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Insurrection : rebellion, civil rights, and the paradoxical state of Black citizenship / Hawa Allan.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2022]Edition: First editionDescription: 261 pages ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781324003038
  • 1324003030
Subject(s):
Contents:
In the beginning was the word -- Be not afraid or dismayed -- So that every mouth may be silenced -- A house divided -- They will bring a mob against you -- Turn to him the other cheek -- Eye for an eye -- Disaster upon disaster -- The beginning and the end -- Exodus.
Summary: "Long before the uprising at the Capitol, the threat of insurrection has held a mirror to America's highest ideals and deepest fears. The Insurrection Act of 1807--passed amid pervasive fears of slave rebellion--authorizes the president to deploy federal troops to quell domestic uprisings. Invoked during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, the Act was deployed to enforce the promise of equal citizenship for Black Americans. But the Act has also authorized federal military intervention to suppress so-called race riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and during the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion; more recently, President Trump threatened to use the Act in response to the George Floyd racial justice protests. The invocation of the Act to either enforce civil rights or suppress riots, lawyer and cultural critic Hawa Allan argues, reflects the enduring struggle to incorporate Black Americans as full citizens of the United States. She demonstrates how the Insurrection Act exposes America's most enduring conflicts: over racial injustice, human rights, equal citizenship, and federal power"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 342.7306 A417 Available 33111010785885
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the Act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South. During the civil rights movement, it enabled the protection of black students who attended previously segregated educational institutions. Most recently, the Insurrection Act has been the vehicle for presidents to call upon federal troops to suppress so-called "race riots" like those in Los Angeles in 1992, and for them to threaten to do so in other cases of racial justice activism. Yet when the US Capitol was stormed in January 2021, the impulse to restore law and order and counter insurrectionary threats to the republic lay dormant.

Allan's distinctly literary voice underscores her paradigm-shifting reflections on the presence of fear and silence in history and their shadowy impact on the law. Throughout, she draws revealing insight from her own experiences as one of the only black girls in her leafy Long Island suburb, as a black lawyer at a predominantly white firm during a visit from presidential candidate Barack Obama, and as a thinker about the use and misuse of appeals to law and order.

Elegant and profound, deeply researched and intensely felt, Insurrection is necessary reading in our reckoning with structural racism, government power, and protest in the United States.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-244) and index.

In the beginning was the word -- Be not afraid or dismayed -- So that every mouth may be silenced -- A house divided -- They will bring a mob against you -- Turn to him the other cheek -- Eye for an eye -- Disaster upon disaster -- The beginning and the end -- Exodus.

"Long before the uprising at the Capitol, the threat of insurrection has held a mirror to America's highest ideals and deepest fears. The Insurrection Act of 1807--passed amid pervasive fears of slave rebellion--authorizes the president to deploy federal troops to quell domestic uprisings. Invoked during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, the Act was deployed to enforce the promise of equal citizenship for Black Americans. But the Act has also authorized federal military intervention to suppress so-called race riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and during the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion; more recently, President Trump threatened to use the Act in response to the George Floyd racial justice protests. The invocation of the Act to either enforce civil rights or suppress riots, lawyer and cultural critic Hawa Allan argues, reflects the enduring struggle to incorporate Black Americans as full citizens of the United States. She demonstrates how the Insurrection Act exposes America's most enduring conflicts: over racial injustice, human rights, equal citizenship, and federal power"-- Provided by publisher.

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