In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Letters, Laws, and New (In)Justice:The Rhetoric of Rights in Shaping Democracy
  • Ellen W. Gorsevski (bio)
Keywords

Human Rights, Civil Rights, Rhetoric, Democracy, Power, Speech, Letters, Activism, Social Justice

Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights. By Arabella Lyon. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013; pp. vii + 222. $64.95 cloth.
Tell It Like It Is: Women in the National Welfare Rights Movement. By Mary E. Triece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013; pp. vi + 155. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.
This Is Not Civil Rights: Discovering Rights Talk in 1939 America. By George I. Lovell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012; pp. ix + 259. $85.00 cloth; $27.50 paper.
Speaking Rights to Power: Constructing Political Will. By Alison Brysk. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. xi + 252. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. [End Page 719]

Years ago I attended a lecture given by Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi of India, one of the twentieth century’s great world leaders of nonviolent activism for rights. Arun Gandhi spoke of his grandfather’s list of “7 Blunders of the World,” to which he had added an eighth blunder: “Rights without responsibilities.” All books reviewed here underscore the critical role of ordinary people in legally codifying and ensuring compliance of rights in democratic nations. Authors explore rights such as voting rights for women and minorities, or the right to obtain without interference fair, equitable levels of government assistance in a variety of contexts, including dealing with instances of police brutality, or obtaining minimal welfare rights under conditions of disproportionately race-, class-, and gender-based unemployment and poverty.

In the evolution of American democracy, the term “civil rights” was a strategic selection of words chosen by leading members of the African American movement for social justice in their push for rights already stipulated in the international context in 1948 in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR). To have chosen “civil” over “human” reflects these activist-intellectuals’ sober calculation that “civil” correlated to specific—and plausibly attainable—civic and citizenship rights that Americans of color in the United States had long been denied. Above all, using “civil” as a persuasive word was and remains a gesture of acknowledgment of the realities of lynching, police brutality, and economic and social terrorism that reflected the overwhelming daily, lived experience of many persons of color living in the United States since its inception as a nation. Civil rights as a term and a movement in the United States is associated with the 1960s, which diminishes the fact that citizenship rights are ever in flux and continue to be denied to American minorities and other demographic groups. Today denials of civil/human rights persist, as evidenced by recent, high-profile legal cases featuring variables such as race or sexual orientation as they apply to rights in public and political spheres. Human rights concerns span Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle’s shooting of Oscar Grant at Fruitvale Station in 2009, the widely publicized cases of George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2013, deaths of chokehold victim Eric Garner in 2014 and broken neck victim Freddie Gray in 2015, and the veto in early 2014 by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer of a proposed bill that would have denied lesbians, gays, and others the right to service by public business owners claiming religion as a basis for selectively [End Page 720] deciding which customers would be served and who would be turned away. In 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder provided federal recognition of same-sex marriages in Michigan and Utah so that affected couples could garner basic rights of citizenship, such as the ability to file joint federal income tax returns and apply for spousal benefits, including Social Security and legal immigrant status. Issues such as access to immigration evoke broader rights called for in the UNDHR, further imbricating civil and citizenship elements of human rights within current political debates.

The books reviewed here serve as reminders of rights routinely denied to so many Americans in the past, and ones that continue to be out of reach for millions of people today, plus extant or...

pdf