Jury Discrimination: The Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and a Grassroots Fight for Racial Equality in Mississippi

Abstract

Jury Discrimination is a book of many parts. In one, Christopher Waldrep tells how two lawyers cooperated in 1906 to achieve, if only for a brief time, the racial integration of juries in Mississippi. This story is told in accessible prose that will appeal to general readers. Other parts of the book deal with the notion that defendants have a right to be tried by a jury of their peers; the congressional debate over the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the Supreme Court's subsequent interpretation of that clause. The discussion of these matters does justice to the complexity of the points at issue but is written in a way that will appeal only to scholars who specialize in legal history. The Fourteenth Amendment asserted, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” What did that mean? Was this language intended to effect a sweeping change in the relative power of the state and federal governments? Did it authorize the central government to protect the rights of individuals—including the right to serve on juries—from infringement by local authorities and groups? Even among Republican members of Congress, there was no consensus, and Waldrep acknowledges that most people in many ratifying states did not understand that the privileges and immunities clause contained revolutionary possibilities. “The question of just what power the nation now had over the states” was, Waldrep writes, “uncertain, ambiguous, and subject to judicial interpretation” (p. 85).