Introduction

The story told very briefly: a teacher and a group of students in an American senior high school meet twice a week for the school year in a class called Street Law. During the course of that year, the teacher, himself a law student, explicitly tried to teach his charges something about the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. Unbeknownst to the students or even the teacher himself, for that matter, this very teacher would also try to get these students — poor and working class African Americans — to talk more like him: an upwardly mobile middle-class African American man enrolled at a local elite law school.