Of race and rights: Legal culture, social change, and the making of a multiracial metropolis, Denver, 1940--1975

This dissertation explores the relationship between multiracial formation and law, jurisprudence, and politics in the post-World War II urban American West. Specifically, the dissertation is a comparative study of the legal and political experiences of "Mexican Americans," "African Americans," "Japanese Americans," "Jews," and "Whites" in postwar Denver. The study examines the manner in which each group's experience with legal culture (e.g.: concepts such as rule of law, order, and justice) and government policy (e.g.: internment, municipal charter revision, cold war ideology, natural resource restrictions, and school desegregation) contributed to a process of racial formation that differed markedly from those events in Southern, Midwestern, and Eastern municipalities.;Beginning with the first treason trial in the United States to involve "Japanese Americans" in 1944, Denver's lawyers, judges, politicians, and activists were forced to confront the meaning of race and rights in relation to people who could not be easily categorized into the typical "Black"/"White" understanding of race relations. In the next three decades, rapid demographic change in Denver as well as the citizenry's inability to sustain seemingly "tolerant" legal ideologies and political and social geographies reconfigured racial tension as a "White," "Black," and "Brown" issue. The dissertation argues that such experiences compelled Denverites of all racial groups to become deeply invested in the emergence of multiracial color lines throughout the metropolitan area between 1940 and 1975.;The consequences of a "possessive investment" in color came to a head in 1973 in the case, Keyes v. School District Number One ---the first non-southern school desegregation case to be heard by the United States Supreme Court. Accordingly, the dissertation examines the litigation and its related events to explain how Denver's students, parents, judges, activists, and lawyers articulated competing and often times incompatible conceptions of "opportunity" along multiracial lines. Keyes---as a microcosm of both Denver and the urban metropolitan American West's postwar history---underscored not only the centrality of multiple racial identities to the "urban crises" of the American West, but their role in complicating conceptions of equality, fairness, and justice in the United States. Ultimately, the Denver experience provides historical perspective into the multiracial nature of human relations in law, society, and jurisprudence at the beginning of the twenty-first century.