• DOI:10.2307/3378711
• Corpus ID: 159598797

Ignoble Intentions and Noble Dreams: On Relativism and History with a Purpose

@article{Kousser1993IgnobleIA,
  title={Ignoble Intentions and Noble Dreams: On Relativism and History with a Purpose},
  author={J. Morgan Kousser},
  journal={The Public Historian},
  year={1993},
  volume={15},
  pages={15-28}
}

• J. M. Kousser
• Published 1 July 1993
• History, Law
• The Public Historian

In 1980, immediately after the Southern Historical Association Convention
at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, historian Peyton McCrary and a
bevy of voting-rights lawyers gathered together a group of historians to try
to engage them as expert witnesses in voting-rights litigation. Earlier in
1980 in the case of Mobile v. Bolden, a plurality of the justices of the U.S.
Supreme Court had decided that to sustain a claim of vote dilution under
the Voting Rights Act or the Fifteenth Amendment, members of minority
groups had to prove that the relevant law had been passed with a racially
discriminatory purpose, not merely that it had a current racially discriminatory
effect. Since the ordinance requiring that the Mobile City Commission
was to be elected at-large, rather than by single-member districts,
had been passed (everyone thought at the time) in 1911, lawyers for the

plaintiffs had no choice but to bring in the historians. Because McCrary
lived in Mobile and knew the lawyers who had filed the Bolden case, he
took over the principal organizing task. Most of the historians present at
the Biltmore seemed to respond favorably, and some ended up working in
a few cases. Others, probably better advised, went back to their usual
research and teaching.