J. Morgan Kousser

Professor of History and Social Science

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Research interests

Racial discrimination in schools, politics, and the distribution of public goods.

Research Statement

Section 5, the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, comes up for renewal in 2007. I recently completed the first comprehensive history of that section, an 80-page paper for a book to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation, which is meant to influence the national debate. In February, 2006, I participated in a panel at the University of North Carolina Law School on whether racial minorities would be better off if redistricting were conducted by commissions, instead of legislatures. In April, 2006, I will give a paper at Duke University on the influence of Shaw v. Reno, the leading case on redistricting during the 1990s, on the actual redistricting of 2001. I also hope to complete one or more empirical and theoretical papers on the appropriate standard for judging "retrogression" in elections involving minorities, based on my statistical study of Latino success in California legislative and congressional elections, 1994-2000.

At the Southern Historical Association convention in 2005, I gave a paper titled "The Strange Career of Jim Crow and the Lost Promise of the History of Race Relations" as part of a session that I organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of C. Vann Woodward's classic. My paper is an attempt to critique and reorient the study of the history of race relations of the U.S. by developing themes that Woodward pioneered.

In my spare time, I also continue to pursue my longer-term project on the history of school integration cases in the 19th century U.S., revising two already-published papers and extending a currently incomplete paper for a book contracted with Cambridge University Press, and revising three lectures for a contracted book on the first U.S. Supreme Court case on racial discrimination in schools, Cumming v. Richmond County (1899).

Publications

Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Injustice and Scholarship and Responses to Commntaries. Social Science History 24 (2000)): 415-21, 443-50.

Reapportionment Wars: Party, Race, and Redistricting in California, 1971--1992. In Race and Redistricting in the 1990's, Bernard Grofman, editor, NY: Agathon Press, 1998, 134-90.