The controversy stemmed from a 2009 dispute between Quinnipiac University and members of the school’s Division I women’s volleyball team. In March 2009, the university announced that it would be cutting three sports programs: women’s volleyball, men’s golf, and men’s outdoor track. At the same time, the school announced the creation of a new varsity sport: competitive cheerleading.

Related Link: Read the Biediger v. Quinnipiac 2009 legal motion

The volleyball players and their coach alleged that the school’s decision was a breach of Title IX’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination in higher education.

U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill issued a preliminary injunction against the university, holding that their management of varsity rosters deprived female athletes of equal athletic participation opportunities.

According to Underhill, Qunnipiac had violated Title IX in three ways:

First, the university had erroneously defined competitive cheerleading as a varsity sport for the purposes of Title IX compliance. “Competitive cheer,” wrote Underhill, “may, sometime in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX; today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”

Second, the university had distorted the number of athletes participating in women’s indoor and outdoor track by requiring that female cross-country runners join all three teams, even while for many their activity did “not amount to genuine athletic participation opportunities.”

Third, as corroborating evidence, Underhill found that the school had in the past engaged in roster manipulation—inflating the rosters of women’s teams and deflating that of men’s—thus supporting the finding that Quinnipiac was not offering equal opportunities for male and female athletes.

In 2011, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s holdings.  “We identify no merit in [the arguments of the university],” wrote the three-judge panel presiding over the decision, “and we affirm the challenged injunction substantially for the reason stated by the district court in its comprehensive and well-reasoned opinion.”

The Quinnipiac case came in a long line of legal disputes seeking to clarify the implementation of Title IX.

Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972 fundamentally reshaped educational opportunities across the United States. The legislation forbade any educational program, institution, or activity receiving federal financial aid from discriminating on the basis of sex.

As the law mandates, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid.”

Though the original legislation made no mention of intercollegiate sports, Title IX has become most famous for its impact on bringing more women into athletics.

In 1979, seven years after Title IX was passed, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) issued a final policy interpretation on the law, laying out a three-part test to verify Title IX compliance. This test set the stage for decades of wrangling as institutions and courts worked to negotiate the complicated relationship between gender equity, resource allocation, and representation in college athletics.

The HEW Test mandates that schools must meet one of the following three standards in order to be found in compliance of Title IX.

1. The number of athletes from each sex at a school must be roughly equivalent to enrollment percentages, or
2. A school must demonstrate a history and continuing practice of expanding athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex (most commonly, women), or
3. A school must show that the interests and abilities of female athletes are being fully and effectively accommodated.

That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that individuals have a cause of action against a school for discriminatory policies in violation of Title IX. In Cannon v. University of Chicago (1979), Justice John Stevens, writing for the majority, ruled that a woman could sue the university for a denial of admittance to medical school.  The case became the foundation for dozens of lawsuits in the years to follow.

In Grove City v. Bell (1984), the Burger Court held that while Title IX applies even to private universities where a substantial number of students receive federal aid, the legislation is only relevant to the institution’s financial aid services, not to overall school programming. The ruling effectively ended the statute’s application to intercollegiate athletic programs beyond the regulation of athletic scholarships.

Four years later, however, in March 1988, the Civil Rights Restoration Act was enacted, mandating that the law apply to all operations of any school receiving such funds, overturning Grove City and reaffirming the relevance of Title IX in all aspects of college sports.

According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, approximately 294,000 girls participated in high school sports in 1971, the year before Title IX was enacted. At the collegiate level, that number was under 30,000. In 2012, at the 40th anniversary of the bill’s passage, those numbers had climbed to 3.2 million at the high school level, and nearly 200,000 in colleges and universities.

By 2009, then, when the women’s volleyball team at Quinnipiac University filed suit against the school, Title IX had become firmly entrenched in American culture, society, and law.

But even as opportunities for participation and competition had risen dramatically, institutions were still engaging in practices designed to distort the numbers of female participation in athletics.

As New York Times writer Katie Thomas wrote in a 2011 series on collegiate compliance of Title IX, “many [NCAA Division I institutions] are padding women’s teams rosters with underqualified, even unwitting, athletes. They are counting male practice players as women. And they are trimming the rosters of men’s teams.”

The Quinnipiac case brought an increasingly critical eye on such practices, and federal courts responded with injunctive relief for the female athletes who filed suit. According to Nancy Hogshead-Makar, senior director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation, “Many of these persistent gaps flow from the types of institutional practices that the court in Biediger v. Quinnipiac declared to be a violation of Title IX.”

After four years of court battles, the parties settled last week in favor of the original petitioners. As part of the agreement, scholarships for female athletes in track, cross-country, rugby, volleyball, ice hockey, and basketball increased. The school affirmed that women’s sports will receive at least half of the number of scholarships permitted by the NCAA, and committed to hiring new coaches for women’s teams, increasing compensation for these coaches, and improving facilities and services for female athletes.

Without a formal Supreme Court decision, it remains unclear what the legal ramifications of such a settlement will be; however, the outcome of the Quinnipiac controversy evidences growing scrutiny on the implementation policies and practices of institutions and athletic programs.

Abigail Perkiss is an assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and a fellow at the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.  Follow her on twitter at @Abiperk.

Further Reading

• Katie Thomas, “College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equity,” New York Times, April 25, 2011.

• Biediger v. Quinnipiac University, U.S. District Court Opinion, 2013.

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Yet the Constitution and Declaration make only cameo appearances in King’s most sustained treatment of race, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” As we observe the 50th anniversary of that treasure of American letters (dated April 16, 1963), it is instructive to reflect on that strange omission.

The “Letter” was King’s answer from his jail cell to eight white clergymen, among the most prestigious clergy in the state of Alabama, all racial moderates, who had condemned the protests roiling that city of fierce racism and branded King an extremist. The “Letter” was his relentless rebuttal.

Defending the protests and arguing for the fierce urgency of now, he parsed and parried in the most varied ways. Taking his white readers on a tour of the inner recesses of black hurt, he appealed to pathos (“when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’”).  He seized on the axiom of Paul Tillich (“sin is separation”) and drew out its subversive implication: “Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation?”

To prove the movement wasn’t reckless, he called on the most reassuring precedents: the Tea Party (the original one), the Hungarian freedom fighters who rose up against Communism, and the Hebrew boys in the fiery furnace. King did everything but summon the values of the Constitution and the Declaration.

At the midpoint of the “Letter,” King largely stopped trying to justify the movement to whites and began to chastise them. There’s really no mystery about his shift from diplomat to prophet.

In truth, he did not think very many whites had the capacity to empathize with black suffering: “Few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race.” Nor was he in sway to the illusion that moral exhortation could bring the fullness of democracy in the absence of protest and pressure: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Just days after he got out of the Birmingham jail, King spoke to a black audience at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Right before he heard the chimes of freedom ringing from every mountain top, he anticipated the day when blacks would be able to sing “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.” The corollary was clear: That land did not yet exist. The civil rights movement first had to create it.

Jonathan Rieder, professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University, is the author of the recently published Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation; The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism.

His latest book, Gospel of Freedom, is available from Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Anderson, who was black, and her manager, Sol Hurok, were refused permission by two groups to perform in Washington just a few months earlier.

Howard University had worked with Hurok to ask the Daughters of the American Revolution in January 1939 to use their 4,000-seat Constitution Hall for an Easter event with Anderson.

In March 1939, the District of Columbia’s Board of Education briefly gave permission for Anderson to use the Central High School auditorium for her recital, but with string attached. The offer was withdrawn within two weeks.

The moves were a challenge to the segregation polices in the nation’s capital. In 1930, singer Paul Robeson had been refused permission to perform at Constitution Hall, and blacks who attended events there had to sit at the back of the auditorium.

The Philadelphia-born Anderson had become an internationally known star in the prior decade, performing extensively in Europe and the United States.

Anderson was active in local church groups as a child. Her father died when she was 12, after he was hurt working at the city’s Reading Terminal Market. Her grandfather had been a slave.

When she toured Europe, Anderson had equal use of all public facilities, which wasn’t true when she came home.

An AP story from March 4, 1939, quoted the Education Board statement that the decision was “in no way opening the door for the beginning of a new policy.” Author Allan Keiler, in his biography Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey, said the offer was pulled on March 17, apparently over concerns about how a potential performance by Anderson would affect segregation in Washington’s public school system.

By that point, the story involving Anderson’s concert had become a national one. A group called the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee (MACC) formed to put pressure on the DAR and the Board of Education.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt advocated for Anderson in a nationally syndicated newspaper column she wrote. In late February 1939, Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR and supported the MACC.

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Just days before the Board of Education withdrew its offer, the NAACP approved the relocation of the concert to the Lincoln Memorial. On March 21, the news got out that the concert could be held at the Lincoln Memorial.

With the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes confirmed the event would be on Easter Sunday. (Ickes also had been the past president of the Chicago NAACP.)

The First Lady decided not to attend the event, to avoid a distraction, but she lobbied to make sure it was broadcast on national radio and was involved in other planning.

The event came together in little more than a week. The NAACP worked to get people there within traveling distance to the Lincoln Memorial. The Interior Department expected a large crowd, and the official attendance figure for the 30-minute concert of 75,000 people was about what they planned for.

Keiler says that Anderson and her family took a train from Philadelphia to Washington early Sunday afternoon. They were to stay with former Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot and his wife, since it wasn’t known which hotel, if any, in Washington would board Anderson and her mother.

The concert started around 5 p.m. Secretary Ickes spoke briefly. Members of the Supreme Court, the Cabinet and Congress sat up front. The crowd stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial, in a scene that would become more familiar in later years.

Anderson started by singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” which was captured by newsreel cameras with the singer standing in front of eight microphones with the Lincoln Memorial behind her.

The radio audience on the NBC Blue network was large. And author Raymond Arsenault, whose book The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial and the Concert details the concert scene, says organizers knew the important role radio would play in sending a message beyond Washington.

The radio announcer introduced Anderson by saying, “It is fitting and symbolic that she should be singing on Easter Sunday on the steps of the memorial to the Great Emancipator, who stuck the shackles of slavery from her people 76 years ago.”

Video: Newsreel highlights | Audio: Radio highlights

The newsreel cameras didn’t film the entire event, but the opening images of Anderson performing in front of the Lincoln Memorial–in front of a biracial audience–was seen by millions.

Among the people influenced by the concert was 10-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. Five years later, King won a speaking contest at his Atlanta high school, using the topic “The Negro and the Constitution,” and mentioning the event.

As a high school junior, King said: “She sang as never before with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows De Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.”

“Recently she was again signally honored by being given the Bok reward as the most distinguished resident of Philadelphia. Yet she cannot be served in many of the public restaurants of her home city, even after it has declared her to be its best citizen.”

But by January 1943, Anderson did sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, and she started her 1964 American farewell tour there. The DAR has hosted several Anderson tributes in the years after the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert, and Anderson said well before her death in 1993 that she forgave the group.

Link: DAR resources about Anderson

And there’s some evidence that a spat between the man who booked concerts at Constitution Hall and another black singer, Roland Hayes, in 1932 may have played a part in the incident.

In 1963, King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial where he gave his “I Have A Dream” speech and echoed Anderson’s performance.

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring,’” King said.

Among the singers who performed at the event was Marian Anderson.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

The quotes come from public speeches given by King, a letter, and one of his books. Each section contains a link to the original source.

If you want to read more quotes, check out the resources at the end of this story.

10 famous quotes

1. “We are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Address at Holt Street Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955

2. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

3. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.”

From his 1963 book, Strength to Love

4. “There are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Speech in Detroit on June 23, 1963

5. “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

Speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963

6. “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1964

7. “We’ve been in the mountain of war. We’ve been in the mountain of violence. We’ve been in the mountain of hatred long enough. It is necessary to move on now, but only by moving out of this mountain can we move to the promised land of justice and brotherhood and the Kingdom of God. It all boils down to the fact that we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied with unattained goals. We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent.”

Sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood in June 1965

8. “When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967

9. “We all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. … And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct. It is a good instinct if you don’t distort it and pervert it. Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be the first in love. I want you to be the first in moral excellence. I want you to be the first in generosity.”

Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 2, 1968

10. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Speech at Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968

More speeches and quotes

The Martin Luther King, Jr. King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University has an extensive collection of primary sources, including speeches, texts, and analysis.

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/

Plus, check out these recent stories from the National Constitution Center:

The day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died

How Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday became a holiday

Five interesting facts about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Constitution Hall Pass: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Legacy of Service [VIDEO]

Additional quote sources

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23924.Martin_Luther_King_Jr

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/martin_luther_king_jr.html

http://mlkday.gov/plan/library/communications/quotes.php

The Lorraine Motel. Source: DavGreg (Wikimedia Commons).

King was in Tennessee to help support a sanitation workers’ strike. At the age of 39, King was already an internationally known figure. Starting with the Montgomery boycott in 1955, King had led a series of nonviolent protests against discrimination.

When King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, at the time he was the youngest Peace Prize winner ever, at the age of 35.

His acceptance speech in Norway included the famous statement, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.” King also donated his prize money of $54,123 to the civil rights movement.

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On April 3, 1968, King had traveled to Memphis to support a movement seeking better compensation for black sanitation workers. He spoke at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple to a group of supporters–knowing there were threats made against his life.

He told the audience about how he survived a 1958 assassination attempt by a mentally deranged woman named Izola Ware Curry, who stabbed King in the chest at a New York book signing. King had read in a newspaper that if he had sneezed just before the attack, the location of the wound have been fatal.

Link: Read the Mountaintop Speech

“I want to say tonight that I, too, am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” he said.

The better-known part of King’s speech was its conclusion.

“I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life–longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” King concluded.

At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, King was shot while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel. One shot was heard coming from another location. King was rushed to a hospital and died an hour later.

A young colleague, Jesse Jackson, had been below King’s balcony speaking with him when the civil rights leader was shot.

Senator Robert Kennedy was at a campaign rally when he learned of King’s death.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black,” Kennedy said.

As word spread about King’s death, protests started nationwide that included outbreaks of violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths. President Lyndon Johnson ordered a national day of mourning on April 7. Two days later, King’s funeral in Atlanta had more than 100,000 mourners.

In July 1968, a fugitive, James Earl Ray, was extradited from Great Britain to stand trial for the killing. Ray agreed to a controversial plea bargain, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, where he died in 1998.

Ray later recanted his confession, and members of King’s family supported reopening an investigation into the shooting.

At the time of his death, King was trying to organize a protest in Washington against poverty, and he had become outspoken as an opponent of the Vietnam War.

A year earlier, King told an audience on April 4, 1967, at a New York City church that he was against the war overseas.

“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” he said.

Three years ago, Representative John Lewis, who was a civil rights protester in the 1960s, spoke with CNN on the anniversary of King’s death.

“He told us how to stand up and how to fight. I remember him saying on one occasion, soul–from the depth of his soul that you could stand up and not bend your back. When you stand up straight, no man, no person can ride on your back.”

Programming note: From June 14 to September 2, 2013, the National Constitution Center presents The 1968 Exhibit. Learn more here.

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Dr. King was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, and died in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dr. King’s legacy extends into today and he remains one of the most discussed leaders of our time.

Among that discussion are some interesting facts that lend some insight into the man.

Fact 1: Dr. King got a C in public speaking at seminary school. Dr. King’s father, a preacher in Atlanta, thought his son was the best speaker he’d ever seen, before he went away to seminary school. But in his first year of seminary school in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of Dr. King’s professors gave him a C in a public speaking course! In his third and final year, Dr. King was valedictorian with straight A’s.

Fact 2: While at Crozer Theological Seminary, Dr. King was introduced to the teachings and philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi. Dr. King entered Crozer in the fall of 1948, after Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 in India. In an interview, Dr. King said he attended a lecture from the president of Howard University given in Philadelphia about Gandhi, and he immediately became “deeply influenced” by the philosophy of nonviolence.

Fact 3: Dr. King was virtually unknown when he was named as spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. He had recently arrived in Alabama, and the leaders of the boycott, which was sparked by Rosa Parks’ decision to keep her bus seat, wanted a newcomer to be the public voice of the movement. There were concerns that some rivalries within the movement could present problems, and Dr. King was picked as a bipartisan leader.

Fact 4.  Dr. King apparently improvised parts of the “I Have A Dream” speech in August 1963, including its title passage. Clarence B. Jones worked on the draft of the speech, which was being revised up to the time Dr. King took the podium. He says Dr. King’s remarks were up in the air about 12 hours before he spoke, and the “dream” reference wasn’t in the speech. Dr. King later added it live when singer Mahalia Jackson prompted him to speak about the “dream.” In June 1963, Dr. King had talked about his dream in a speech in Detroit.

Fact 5. When Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, at the time he was the youngest Peace Prize winner ever, at the age of 35. Currently, Tawakkol Karman of Yemen in the youngest winner on record; she was 32 when she won the prize in 2011. His acceptance speech in Norway included the famous statement, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

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“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity… For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.”
– President Barack Obama, inaugural address, January 21, 2013

In 2013, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia celebrates its 10-year anniversary as the museum of “We the People.” The Center demonstrated its ability to live up to that title last year when it marked a major milestone: the acquisition of Justin Dart Jr.’s wheelchair, which he used while sitting alongside the Reverend Harold Wilke, Sandra Parrino, Evan Kemp and the Center’s former chairman, President George H.W. Bush, as the president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law in 1990.

Now displayed in the Center’s main exhibition, this meaningful artifact will allow the museum—in our next decade, and beyond—to better illuminate the experiences of all Americans and the constitutional ideals of freedom and active citizenship. To quote ADA pioneer Senator Tom Harkin, in his statement for the Congressional Record: “This wheelchair will remind visitors of the visionary leadership and inspired advocacy of Justin Dart Jr., and the courageous struggle of all those in the Disability Rights Movement who fought to pass the ADA, one of the great civil rights laws of the 20th century.”

The Center proudly unveiled Justin Dart Jr.’s wheelchair on July 28, 2012, during Philadelphia’s first-ever Disability Pride Day Celebration. The daylong event was inspired by disability rights singer-songwriter, policy analyst, and activist Alan Holdsworth and hosted by the Center, in partnership with Liberty Resources, a center for independent living in Philadelphia, and Vision for EQuality, an advocacy organization, and in collaboration with numerous organizations including ADAPT, DIA, and the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. Taking place the same week as the ADA’s 22nd anniversary, the Disability Pride Celebration brought together some of the preeminent leaders of the disability rights movement including Justin’s beloved wife and partner in activism, Yoshiko Dart. After many years of collaboration and friendship between Yoshiko and Liberty Resources CEO Thomas Earle, the Center is able to share in the disability rights journey and help to tell this important story.

In addition to bringing together numerous disability rights organizations and leaders, the event drew thousands of people to Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. The Center’s main exhibition hall was packed with visitors as Yoshiko spoke eloquently about her late husband’s legacy. As one of the organizers of the event, I was honored to help present Yoshiko with a signed, framed letter from President George H.W. Bush, who considered the passage of the ADA one of the major achievements of his presidency. As he wrote in his letter to Yoshiko, “It is fitting you have chosen to donate Justin’s wheelchair to the National Constitution Center where it will serve both as a tribute to Justin and as a poignant reminder to all that ‘We the People’ includes all the people.”

The Disability Pride Day Celebration also featured a diverse array of artists, athletes, and support organizations, including musician and composer of the “ADA Anthem” Jeff Moyer; nationally recognized documentary photographers Tom Olin and Harvey Finkle; Matrix Theatre Company, with their large-scale Justin Dart puppet; and the Magee Sixers wheelchair basketball team. The Center’s vice chairman, Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and mayor of Philadelphia, moderated a dynamic panel discussion that brought together a remarkable lineup of disability rights activists, the majority of whom were present at the ADA’s signing: Janine Bertram Kemp, Lex Frieden (who joined the conversation via robotic telepresence), Andy Imparato, Cassie James-Holdsworth, Joseph Rogers, and Erik von Schmetterling. The celebration culminated in a Disability Pride March beginning at the National Constitution Center and ending in front of the iconic Liberty Bell.

After the overwhelming success of last year’s Disability Pride Celebration, the second annual event is scheduled to take place at Franklin Square in Philadelphia on June 22, 2013, coinciding with the anniversary of the Olmstead decision. As the National Constitution Center looks toward the years to come, we have committed to honoring the ADA as part of our calendar of civic holidays. And as we approach the ADA’s 25th anniversary in 2015, we draw inspiration from Justin Dart Jr.’s legacy of united advocacy and civic action as our definition of “We the People” grows broader and stronger.

Kathleen Cohen is the vice president of digital innovation and integration at the National Constitution Center.

The statement at issue:

“A foreign member of al Qaeda should never be treated like a common criminal and should never hear the words ‘you have a right to remain silent.’ ”

– Joint statement of Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and John McCain of Arizona, quoted in The Washington Post on March 31, in an article by reporter Peter Finn, titled “Somali’s case a template for U.S.” The three senators made such a comment twice in March when the U.S. government revealed it had brought foreign nationals suspected of terrorism to the U.S. for prosecution in a civilian court.

We checked the Constitution, and…

Almost a dozen years since the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, it is an open question which of the rights protected by the Constitution apply to those captured or prosecuted as terrorism suspects. The military detention system set up at Guantanamo Bay right after those attacks was understood then, and that remains true today, precisely to limit the rights of those held in detention. The same is true of those prosecuted by military commissions at Guantanamo.

The practical reality, however, is that the federal government has had far more success getting guilty verdicts against terrorist suspects captured overseas since 9/11 in civilian court than in the war crimes commissions; the score so far is 67 to 7 (and two of those seven war crimes verdicts have been overturned on appeal). What a guilty verdict does is to take an individual out of circulation, perhaps for the rest of that person’s life, and the thorny legal and moral question of long-term detention without criminal charges does not arise.

And federal government officials understand that, if they are going to take a terrorism case into a civilian court, they had better be prepared to prove to the court that the evidence of a war crime was not tainted because it was gathered in an unconstitutional way. One almost certain way to turn a criminal trial in the accused’s favor is to forfeit a chance to use evidence that was obtained by coercion–that is, by getting a suspect to talk without knowing the legal peril of confessing.

That is why a captured suspect will be given “Miranda warnings”–that is, will be told about the rights they have, such as a right to remain silent, that are mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona.

That mandate is now constitutionally required under the Fifth Amendment, according to a decision in 2000 in the case of Dickerson v. U.S. In that decision, the court remarked: “Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.”

The Supreme Court has not yet had a chance to say, in a post-9/11 terrorism case, whether “Miranda warnings” do apply to foreign nationals captured abroad in a terrorism investigation. But when the Justice Department opts for a prosecution in civilian court, it proceeds on the premise that the Fifth Amendment literally applies to “any person,” protecting that individual from being compelled to be a “witness against himself.”

Beyond the Miranda warnings issue, there is a long tradition in America that military trials should not go forward when the civilian courts are open and operating, even during wartime. That was clearly established by the Supreme Court’s 1866 decision in the case of Ex parte Milligan. Whether that precedent governs during a “war on terrorism” apparently is still open to debate, however.

Official Washington is now clearly divided over what to do with terrorism suspects. Majorities in Congress continue to pass laws that are intended to restrict the executive branch’s power to use the civilian courts for terrorism prosecutions. The aim is to have all foreign nationals seized by the U.S. on suspicion of terrorism to be taken to Guantanamo Bay, and to be held there for the duration of the terrorism conflict, or, as the only alternative, prosecuted for war crimes in a military commission, with far fewer rights than apply in a civilian court.

The opposition to civilian trials includes a fervent objection to giving Miranda warnings to suspects, on the theory that doing so will cause suspects to stop talking, thus depriving the U.S. government of valuable intelligence about terrorist operations, past and future.

As the three Republican senators said in one of their statements in March objecting to civilian prosecution of al Qaeda suspects: “When we place [these] individuals in our civilian legal system, read them Miranda rights, and focus on prosecution rather than intelligence collection, we miss valuable information that will prevent future attacks.”

Administration officials, however, counter that they have found ways to gather intelligence and then prepare an individual for civilian trial by giving Miranda warnings. First, they conduct extensive interrogation of an individual in the days or weeks after initial capture. Then, they will bring in an FBI interrogation team–a group supposedly told nothing at all about what the suspect said during questioning–and that team reads the individual the warnings about rights. If, as seems to have happened in some of these cases, the individual waives those rights and goes on talking, then the government appears to have it both ways.

It is unclear at this point how all of this is going to be sorted out in the long run. But, for the time being, the government is getting the verdicts it wants in civilian courts, while the Guantanamo war crimes machinery continues to struggle its way toward effectiveness and real results.

Lyle Denniston is the National Constitution Center’s adviser on constitutional literacy. He has reported on the Supreme Court for 55 years, currently covering it for SCOTUSblog, an online clearinghouse of information about the Supreme Court’s work.

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Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton were the two major contenders for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. The two candidates were on the campaign trail for the important Pennsylvania primary in April.

Video surfaced earlier in the month of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor in Chicago, making racially inflammatory remarks.

Candidate Obama repudiated the remarks publicly. He wrote a blog post for The Huffington Post that voiced his opinions about the incident.

“I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue,” he wrote.

His appearance at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia became a turning point of the campaign, and one of the most detailed statements about race made by a presidential candidate.

The speech itself was written by Obama, with help from speech writer Jon Favreau and input from from a key aide, David Axelrod.

Author Robert Draper said Obama dictated the main part of the speech to Favreau over the phone, Favreau wrote a draft, and then Obama rewrote the speech in the hours before the event.

The speech lasted for about 40 minutes and was broadcast live nationally.

Related Link: Online exhibition: Video, transcript, and educational resources

The speech itself took on the issues of Wright, race, religion, and politics head-on.

“It has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn,” Obama said.

“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America–to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”

After reviewing the history of race relations in America, and the anger and frustration of people of all colors, Obama made his core argument.

“I have asserted a firm conviction–a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people–that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.”

Later in the speech, Obama returned to the constitutional theme of a more perfect union.

“This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation–the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.”

For the most part, the immediate reaction after the speech was that it successfully diffused the Wright situation politically and raised Obama’s profile as a national figure.

“Barack Obama made that remarkable speech about race and his own journey, and his relationship with Wright in Philadelphia. That held his campaign together; a very key moment,” said ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.

“Senator Barack Obama, speaking across the street from where the Constitution was written, traced the country’s race problem back to not simply the country’s ‘original sin of slavery’ but the protections for it embedded in the Constitution,” said Janny Scott from The New York Times.

The speech also became an immediate sensation on YouTube and with younger voters.

In retrospect, the “More Perfect Union” speech has been dissected by academics for its structure and importance. In 2009, it was named by NBC News as the best political speech of the decade.

A month after the speech, Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary by a large margin to Hillary Clinton. However, Obama wrapped up the Democratic nomination in June and defeated John McCain to become the 44th president.

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It was poignant symbolism of the kind that often unfolds in the high councils of Washington. But the celebration on the Capitol side of the street was markedly more upbeat than the somber mood that Adegbile confronted inside the crowded chamber of the Supreme Court.

Adegbile is an African-American, as is the president, and as was Rosa Parks, one of the heroines of the civil rights movement. The young lawyer is now the senior staff attorney of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and it was his task on Wednesday to urge the Supreme Court not to strike down the federal law that everyone–even its current critics–agree was America’s most successful civil rights law: the Civil Rights Act of 1965. In extending that law for 25 years in 2006, Congress gave it this title: the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act.

“Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,” Adegbile began. He would continue for 15 minutes, fielding questions from the bench, including some hard ones from Justice Antonin Scalia. Perhaps fortunately for Adegbile, he was not at the podium when Justice Scalia had belittled civil rights legislation by calling it “racial entitlements” that are passed by large majorities in Congress because the lawmakers are politically wary of voting against them.

Once before, the Supreme Court had considered striking down the key sections of the re-enacted Voting Rights Act, but stopped short of doing so. That was in 2009. At that time, the court did attempt to send a message to Congress that the law was vulnerable constitutionally, if Congress did not modernize its enforcement formula to reflect the fact that “the South has changed.”

Since then, the states and some of the local governments that have to obey the law’s toughest demands (those are restricted to those jurisdictions that had the worst records in racial discrimination in voting in 1972) have intensified their constitutional attack on it, since Congress did not react at all to the court’s message of four years ago.

Adegbile, alongside the federal government’s top courtroom advocate, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., sought to persuade the justices on Wednesday that the law is still needed, and it is still needed mainly in the same states that have been covered since the law’s first enactment.

It was clear, though, that at least four–and probably five–of the justices retained the deep doubts about the law’s constitutionality that they had expressed at a hearing four years ago. In addition to Scalia, they were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Anthony M. Kennedy (and, probably, Justice Clarence Thomas, since he has openly contended that the law was invalid, although he remained silent Wednesday).

Justice Kennedy did give some passing hints that, in the final reckoning, he might not be prepared to strike down the law in its entirety, suggesting that it may be the only effective legal weapon the government has to deal with racial discrimination in voting, where it continues to exist.

The law in its current form clearly had the support of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor (Kagan and Sotomayor were not yet on the court when the law’s validity was last explored). Justice Stephen G. Breyer expressed some skepticism about the coverage formula for the law, but seemed on the whole to want the law to be kept on the books.

Just as the prospect of a 5-4 split, with the majority against the law, was beginning to take at least preliminary form as the court hearing wound down, President Obama across the street was in the midst of his remarks in Statuary Hall. Rosa Parks is the first black woman to have a statue in that memorial theater.

“Our minds fasten on that single moment on the bus,” the president commented. “Ms. Parks alone in that seat, clutching her purse, staring out a window, waiting to be arrested. That moment tells us something about how change happens or doesn’t happen, the choices we make, or don’t make. … In a single moment, with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America–and change the world.”

He was talking about an incident in Alabama. And Alabama was also on the Supreme Court’s mind, in a case from that state’s Shelby County. The timing very likely was a coincidence, but symbolism often happens that way.

Lyle Denniston is the National Constitution Center’s Adviser on Constitutional Literacy. He has reported on the Supreme Court for 55 years, currently covering it for SCOTUSblog, an online clearinghouse of information about the Supreme Court’s work.

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