How to Litigate a Case Against a White Southerner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Civil Cases ◽  
White Southerner

Chapter 2 traces the legal journey of African Americans who succeeded in litigating cases against white southerners in the 35 years after the Civil War. In many cases, they litigated suits against the very whites who had enslaved them. The chapter discusses why black southerners turned to the courts and the obstacles they met in attempting to litigate suits against whites. It follows black southerners as they hired lawyers, testified before crowded courtrooms, and appealed their suits to their state’s highest courts. It discusses as well why white lawyers represented black litigants, the motivations of white and black witnesses in such suits, and the considerations of juries and judges deciding civil cases between black and white southerners.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Global History ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The World ◽  
Progressive Force ◽  
Judicial Systems

African Americans’ experiences in southern courts during the eight-and-a-half decades after the Civil War is part of a larger, global story of struggles for rights within the courts. White southerners’ efforts to control people of color through the courts is also part of that wider, global history. The very structure of judicial systems often enabled them to serve as both a conservative and a progressive force. In many countries around the world, the courts have been used both to uphold elites’ power and to challenge that same power....

Litigating Across the Color Line

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Color Line ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Government Institutions ◽  
Civil Cases ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Line P

From 1865 to 1950, when the financial futures of their families were on the line, black litigants throughout the South took on white southerners in civil suits. In almost a thousand civil cases across eight southern states, former slaves took their former masters to court, black sharecroppers litigated disputes against white landowners, and African Americans with little formal education brought disputes against wealthy white members of their communities. As black southerners negotiated a legal system with almost all white gatekeepers, they displayed pragmatism and a savvy understanding of how to get whites on their side. They found that certain kinds of cases were much easier to gain whites’ support for than others. In the kinds of civil cases they could litigate in the highest courts of eight states, though, they were surprisingly successful. In a tremendously constrained environment where they were often shut out of other government institutions, seen as racially inferior, and often segregated, African Americans found a way to fight for their rights in one of the only ways they could. This book examines how black southerners adapted and at times made a biased system work for them. At the same time, it considers the limitations of working within a white-dominated system at a time of great racial discrimination and the choices black litigants made to have their cases heard.

You Must Remember This

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-182
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
World War ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
At Home

In the lead up to World War II, and in the course of the war itself, memories of the Civil War were deployed once again. This time, the war, the fight against slavery, and Lincoln in particular, assumed noteworthy prominence, reminding Americans of the importance of fighting a just and moral war. However, this created a challenging rhetorical environment for cementing a united homefront – including both white southerners and African Americans. White southerners, like Douglas Freeman, tried to keep Confederates prominent in the Civil War narrative, while black Americans used the new emphasis on Lincoln to talk about racial oppression at home and abroad. An anti-communist backlash, in the end, helped silence voices that focused on problems of racial oppression.

The New South and the Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political System ◽  
Black People ◽  
African American Men ◽  
New South ◽  
Personal Injury ◽  
The Political ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Civil Cases

Chapter 5 shows the shifts that occurred in the types of civil cases African Americans were able to litigate in southern courts at the end of the nineteenth century, as segregation and disfranchisement became increasingly written into law around the South. Even as white southerners dismantled the political system put in place during Reconstruction, they did not change the structure of the legal system. They viewed black southerners’ involvement in the courts as far less dangerous than African Americans entering the polling booth. As African American men lost the power to vote, however, the kinds of civil cases black southerners were able to litigate against whites in southern courts narrowed. Almost three quarters of their appellate civil suits in the first two decades of the twentieth century now involved particularly egregious cases of fraud in property dealings or personal injury claims and highlighted black people in dependent, vulnerable positions.

Defining Loyalty in an Age of Emancipation

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-117
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
State Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Republic ◽  
American State

Beginning at the start of the war, the growth of the American state worked in tandem with concerns about the threats to that state’s survival from disloyal persons, all of which generated a rapid expansion of state power. By the middle of the Civil War, ideas about loyalty had coalesced around a new plan for the occupied South, a plan in which white southerners, shorn of their citizenship, would become colonial subjects of the American state. At the same time, the doctrine of emancipation created opportunities and challenges for African Americans, who grabbed the idea of loyalty as a key to their inclusion in the republic. Looking at how freedpeople both encouraged and challenged U.S. policy as soldiers and laborers, the chapter examines how officials came to realize that any future for the United States in the Confederate South lay in providing some measure of protection for loyal African Americans, in contrast to white southerners, whose loyalty was suspect.

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