Everyone is invited to join us for our first book club discussion of 2022. We are reading Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court by Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner. RSVP to book club leader Nancy Barry for the zoom link.

From Harvard University Press: "In the first comprehensive accounting of the U.S. Supreme Court’s race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice.

The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice."

Orville Vernon Burton is the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute.

Armand Derfner is a nationally renowned civil rights attorney. He has argued and won five cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, and is frequently asked to testify before congressional committees about voting rights legislation, most recently during the 2006 debate to renew the Voting Rights Act. He is currently Distinguished Scholar in Constitutional Law at the Charleston School of Law.