We may be coming to the end of Black History Month, but researchers know that learning about Black history doesn’t have a timeline. Did you know that our Law Journal Library has a number of tools that can help you find multidisciplinary, scholarly articles that shed light on the trajectory of Black history in America and beyond? In this edition of Behind the Bindings, we’ll show you the different ways that you can uncover scholarly resources that highlight the unique struggles, oppressions, achievements, and strengths that underpin Black history.

PathFinder Subjects

Within our PathFinder tool, under Social Sciences, users will find a Race, Ethnicity, and Culture subtopic, which reveals a further level of subtopics, including:

• Race, Ethnicity, and the Law
• Race and Ethnicity Issues
• Indigenous Peoples
• and more

Some of these topics can be even further distilled down – for example, within Race and Ethnicity Issues, users can choose between Desegregation, Racial Discrimination, Segregation, and Slavery.

Within Racial Segregation, for example, users will find articles such as:

• Redressing State-Inflicted Racial Violence: A Federal Discrimination Law Remedy for Deaths in Custody after Wotton
• High Anxiety: Racism, the Law, and Legal Education
• Mass Incarceration, Deprivation of Rights, and Racial Subordination: U.S. v. Gary, the American Gun Control Narrative, and Ugly Truth behind Sec. 18 U.S.C. 922(g)
• Walls or Bridges: Law’s Role in Conflicts over Religion and Equal Treatment
• On the Regulation of Racist Speech
• And thousands more

Venn Diagram Tool

If you’re looking to research intersectionality of race with other socioeconomic factors, our Venn Diagram tool, located within the Advanced Search options, makes it easy. For example, try a search such as Blackness AND poverty AND “gender inequality.”

The phrases overlap in articles such as:

• Parsing out the “Hispanic Effect” in Disaggregated Homicide Trends at the Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender from 1990 to 2016
• Hush Woman! The Complex ‘Disabled’ Woman in Nigeria’s Legal and Human Rights Framework: A Deconstruction
• Buying White Beauty
• Invisible Histories & the Failure of Protected Classes
• Status Inequality and Social Groups

Additionally, this tool allows users hover over the different segments of the diagram and see all possible search term combinations from the original query. For example, you can view results for:

• Blackness AND poverty
• Poverty AND “gender inequality”
• Blackness AND “gender inequality”
• And the phrases Blackness, poverty, and “gender inequality” individually

Keyword Search Builder

Another tool in the Law Journal Library that can help you research Black history is our Keyword Search Builder tool, which allows you to select keywords and designate the weight with which you’d like each word to be considered in the search results. Consider a search for “Black culture” AND reparations AND redlining, with the weight set highest for the phrase “Black culture”:

This search will yield results for relevant articles such as:

• Solving the Problem of the Whiteness of Wealth
• Losing the Understanding of the Importance of Race: Evaluating the Significance of Race and the Utility of Reparations
• Making Amends: Localizing and Implementing Housing Reparation Programs for African Americans Affected by Discriminatory Housing Policies
• Black Reparations for Twentieth Century Federal Housing Discrimination: The Construction of White Wealth and the Effects of Denied Black Homeownership
• When Is the Time of Slavery – The History of Slavery in Contemporary Legal and Political Argument

Get the Most Out of the Law Journal Library

For more tips and tricks about how you can utilize the Law Journal Library to learn about Black history, or any other topic, dive into our dedicated LibGuide, which highlights the unique tools and features within our flagship collection, which now contains more than 3,300 multidisciplinary journals dating back to inception!