The Washington History Seminar, Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs, on January 13, 4pm, will hear Risa Goluboff, the John Allan Love Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Virginia, speak on "People Out of Place: A Constitutional History of the Long 1960s."
Vagrancy laws made it a crime to be idle and poor, or dissolute, or to wander about without any purpose. They came to these shores with the American colonists, proliferated throughout the nation and were on the books in almost every state as of 1950. But beginning in that decade, African Americans and other civil rights activists, communists, labor union activists, poor people, Beats and hippies, gay men and lesbians, women, Vietnam War protestors and student activists, and young, urban minority men all contested their constitutionality. In 1971 and 1972, the Supreme Court struck them down. Risa Goluboff shows how this changing constitutional status of vagrancy laws was part and parcel of the larger social transformations of the long 1960s.Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom. Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop
Reservations requested because of limited seating:
mbarber@historians.org or 202-450-3209. Photo ID required for admittance to the building.
