Tag: Shelby County

The Fair Housing Act: How fair is Fair?

Cara L. Gallagher, weekend contributor

There was a case argued two weeks ago that I’ll admit I paid no attention to when I created my roster of Cases to Watch in the OT14: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project.  A woman who teaches a course on social justice in urban areas asked if I knew anything about this case after it popped up on her Twitter feed.  Her students were interested in the impact of the case and, as many of them had just taken my law and politics course and knew the ideologies of the Supreme Court bench, wanted to know more about it so they could make predictions about the outcome.  As an educator and (self-described) specialist of Supreme Court activities, I did a deep dive into researching it in an effort to help with this teachable moment and immediately moved it into the top five cases to watch this term.

This is a case about a specific part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, that iconic piece of legislation signed one week after Dr. King was shot, called the Fair Housing Act (FHA). Continue reading “The Fair Housing Act: How fair is Fair?”

Selma’s error of omission: The specter of Shelby County

Selma

By: Cara L. Gallagher, weekend contributor

In one of the opening scenes in Selma, Ava DuVernay’s depiction of Dr. King’s quest for legislation that would end decades of disenfranchisement in the American South, Oprah plays a woman jammed up by Black codes prevalent in the South in 1965. A voter registrar quizzes her with questions that neither she nor any educated person of the time could possibly answer. She fails his test and is once again denied the right to register to vote. Right away we learn Selma is clearly not just a biographical film about Dr. King and other Civil Rights legends like Congressmen John Lewis, but also about the pain, shame, and violence endured by these men and women to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed.

A group of fellow history teachers and I went to see an early release of Selma last week. I had mixed feelings about it. Continue reading “Selma’s error of omission: The specter of Shelby County”