Amendment was
passed (as I pointed out in a 1988 Northwestern ULR article), activists
realized that far from slowing down progressive change, struggles in
several political arenas were complementary and hastened political
change. The one exception to this rule is that successes on the
state level by 1901 in every non-southern state with any appreciable
number of African-Americans except Indiana may have removed some of the
pressure for congressional action.
I testified in Underwood v. Hunter in Alabama in the early 1980s,
and I'm working in Farrakhan v. Gregoire for the NAACP-LDF now. As
you know, I'm reviewing two books on felon disfranchisement for ELJ,
books that represent scholarly efforts to move the felon disfranchisement
issue ahead, and which feed the struggles in courts as well as
legislatures. It's a terrible mistake to conclude, as Michael
Klarman did by suppressing widespread evidence, which I and perhaps
others forcefully pointed out to him long before he published his book on
school desegregation, that the legislative and judicial paths are
mutually exclusive. They're not. Put them both together and
the highway to reform is broader.
Morgan
Prof. of History and Social Science,
Caltech
snail mail: 228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125-7700
phone 626-395-4080, fax 626-405-9841
home page:
<
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html>
to order Colorblind Injustice:
<
http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-388.html>
"Peace if possible, Justice at any rate" -- Wendell Phillips