Race and the Supreme Court are two of America’s most salient topics today. Historian Burton and legal scholar Derfner dovetail these topics in Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court.

Race is a social construct, it does not exist, but American history and our legal institutions have created it as a supposedly legitimate legal category that has shaped our history. The court continues to play a major but changing role in how we construct race in U.S. history. The Virginia judge who convicted Richard and Mildred Loving of unlawful “miscegenation” in the 1960s said “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red and he placed them on separate continents. . . . that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” The Supreme Court treats all these groups and so does Justice Deferred.

The book is a sweeping history from the 17^th century through 2021; from origins and growth of enslavement, its aftermath, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and its dismantling, and modern-day problems such as affirmative action and criminal justice. Two centuries of Supreme Court cases carry the story of African Americans from The Amistad and Dred Scott through Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and the two-part destruction of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and 2021.

The authors feature other races’ adventures with the Supreme Court, from the early 19^th century Cherokee Trail of Tears through the 21^st century Cherokee baby adoption case. Between come the “Yellow Peril” cases (Chinese Exclusion and Japanese “Gentleman’s Agreement”), and emergence of Latinx as a distinct group in Court doctrine. And in World War II, while the Court was beginning to recognize African American rights, it was also upholding Japanese internment,

All these strands are woven together in an analysis illuminating this country’s color, past and present, and produces several unifying themes, including:

Choice: the role of Justices’ choice in making decisions and how those choices have changed with time.

Time itself: We have had 12 generations of slavery and Jim Crow, followed by slightly more than two generations of trying to overcome those evils.

Law and government action: Not neutral through time, but rigidly supporting inequality for those 12 generations, but seemingly reversed since then – or perhaps not.

The story has its peculiarities., Justice John Marshall Harlan was the 19^th century’s Great Dissenter for African Americans, but strikingly deaf to Asian minorities, while Justice David Brewer, the most hostile to claims of African Americans, was Asian minorities’ best friend on the Court. Thurgood Marshall won against all odds in his Supreme Court arguments, but as a member of the Court he found himself consistently in dissent.

Historians and Legal scholars will analyze and critique from different perspectives Justice Deferred. Because of chronological coverage the panel should appeal to all U.S. historians, as well as to a general audience. The history of race is still being written today, the present grows out of the past, and makes our future.