Justice Deferred: Race & The Supreme Court

Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court by civil rights attorney Armand Derfner and historian Vernon Burton tells the story of race by laying bare the complicity of the Court, narrating how we got to where we are.  “Race” is America’s most salient topic today, and the Supreme Court a close second. These topics are combined in Justice Deferred. The book covers slavery, its aftermath, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and its dismantling, and modern problems, including criminal justice.

Orville Vernon Burton is the Matthew Perry Distinguished Chair of History at Clemson University. He is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar at the University of Illinois. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton. Burton is a prolific author on race relations and voting rights.  In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions (1985) broke new ground in the study of Black and white families.  Prize-winning The Age of Lincoln (2007) used Lincoln as a fulcrum to tell the story of 19th century America.

Armand Derfner, a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, has been a civil rights lawyer for more than a half century.  As part of that work, he helped shape the Voting Rights Act in a series of major Supreme Court cases and in work with Congress to help draft voting rights and other civil rights laws.  He is currently Distinguished Scholar in Constitutional Law at the Charleston School of Law.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.