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A revealing legal journey through Alabama’s civil rights battles, exposing systemic discrimination and the enduring fight for justice via landmark Supreme Court cases

State of Segregation: America’s Freedom Rights Struggles, as Told by Alabama by Mark J. Tenhundfeld offers a compelling exploration of Alabama’s civil rights and civil liberties history through the lens of thirty-two pivotal US Supreme Court cases. Each case, rooted in Alabama’s social and legal conflicts, reveals the persistent struggle to fulfill the Constitution’s promises of equal protection and due process. From early twentieth-century challenges to the Alabama Constitution of 1901 to contemporary battles over gerrymandering, Tenhundfeld traces how discrimination was embedded in the state’s institutions—and how it was contested.

State of Segregation uniquely blends legal analysis, historical narrative, and social commentary to expose the deep-rooted systems of racial, gender, and class-based discrimination in Alabama. Tenhundfeld argues that while discrimination is the most defining feature of Alabama’s past, it remains the most difficult to confront. By illuminating the legal strategies used to uphold and dismantle injustice, State of Segregation contributes to the broader understanding of how historical inequities continue to shape modern society.

Accessible to general readers and scholars alike, this work stands apart by combining Alabama history, civil rights struggles, and Supreme Court jurisprudence into a single, powerful narrative. It offers both cautionary tales about the fragility of freedom and enduring lessons for today’s social justice advocates.

The U.S. Supreme Court increasingly matters in American political life when those across the political spectrum look at the Court for relief from policies they oppose and as another venue for advancing their own policy agendas. However, the evidence is mounting, to include this book in a big way, that courts are more of a sideshow to the culture war. While court decisions, especially Supreme Court decisions, do have importance, the decisions emanating from the Court reflect social, cultural, and political change that occurred long prior to their decision ever being made.

This book tests how much political and social change has been made primarily through Gerald Rosenberg’s framework from his seminal work, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change, but it also utilizes Daniel Elazar’s Political Culture Theory to explain state level variations in political and social change. The findings indicate that while courts are not powerless institutions, reformers will not have success unless supported by the public and the elected branches, and most specifically, that preexisting state culture is a determining factor in the amount of change courts make. In short, federalism still matters.

An associate justice on the renowned Warren Court whose landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned racial segregation in schools and other public facilities, Tom C. Clark was a crusader for justice throughout his long legal career. Among many tributes Clark received, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger opined that "no man in the past thirty years has contributed more to the improvement of justice than Tom Clark."

Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark is the first biography of this important American jurist. Written by his daughter, Mimi Clark Gronlund, and based on interviews with many of Clark's judicial associates, friends, and family, as well as archival research, it offers a well-rounded portrait of a lawyer and judge who dealt with issues that remain in contention today—civil rights, the rights of the accused, school prayer, and censorship/pornography, among them. Gronlund explores the factors in her father's upbringing and education that helped form his judicial philosophy, then describes how that philosophy shaped his decisions on key issues and cases, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the investigation of war fraud, the Truman administration's loyalty program (an anti-communist effort), the Brown decision, Mapp v. Ohio (protections against unreasonable search and seizure), and Abington v. Schempp (which overturned a state law that required reading from the Bible each day in public schools).