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Full-Text Articles in Law
Debating The Past's Authority In Alabama, Sara Mayeux
Debating The Past's Authority In Alabama, Sara Mayeux
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
With some exceptions, the major project of civil rights litigators today is not forward movement but the work of preserving as much as possible the gains of the 1960s against legal and political battering.29 Meanwhile, and ironically, the rise of conservative progress metanarratives reflects the achievement of both liberal and radical scholars of forcing into mainstream discourse greater recognition of the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. Respectable conservatives now join in denouncing the most flagrant forms of racial terror running through the American past (pace certain allies of the Trump Administration). But doing so places them in a bind, …
Crossing The Color Line: Racial Migration And The One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860, Daniel J. Sharfstein
Crossing The Color Line: Racial Migration And The One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860, Daniel J. Sharfstein
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Scholars describe the one-drop rule--the idea that any African ancestry makes a person black--as the American regime of race. While accounts of when the rule emerged vary widely, ranging from the 1660s to the 1920s, most legal scholars have assumed that once established, the rule created a bright line that people were bound to follow. This Article reconstructs the one-drop rule's meaning and purpose from 1600 to 1860, setting it within the context of racial migration, the continual process by which people of African descent assimilated into white communities. While ideologies of blood-borne racial difference predate Jamestown, the rhetoric of …