"Race, Law and Politics in America: Have we become a post-racial society?"

John Payton on "Race, Law and Politics in America: Have we become a post-racial society?"


John A. Payton, one of the nation's top lawyers and a prominent African-American civil rights attorney, was appointed as the sixth president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 2008. His address will start with a review of what happened in the United States during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period when after ten years of relatively open democracy all black people were disenfranchised.

With that historical perspective, he discussed whether we have become a "post-racial" society whether "we are past all of these issues that have plagued us for 200-plus years."