Dr Michael Ross

speaker

223 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Michael Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined Jim Crow · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

And they will combine this with another policy that the Supreme Court will also give its approval to in a case called Williams v. Mississippi, which is the idea that you could use literacy tests, always unfairly applied, to disqualify voters.

And the combination of the Jim Crow laws and the literacy tests

which will disfranchise the vast majority of black voters as they face unfairly applied tests.

That combination of disfranchisement and all of these laws that are going to get very particular and

in the ways people have to separate.

And in fact, in some places, they're going to try, like in Baltimore, to pass laws saying people have to live on different streets and in different parts of town.

All of that takes off thanks to Plessy.

So Plessy is going to set off this moment, which will be the nadir of black rights in America.

but with the important point that the folks like the Committee of Citizens never give up, even in the darkest moments.

You're going to start to see folks like W.E.B.

Du Bois and what will eventually become the NAACP's legal campaign under Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, that the law could still be used to undo what was done, and eventually they'll win.

Yeah, the NAACP legal campaign is mesmerizing in my opinion.

my course on the legal history of the civil rights movement, students are always kind of stunned by it with the caveat that there is another approach taken by Booker T. Washington, who is going to take something of publicly a more accommodationist position saying, okay, we can deal with separate, but equal as long as it's really equal.

And as long as we're given the tools for black economic empowerment,

And the debates between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington over the approach to take to the Jim Crow system become quite famous and bitter.

Yes.

And I mean...

There's no question about it, as has been famously stated by a lot of people, that America has a series of ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence and then enshrined with the rule of law and the Constitution, particularly the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution.

And it's been an uneven path.

We go back, we go forward.

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