MARK S. WEINER. Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. Pp. xvii, 421. $26.95

Abstract

In this very impressive and important work, Mark S. Weiner uses “legal cases” from America's colonial period up until modern times to “depict the changing status of black Americans within the American national identity” (p. xi). For Weiner, these legal conflicts—the “black trials” of the book's title—also reveal important truths about America's “national identity itself.” We are the things we struggle over, and the civic status and social position of black people have been the subject and object of unremitting struggle throughout American history. Weiner sees these struggles as having taken place within the framework of “three visions of law and civic life” in America: “liberal individualism,” “racial caste,” and “Christianity” (pp. 17–20). Weiner's project is to show, through his analysis of fourteen legal cases, how these three, often contradictory, visions have helped shape black Americans' quest for “civic belonging” (pp. 5–9). The book unfolds chronologically in five parts whose titles convey the author's view of the “rituals of citizenship” that have marked blacks' progress across the four centuries surveyed. “Colonial Visions, 1619–1773” presents the “birth of black trials” (p. 27) as blacks and whites on both sides of the Atlantic grappled with contradictory religious impulses, the values of the Enlightenment, and white supremacy in legal proceedings well known and almost unknown. One of the book's many strengths is that Weiner, in this section and others, employs the obscure—the case of Joseph Hanno, accused of killing his wife—along with the very famous—Somerset's Case—to illustrate the problematic nature of blacks' civic status.