ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on “civic rights,” a form of rights talk with a strong history in American political life going back to the eighteenth century, but which has largely been eclipsed by their close relation, “civil rights.” Civil rights are classically those that involve a right to equal treatment in the market place and in the legal system. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality. In the years accompanying and following the great judicial and legislative victories of the modern Civil Rights movement, Black Americans experienced an extraordinary wave of police violence and aggression, the legacies of which continue to haunt American society to this day. Civic rights in the Anglo American tradition reached their zenith prior to the framing of the Constitution as a tradition of popular legality that has continued to influence law and society since that time.
