Interpreting the Effects of Jim Crow

Brando Simeo Starkey, Harvard Law School Research Fellow; Equal Justice Society, has published Jim Crow and the Birth of Uncle Tom: Law’s Impact on Black Culture . Here is the abstract.

Uncle Tom has grown into the most injurious pejorative that blacks can hurl at one another. That it occupies such a 'lofty' status is due to segregation. During Jim Crow, law and legal institutions vehemently reflected America’s racist priorities. All three branches of the federal government subordinated blacks. State and local governments, meanwhile, disfranchised blacks and required their segregation from mainstream life. The biggest reminder to blacks of their second-class citizenship was segregation. In response, many blacks realized the need to unify to repel the onslaught of Jim Crow. Some blacks, however, might either retreat from the daunting struggle or be co-opted by the majority and become double agents hindering the race’s ability to fight American apartheid. To prevent potential turncoats, blacks needed to enforce loyalty. Many sketched the contours of acceptable behavior; that blacks must both resist their subordination and refuse enlisting for the opposition. Deserters would be denounced with the most opprobrious epithet of which blacks could conceive: Uncle Tom. This paper argues that law frequently steers and directs black culture and that it does is best seen through the community’s use of Uncle Tom in the context of segregation.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Race and Legal History at the University of Texas

Thomas D. Russell, University of Denver College of Law, has published ‘Keep the Negroes Out of Most Classes Where There Are a Large Number of Girls’: The Unseen Power of the Ku Klux Klan and Standardized Testing at The University of Texas, 1899-1999, as University of Denver Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-14. Here is the abstract.

The paper’s title is a quotation from The University of Texas registrar nine days after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This paper examines 20th-century techniques of racial domination at The University of Texas by crosscutting two narratives.

The first narrative that the paper presents is one of the development of bureaucratic or institutional forms of racial exclusion. The paper describes the university’s efforts to limit the application of the Brown v. Board of Education.

In the immediate years after the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, The University of Texas developed and instituted entrance exams that university officials knew would exclude a disproportionate number of African-American applicants. Publicly, the university presented the testing as race-neutral. The university stalled post-Brown integration until the exclusionary admissions testing was in place.

An explicit concern of the university in seeking to exclude African-American students during the 1950s was a racialized sexual concern about the university’s white women.

The second narrative is the story of William Stewart Simkins, a law professor at The University of Texas from 1899 to 1929. Professor Simkins helped to organize the Ku Klux Klan in Florida at the conclusion of the American Civil War, and he advocated his Klan past to Texas students.

Like the university registrar during the 1950s, Professor Simkins was explicitly concerned with the sexual defense of white women. Relying upon the analysis of historian Grace Elizabeth Hale, the paper links Professor Simkins’s advocacy of the Klan to the early 20th-century history of lynching and white supremacist violence.

During the 1950s, the memory and history of Professor Simkins supported the university’s resistance to integration. As the university faced pressure to admit African-American students, the university’s faculty council voted to name a dormitory after the Klansman and law professor. The dormitory carries his name to the present day. During this time period, alumni also presented the law school with a portrait of Professor Simkins. Portraits and a bust of Professor Simkins occupied prominent positions within the law school through the 1990s.

The sources for the paper are drawn largely from primary materials of the university’s archives, including the papers of the university’s Board of Regents, Chancellor, President, and faculty committees. The author completed this research during the 1990s while a member of The University of Texas School of Law faculty

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Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Update: Professor Russell notes coverage of the issue, and discussion of his work, in the Austin American-Statesman, here.

Call For Papers

Call for Papers: “Ah Got De Law in My Mouth”: Black Women Writing Justice

41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure

This panel seeks papers which consider the representation of law, rights, and justice in African-American women’s literature. How have African-American women writers critically engaged the legal system and/or portrayed American legal discourse? Topics include, but are certainly not limited to: slavery, the civil rights movement, immigration, suffrage, lynching, and the prison-industrial complex. Please send a 1-page abstract and a brief bio as Word or PDF attachments to Courtney D. Marshall, cdj@ucla.edu, with “NEMLA” in the subject line.

Deadline: September 30, 2009



Courtney Marshall

English and Women’s Studies

University of New Hampshire

The Black Man as Hero in Film

Gretchen Bakke, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, has published How the Black Guys Got to Kill All the White Guys and Still Be Good: An Essay on the Changing Dynamics of Race in American Action Cinema. Here is the abstract.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a black man - a good black man - killing a white man in an action movie was tentatively accomplished. Not the killing itself, which was as bold and as marked by "righteousness" as the killing of bad whites by good whites. The tentativeness was, rather, both formal and narrative meaning that it was most evident in the careful unfolding of story and character within the limited universe of the film itself. Whites were changed a little, at first, becoming evil, faceless, and generic in new ways and blacks, the good blacks charged with dispatching these new bad white were, at least in the beginning, always flanked by more heroic heroes - white men - wilder men willing to kill and killing more effectively than their darker skinned counterparts. But that was only the beginning. What began as tentative within the narrative structure and characterization of action films has since exploded into a new pattern of race relations evident in, if not governing, a good many of the action films of the new millennium. Black men now are not only buddies paying second fiddle to the rampages of their white counterparts (Pfeil 1995); they are not only expendable characters sent off by whites, like a canary in a cage, to test the efficacy of unseen adversaries, nor are they merely scenery, filling up streets or starships - a silent fluid and chromatic backdrop against which the action takes place (Wallace 1995). Black men now are also, and often, heroes in their own right. They are cast as vengeful and lively characters, both likable and utterly fantastic, and they kill, as all action heroes must, with indiscretion. Who they kill is the topic of this essay, and not only who they kill, but how that killing has come to form the very ground - the necessary premise - of both their heroism and their goodness. Or to put it another way, we know them to be heroes not despite the fact that they kill white characters but because of it.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Rhetoric and Reparations

Lolita Buckner Inniss, Cleveland-Marshall School of Law, has published "A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach to 'In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation'," as Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 8-155. Here is the abstract.

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the way in which the public ideologies of society and the private ideologies of jurists, legislators and other legal actors are manifested in legal and law-like pronouncements. After introducing this case, I briefly tracing the evolution and meaning of the term rhetoric and examine the relationship between rhetoric and law. I next explore the connection between rhetoric and ideology, which is crystallized in the form of the ideograph and its use as a tool of what is known as critical rhetoric. Finally, I show how critical legal rhetoric is achieved by bringing critical rhetoric to law, and thereafter apply critical legal rhetoric to the case of 'In Re African American Slave Descendants'.

Download the paper from SSRN here.