Category: Law

  • Righteous Fathers, Vulnerable Old Men and Degraded Creatures: Southern Justices on Miscegenation in the Antebellum Will Contest Tulsa Law Review Volume 40 (2005) pages 699- Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law Suffolk University Although scholars have long addressed the role of legislators and local elites in policing the color line between black and white,…

  • The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing College Literature Volume 22, Number 3 (October 1995) Race and Politics: The Experience of African-American Literature pages 50-67 Corinne E. Blackmer, Associate Professor of English Southern Connecticut State University When Nella Larsen, then a prominent young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, published her…

  • The Code Noir (French language: The Black Code) was a decree passed by France’s King Louis XIV in 1685. The Code Noir defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire, restricted the activities of free Negroes, forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism, and ordered all Jews out of France’s…

  • Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of “separate but equal”. Wikipedia Comments by Steven F. Riley: The Plessy decision is significant in…

  • AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History Scripps College, Claremont, California 2013 Matthew Delmont, Assistant Professor of American Studies This class will explore the conditions and consequences for crossing racial boundaries in the U.S. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring historical, literary, and ethnographic writings along with several feature and documentary film treatments…

  • Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson Law & Society Review Volume 39, Issue 3 (September 2005) pages 563–600 DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2005.00234.x Mark Golub, Assistant Professor of Politics & International Relations Scripps College, Claremont, California The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of…

  • City of Amalgamation: Race, Marriage, Class and Color in Boston, 1890-1930 University of Massachusetts, Amherst September 2008 223 pages Paper AAI3337029 Zebulon V. Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Stony Brook University, State University of New York Submitted to the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the Graduate School of the University of…

  • The Tapestry of Walter White’s Contradictions [Book Review] Sewanee Review Volume 118, Number 3, Summer 2010 pages lxxxii-lxxxiv E-ISSN: 1934-421X Print ISSN: 0037-3052 Sanford Pinsker, Emeritus Professor of English Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania Tom Dyja. “Walter White: The Dilemma of Black identity in America”.  The Library of African American Biography.  Lanham, Maryland: Ivan R. Dee Publishsers,…

  • The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation’s most visible and most powerful African-American leader.

  • An intensely dramatic true story, “Forsaking All Others” recounts the fascinating case of an interracial couple who attempted—in defiance of society’s laws and conventions—to formalize their relationship in the post-Reconstruction South. It was an affair with tragic consequences, one that entangled the protagonists in a miscegenation trial and, ultimately, a desperate act of revenge.