/Literary Arts
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: The Supreme Court vs. Black America
Event WebsiteAbout
Co-presented with KALW
Brando Simeo Starkey’s Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court aligned with enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution’s Reconstruction Amendments: to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation’s founding conceit—that all men are created equal—real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness.
SF/Arts Curator Insight
KALW and Litquake present Brando Simeo Starkey for “Their Accomplices Wore Robes”, a new exposé on the role of the Supreme Court as an ally in implementing and preserving a racial caste system in the US. It presents dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters to explain how we arrived at this point and how we might arrive somewhere better, even as the courts lurch rightward. Starkey is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the NY bar.
Evan Karp
SF/Arts Curator
Litquake’s diverse live programs are created with the aim of inspiring critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bringing people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuating a sense of literary community, as well as a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. We believe in literature as a public good, so we work to produce events that are accessible to all.
Litquake’s diverse live programs are created with the aim of inspiring critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bringing people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuating a sense of literary community, as well as a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. We believe in literature as a public good, so we work to produce events that are accessible to all.