Legal Slavery and Segregation
"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3, repealed by U.S. Const. amend. XIII.
"I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them." Frederick Douglass
"The initial response to [the abolition of slavery] was an attempt to retain as much of slavey as possible. This... is made clear by the creation of 'Black Codes,' which seem intended to reproduce, within the new limits, a close approximation of the now forbidden master-slave relationship." Daniel A. Novak, Wheel of Servitude 1 (1979).
Special Collections
- HeinOnline: Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture and Law This HeinOnline collection brings together a multitude of essential legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. It includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.
- Teaching Guides: Module 11 - Reparations (Cardozo Law School) This guide explores the ways in which reparations, whether compensatory or symbolic, may offer restitution and restorative justice to the Black community in the United States. Specifically, tort legal theory is utilized to present an understanding, framework, and establishment of the causal link between the enslavement of Black Americans and the ongoing systemic racism, injustice, and inequality that Black Americans face today.
- Library of Congress: Birth of Juneteenth “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free,’ ” Stroud began, reading the opening line of Granger’s order. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…”
- Library of Congress: Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-three interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.
- Library of Congress: Born in Slavery: Portraits and Narratives of Formerly Enslaved People Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. One way to commemorate this anniversary might be to explore the online collection Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. More than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of formerly enslaved people are available online. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).
- ProQuest: Black Abolitionist Papers This primary source collection details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves. Black Abolitionist Papers represents a huge effort by a scholarly team, headed by C. Peter Ripley and George E. Carter, who recognized that African Americans were a pivotal and persuasive force in the 19th-century anti-slavery movement.
Law Library Resources
- Symposium on the Law of Slavery As some of the essays in this symposium demonstrate, Southern courts and legislatures developed special—peculiar—legal rules to accommodate slavery to Anglo-American legal traditions. Politicians also made legal and constitutional arguments peculiar to their own section, to support the defining economic and social institution of the South.
- The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America [I]n mid-nineteenth century America, as slavery necessitated the institutional expansion of federal power over persons, it was simultaneously the frame of reference for contemplating this power. Thus, the federal posse comitatus doctrine and the growth of national power owed as much to the antebellum politics of American slavery as to the well-known icons--the Civil Rights Acts and Reconstruction Amendments--of post-bellum American freedom.17 From 1850 to 1878, the federal government expanded its coercive power over individuals, in order to safeguard national property rights for slaveholders, emancipate millions of enslaved *9 African-Americans, and enforce the doctrine of formal equality. In short, like the marketplace, the rise of the federal state wrought contradictory but congruous forces of liberation and compulsion upon the individual.
- The Crime of Color This Article primarily explores race and crime from the time when slavery was evolving to after it had become rooted in American life. Many of the statutes and cases I examine deal with slaves. Obviously slavery was not merely a system of race relations and prejudice; it was also an institution devoted to social control, class stratification, and economic exploitation. The desire of colonial landowners to exploit the labor of indentured servants for their own profit and the obvious differences between whites and blacks combined to create slavery. Cultural and racial difference allowed white planters to turn their African *2070 servants into African slaves.25 Economics provided the incentive for this development and, thus, many regulations of slaves make sense on purely economic grounds. Others are prudential and common to all slave cultures. Slavery everywhere required force to make some people work for others. Nevertheless, slavery in America was racially based and the regulation of slaves was, in the end, the regulation of race. Moreover, it is clear that, at least in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-American world, some punishments were meted out to slaves at least in part because they were black. Thus, in examining the history of how “color” became associated with crime, it is important to recognize that the court decisions and laws of early America were a convergence of two complementary themes: economics and race.
- Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: the Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery A thorough book review for Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (1996)
- Making Indians "White": The Judicial Abolition of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia and Its Racial Legacy Since the literature on neither Indian slavery nor racial determination alone provides a complete account of Robin and its context, this Comment draws on both to understand fully the causes and significance of the doctrinal transformation in racial construction that the case epitomizes. In particular, this Comment argues that the racial formations of the antebellum United States cannot be understood without reference to its earlier colonial history. The black/white divide that emerged during the revolutionary period was neither natural nor organic. Rather, it represented a conscious repudiation of an earlier triracial era by a judiciary anxious to reinforce race-based slavery. To support these contentions, this Comment is divided into four sections. Part I discusses the colonial history of Indian slavery and race in early America broadly and in Virginia specifically. Part II delves more deeply into Robin and its successors, examining the evolution of the courts' reasoning on the legality of Indian slavery. Part III probes the various explanations for the decision to grant freedom to enslaved Indians. Finally, Part IV explores the legacy of these cases in the antebellum United States, as well as the implications for contemporary legal issues surrounding tribal recognition, tribal membership, and the Equal Protection Clause.
Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 by
This volume is the first comprehensive history of the evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows, racial slavery came to the English colonies as an institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines. Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to reconcile a social order based on slavery with existing English common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.) Because much was left to local interpretation, laws varied between and even within states. In addition, legal doctrine often differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, tensions mounted between the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of capitalism and evangelical Christianity.
Call Number: KF 482 .M67 1996ISBN: 9780807848173Publication Date: 1999
Law in American History by
In the first of the three volumes of his projected comprehensive narrative history of the role of law in America from the colonial years through the twentieth century, G. Edward White takes up the central themes of American legal history from the earliest European settlements through the CivilWar.Included in the coverage of this volume are the interactions between European and Amerindian legal systems in the years of colonial settlement; the crucial role of Anglo-American theories of sovereignty and imperial governance in facilitating the separation of the American colonies from the BritishEmpire in the late eighteenth century; the American "experiment" with federated republican constitutionalism in the founding period; the major importance of agricultural householding, in the form of slave plantations as well as farms featuring wage labor, in helping to shape the development ofAmerican law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the emergence of the Supreme Court of the United States as an authoritative force in American law and politics in the early nineteenth century; the interactions between law, westward expansion, and transformative developments in transportationand communiciation in the antebellum years; the contributions of American legal institutions to the dissolution of the Union of American states in the three decades after 1830; and the often-overlooked legal history of the Confederacy and Union governments during the Civil War.White incorporates recent scholarship in anthropology, ethnography, and economic, political, intellectual and legal history to produce a narrative that is both revisionist and accessible, taking up the familiar topics of race, gender, slavery, and the treatment of native Americans from freshperspectives. Along the way he provides a compelling case for why law can be seen as the key to understanding the development of American life as we know it. Law in American History, Volume 1 will be an essential text for both students of law and general readers.
Call Number: Reynolds 0351ISBN: 9780195102475Publication Date: 2012
Juneteenth Resources
- Juneteenth National Independence Day Act To amend title 5, United States Code, to designate Juneteenth National Independence Day as a legal public holiday. Pub. L. No. 117-17 (June 17, 2021).
- ABA: Celebrating Juneteenth Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day and Cel-Liberation Day, is an American holiday celebrated on June 19.
- Juneteenth.com Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.
- Why every law student should know the importance of Juneteenth The significance of Juneteenth should be even more so important to law students because of the connection between the institution of slavery and the historical establishment of law in America.
The 1619 Project
- The 1619 Project: New York Times Magazine In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.
- Lexis+ access to New York Times Magazine Access Limited to College of Law Students and Faculty. You will need to search through the Lexis+ collection for 1619 Project articles.
Other Resources
- Genetic Consequences of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the Americas According to historical records of transatlantic slavery, traders forcibly deported an estimated 12.5 million people from ports along the Atlantic coastline of Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries, with global impacts reaching to the present day, more than a century and a half after slavery’s abolition. Such records have fueled a broad understanding of the forced migration from Africa to the Americas yet remain underexplored in concert with genetic data. Here, we analyzed genotype array data from 50,281 research participants, which—combined with historical shipping documents—illustrate that the current genetic landscape of the Americas is largely concordant with expectations derived from documentation of slave voyages. For instance, genetic connections between people in slave trading regions of Africa and disembarkation regions of the Americas generally mirror the proportion of individuals forcibly moved between those regions. While some discordances can be explained by additional records of deportations within the Americas, other discordances yield insights into variable survival rates and timing of arrival of enslaved people from specific regions of Africa. Furthermore, the greater contribution of African women to the gene pool compared to African men varies across the Americas, consistent with literature documenting regional differences in slavery practices. This investigation of the transatlantic slave trade, which is broad in scope in terms of both datasets and analyses, establishes genetic links between individuals in the Americas and populations across Atlantic Africa, yielding a more comprehensive understanding of the African roots of peoples of the Americas.
- Brookings Institute The United States of America, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” began as a slave society. What can rightly be called the “original sin” slavery has left an indelible imprint on our nationa’s soul. A terrible price had to be paid, in a tragic, calamitous civil war, before this new democracy could be rid of that most undemocratic institution. But for black Americans the end of slavery was just the beginning of our quest for democratic equality; another century would pass before the nation came fully to embrace that goal. Even now millions of Americans recognizably of African descent languish in societal backwaters. What does this say about our civic culture as we enter a new century?
- Pew Research Center A U.S. House of Representatives committee plans to hold a hearing this week on the topic of reparations for slavery, the first hearing on the topic in more than a decade. The legacy of slavery still resonates for many Americans, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year, with 63% believing it affects the position of black people in American society today either a great deal or a fair amount.
- Legacies of American Slavery Legacies of American Slavery is a multi-year project, providing a variety of opportunities for CIC member institutions, their faculty members and students, and community-based partners to participate in research, teaching and learning, and public discussions about the legacies of American slavery. CIC now invites member institutions to submit proposals to serve as Regional Collaboration Partners—that is, the coordinating hubs for a national network of other colleges, universities, and community partners. The Regional Collaboration Partners will play an essential role in shaping and administering the national network, using funds provided by CIC. Six Partners will be selected in 2020 following a planning meeting with selected finalists, to be held at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut) in August 2020.*
Jim Crow Laws
Race over Empire by
Generations of historians have maintained that in the last decade of the nineteenth century white-supremacist racial ideologies such as Anglo-Saxonism, social Darwinism, benevolent assimilation, and the concept of the "white man's burden" drove American imperialist ventures in the nonwhite world. In Race over Empire, Eric T. L. Love contests this view and argues that racism had nearly the opposite effect. From President Grant's attempt to acquire the Dominican Republic in 1870 to the annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898, Love demonstrates that the imperialists' relationship with the racist ideologies of the era was antagonistic, not harmonious. In a period marked by Jim Crow, lynching, Chinese exclusion, and immigration restriction, Love argues, no pragmatic politician wanted to place nonwhites at the center of an already controversial project by invoking the concept of the "white man's burden." Furthermore, convictions that defined "whiteness" raised great obstacles to imperialist ambitions, particularly when expansionists entered the tropical zone. In lands thought to be too hot for "white blood," white Americans could never be the main beneficiaries of empire. What emerges from Love's analysis is a critical reinterpretation of the complex interactions between politics, race, labor, immigration, and foreign relations at the dawn of the American century.
Call Number: E 661.7 .L685 2004ISBN: 9780807855652Publication Date: 2004
The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice by
From the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and noted professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, a groundbreaking book that examines both civil and criminal court cases from the Civil War to the present, to reveal the impact of stereotyping--race, class, gender--on the American legal system. The question Mary Frances Berry asks: Whose story most strongly influences the making of legal decisions in the American justice system? Using previously unexamined material from state appellate civil and criminal court cases--cases of rape, seduction, and paternity disputes, and cases dealing with murder, inheritance, and property disputes in which sexual relations are at the heart of the story--Berry takes us through two centuries of American case law to show how attitudes toward gender, race, class, and sexuality have materially affected, and continue to affect, judicial decision-making. Among the many cases Berry discusses: Alabama, 1867--A white woman sues her husband for divorce in both the lower and state supreme courts because of his sexual relationship with a former slave, and is denied her petition on the basis that a sexual relationship between a white man and a black woman is "of no consequence." New York, 1932--In a surprising victory, the longtime mistress of a theater owner successfully contests her lover's will and proves her right to inherit a wife's portion of the estate. Texas, 1984--A suit by a woman against her female lover ends in a decision that allows the court to avoid acknowledging the existence of a lesbian relationship. And, in the 1990s, we see the cases of William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, and O. J. Simpson in a new context. Moving stories, shocking stories, ironic stories, tragic stories--a book that fascinates in terms of its human drama, by its demonstration of the ways in which prejudice affects justice, and by its account of how the law has evolved (or hasn't) as our racial, social, and sexual attitudes have changed.
Call Number: KF 4757 .B44 1999ISBN: 9780679436119Publication Date: 1999
From Jim Crow to Civil Rights by
A monumental investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow To Civil Rights spells out in compelling detail the political and social context within which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of their decisions for American race relations. In a highlyprovocative interpretation of the decision's connection to the civil rights movement, Klarman argues that Brown was more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. Brown unquestioningly had a significant impact--it brought raceissues to public attention and it mobilized supporters of the ruling. It also, however, energized the opposition. In this authoritative account of constitutional law concerning race, Michael Klarman details, in the richest and most thorough discussion to date, how and whether Supreme Court decisionsdo, in fact, matter.
Call Number: Online: EbraryISBN: 9780195310184Publication Date: 2006
Lynching
- National Memorial for Peace and Justice The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
- A Legacy of Lynchings: Perceived Black Criminal Threat Among Whites This article examines the legacy of lynchings on contemporary whites' views of blacks as criminal threats. To this end, it draws on prior literature on racial animus to demonstrate the sustained influence of lynching on contemporary America. We hypothesize that one long-standing legacy of lynchings is its influence in shaping views about blacks as criminals and, in particular, as a group that poses a criminal threat to whites. In addition, we hypothesize that this effect will be greater among whites who live in areas in America where socioeconomic disadvantage and political conservatism are greater. Results of multilevel analyses of lynching and survey data on whites' views toward blacks support the hypotheses. In turn, they underscore the salience of understanding historical forces, including the legacy of lynchings that influence contemporary views of blacks, criminals, and punishment policies.
- Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these “public torture lynchings” took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events--characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments.
- Creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Lynching n this Article, I contend that given the power of lynching as a tool for white supremacy45 and its important role in shaping the relationships between and within black and white communities in towns throughout the United States, efforts should be made to uncover and dismantle the legacy of lynching.46 That lynchings continue to occur, albeit sporadically, presents reason enough to look more closely at its historical origins and significance. Even if there are no more lynchings ever again, the specter of past lynchings remains such a powerful source of deep distrust, disconnection, and cynicism within and between blacks and whites.47 The complicity of hundreds and thousands of whites in lynchings48 continues to generate profound uncertainty among blacks about forging alliances with whites. It is quite probable that the scope of white complicity in lynching in some communities has affected the ability of whites to reconcile themselves to their role in racial oppression.
Redlining
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America Among the thousands of area descriptions created by agents of the federal government's Home Owners' Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940, the one that was written for what is now called the Carver Heights neighhborhood in Savannah, Georgia, stands out. HOLC staff members, using data and evaluations organized by local real estate professionals--lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers--in each city, assigned grades to residential neighborhoods that reflected their "mortgage security" that would then be visualized on color-coded maps. Neighborhoods receiving the highest grade of "A"--colored green on the maps--were deemed minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders when they were determining who should received loans and which areas in the city were safe investments. Those receiving the lowest grade of "D," colored red, were considered "hazardous."
- Economic Policy Institute: Racial Wealth Gap Wealth is a crucially important measure of economic health. Wealth allows families to transfer income earned in the past to meet spending demands in the future, such as by building up savings to finance a child’s college education. Wealth also provides a buffer of economic security against periods of unemployment, or risk-taking, like starting a business. And wealth is needed to finance a comfortable retirement or provide an inheritance to children. In order to construct wealth, a number of building blocks are required. Steady well-paid employment during one’s working life is important, as it allows for a decent standard of living plus the ability to save. Also, access to well-functioning financial markets that provide a healthy rate of return on savings without undue risks is crucial.
The Color of Law by
Widely heralded as a "masterful" (Washington Post) and "essential" (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, "virtually indispensable" study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Call Number: Founders' E 185.61 .R8185 2017ISBN: 9781631494536Publication Date: 2018
