Alexander Polikoff - Böcker

This "brief history" presents the essential story of the subordination of African Americans in the U.S., captured in a 1968 cartoon by Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti. The drawing is of a black man handcuffed to a wall with cuffs labeled "White Racism." The caption reads, "Why don’t they lift themselves up by their own bootstraps like we did?" Bootstraps shows just how little lift-up there has been, and how the handcuffs of white racism have been and continue to be the cause. Unique in its combination of comprehensiveness and brevity, Bootstraps is written in language for the general reader; yet its extensive endnotes will make it useful to both scholars and students. Its succinct overview of the subordination history includes an in-depth treatment of residential segregation – a legacy of slavery and a central problem of our time – and a response to the view that today’s racial inequality is due largely to African Americans’ own moral and cultural failures. By addressing a serious omission in the way we have educated our children, the book’s narration of our white racism history may make a contribution to a much-needed confrontation with our racist past.

In 1966, Alexander Polikoff, a thirty-nine-year old volunteer ACLU attorney and a partner in a Chicago law firm, met three friends to discuss a pro bono case. Over lunch, they talked about the Chicago Housing Authority construction program. All the new public housing, it seemed, was going into black neighborhoods. If discrimination was prohibited in public schools, wasn't it also prohibited in public housing? And so began Gautreaux v. CHA and HUD, a case that would roll on year after year, decade after decade, carrying Polikoff and his intrepid colleagues to the nation's Supreme Court. Despite legal roadblocks and political constraints, the case would set the stage for a nationwide experiment aimed at ending the concentration - and racialization - of poverty through public housing. Inspiring and absorbing, the narrative of Gautreaux as told by its principal lawyer moves with ease through local and national civil rights history. Ultimately, this story - itself a critical, still-unfolding chapter in recent American history - urges us to take an essential step toward ending racial inequality, which Alexis de Tocqueville prophetically named America's ""most formidable evil.