Acknowledgment
----
We must first acknowledge the two universities—the University of Michigan and Rutgers University Law School—that have been our base for most of our lives. At Michigan we met and married; learned journalism at the Michigan Daily; and studied history, economics, political science, and, of course, law. One of our near classmates, Ted St. Antoine, long-time dean of the Michigan Law School, encouraged our book project at a time when we needed support.
We continued to study and learn from the Rutgers law faculty when we came to the law school in 1955. Most memorable were Tom Cowan, Gerry Moran, Bob Knowlton, and Clyde Ferguson. A succession of deans supported our activities in labor relations, civil rights, and employment discrimination law: Lehan Tunks, Willard Heckel, Jim Paul, Peter Simmons, Roger Abrams, and now Stuart Detsch. We inflicted our evolving ideas about slavery and the Revolution on those faculty members who would listen, particularly Greg Marks and Mark Weiner.
Our second acknowledgment is to the work of generations of historians, many of whom we rely on in this book. Although we criticize those who believe that slavery played no role in the beginning of the Revolutionary era, we recognize that we are standing on their collective shoulders in order to reach our conclusions to the contrary. Particularly, we have built on Staughton Lynd’s
Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States
. Lynd’s underlying principle—that slavery was an important element in the beginning of our national existence—resonated with our own thinking about that topic. Lynd did not get it all right, but he first saw that slavery had to be more central in the analysis of our Revolution than the “conventional wisdom” recognized. We built upon his essay, “The Compromise of 1787,” to better understand the relation between the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance. Since Lynd wrote, nearly forty years ago, others, including John Hope Franklin, Paul Finkelman, Gary Nash, Don Fehrenbacher, Duncan McLeod, and Don Robinson, have examined the role of slavery in our history. They rarely focused on the summer of 1772, when an English judge denounced slavery as “so odious” that a master could not recapture a slave in England. Nor did they make the connection between the Continental Congress and the deadlock at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Third, we have a debt of gratitude to the repositories of information that were unfailingly helpful: the law libraries at Rutgers, Newark; Columbia University; Fordham University; the Butler Library at Columbia; the New York Historical Society; the British Museum; the British Anti Slavery Society in London; the library of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; and the Library of Congress.
Fourth, we have received support over the years that expanded our understanding of the breadth of legal culture, commencing in 1957 with a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to examine the relationship between law and sociology. In 1993 we had Fulbright Scholarships to South Africa to examine whether the U. S. experience with equal employment opportunity would be useful there as South Africans embarked on the peaceful dismantling of apartheid. This was followed by a month’s residency at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Beginning in 1998, the Ford Foundation enabled our statistical study of intentional job discrimination that is relevant to the closing chapter of this book. All of these institutions—meaning the people in them—have helped us to understand the problems we have addressed in this book.
During the civil rights era, it was often said that “if we could go to the moon, we could surely end discrimination at home.” These last forty years have demolished that prediction. Going to the moon involved an environment of known or knowable forces; discrimination involves complexities of human behavior that defy the certainties of natural science.
We
Similar Books
