Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present [Book Review]

Abstract

Not just an admirably clear, beautifully written, and extremely well informed summary of a generation of productive scholarship, Promises to Keep is also the fist comprehensive statement of a new view of the history of race relations law in America. Compared to the post-civil rights movement feeling of deep malaise, Donald G. Nieman's interpretation is more attentive to the efforts of African Americans to assert their rights, more sympathetic to their white liberal allies, and more impressed with the plasticity and changeability of the law. Short but detailed, assuming no initial knowledge but containing at least some facts that will be new to all but the most advanced specialists, simultaneously printed in hard and soft covers, this first published volume in the Organization of American Historians' series of bicentennial essays on the Bill of Rights should be widely adopted for classes and read by anyone interested in black or legal history.