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Full-Text Articles in Law
Crisis? Whose Crisis?, Jack M. Beermann
Crisis? Whose Crisis?, Jack M. Beermann
Faculty Scholarship
Every moment in human history can be characterized by someone as “socially and politically charged.” For a large portion of the population of the United States, nearly the entire history of the country has been socially and politically charged, first because they were enslaved and then because they were subjected to discriminatory laws and unequal treatment under what became known as “Jim Crow.” The history of the United States has also been a period of social and political upheaval for American Indians, the people who occupied the territory that became the United States before European settlement. Although both African-Americans and …
Financial Freedom Suits: Bankruptcy, Race, And Citizenship In Antebellum America, Rafael I. Pardo
Financial Freedom Suits: Bankruptcy, Race, And Citizenship In Antebellum America, Rafael I. Pardo
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Article presents a new frame of reference for thinking about how the federal government facilitated citizenship claims by free people of color in the antebellum United States. While scholars have accounted for various ways in which free black litigants may have made such claims, they have not considered how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 enabled overindebted free people of color to reconstruct their economic lives, thereby restoring the financial freedom that was and continues to be an essential component of American citizenship. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including manuscript court records, this Article shows how six free …
Gabriel Franklin Hargo: Michigan Law 1870, Margaret A. Leary, Barbara J. Snow
Gabriel Franklin Hargo: Michigan Law 1870, Margaret A. Leary, Barbara J. Snow
Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications
A brief biographical sketch of Gabriel Franklin Hargo, the first African American graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.
Criminal Justice And The 1967 Detroit 'Riot', Yale Kamisar
Criminal Justice And The 1967 Detroit 'Riot', Yale Kamisar
Articles
Forty years ago the kindling of segregation, racism, and poverty burst into the flame of urban rioting in Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, and other U.S. cities. The following essay is excerpted from a report by Professor Emeritus Yale Kamisar filed with the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) regarding the disorders that took place in Detroit July 23-28, 1967. The report provided significant material and was the subject of one article in the series of pieces on the anniversary of the disturbances that appeared last summer in The Michigan Citizen of Detroit. Immediately after the disturbances ended, …
Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott
Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
This comparative study between the quest for political racial inclusivity in 1890s Louisiana and the fight against state-sanctioned racialized violence in Cuba in the early 1900s exposes similarities, tensions, and differences between the two systems. The article traces the evolving contests for citizenship and suffrage in each climate at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the twentieth, juxtaposing the expression of race, suffrage, and citizenship in the constitution and political climate of each locale. In 1898, the new Louisiana state constitution disenfranchised African-Americans, while in 1900 Cuba was positioning itself for a grant of universal …
The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus
The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus
Articles
In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …
Tricky Magic: Blacks As Immigrants And The Paradox Of Foreignness, Lolita K. Buckner Inniss
Tricky Magic: Blacks As Immigrants And The Paradox Of Foreignness, Lolita K. Buckner Inniss
Publications
Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the "outsider." Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many …
Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski
Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski
Faculty Scholarship
The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …