Doorway to the Competitions of Life: African American Citizenship and Access to Higher Education

315 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Legal developments of the 1950s and 1960s such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act (1964) relied heavily on the Reconstruction Amendments to launch a revised attack on segregation and racial discrimination producing only limited success. However, more recent court cases and legislative changes such as Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), Hopwood v. State of Texas (1996), and Article I section 31 of the California Constitution (2004) have further restricted the legal strategies available to organizations and individuals seeking to combat various forms of racial bias and discrimination. Basically, the legal mechanisms designed to extend full citizenship rights to African Americans have failed. Although this failure affects many facets of the lives of African Americans, this study analyzes how the legal limitations placed on African American citizenship influence access to higher education.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD