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Carey McWilliams
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Jesse Helms, American Bigot
Conservatives & The American Right
Lisa Duggan: In death it's easy to dismiss Jesse Helms as a colorful buffoon or a relic of the bad old days of segregation and sexism, but that doesn't do his bigotry justice.
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Supreme Politics
The Supreme Court's final rulings remind us that civil rights and a sane vision of the Constitution rest with the next President's judicial appointments.
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A Blow Against Gitmo
David Cole: By a single vote, the Supreme Court stood up to an Administration that has declared war on the rule of law.
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Supreme Court Deals Death Blow to Gitmo
Jonathan Hafetz: The Supreme Court delivers a dramatic blow to the President's lawless detention policies, overturns an effort by the previous Congress to eliminate the right of habeas corpus and sounds the death knell for Guantánamo Bay prison.
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Protecting the Rights of Millionaires
Laura MacCleery: By equating money with free speech, is the Supreme Court defending the right of the rich to steal elections?
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Did Race Win the Race for Hillary?
Gaiutra Bahadur: Does living in mixed communities make people less or more vulnerable to campaigning that plays on ethnic and racial divisions?
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House of Cards
Patricia J. Williams: t would be truly tragic if John McCain strolls into the White House while we argue over who has it worse, black men or white women.
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Looking Back, Looking Forward
Various Contributors: A forum with Noam Chomsky, Mary Robinson, Mary Gordon, Eric Foner, Van Jones and many others.
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The Costs of War
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Debating the Great Debate
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Happy 30th Anniversary Discovery/The Nation
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How to Get Out of Iraq
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Beyond Black, White and Brown
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The Climax of an Era
Various Contributors: This forum, from the May 29, 1954, issue of The Nation, is a special selection from The Nation Digital Archive. If you want to read everything The Nation has ever published on the education and race, click here for information on how to acquire individual access to the Archive--an electronic database of every Nation article since 1865.
The dead no less than the living must have rejoiced. Among the ghosts that smiled with pleasure--it is somehow easier to imagine them smiling than cheering--were Homer Adolph Plessy, the one-eighth-Negro plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the iniquitous "separate but equal" doctrine was first announced, and his counsel, Albion Winegar Tourgée--who is better known, perhaps, for his novels about the Reconstruction period. Another beaming ghost would be Justice John Marshall Harlan whose great dissents in this and the Civil Rights Cases have at long last been fully vindicated.
Not every ghost smiled, we may be sure. Glum and dour must have been the ghost of the late Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, but in this case, happily, there was compensation. For only a week or so before the Supreme Court's decision a life-size bronze statue of the Senator was unveiled in the Mississippi Capitol. "His imperfections were infinitesimal," said Mississippi's Secretary of State in unveiling the statue, "when compared to the magnitude of his contribution to mankind."
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