“Security of Justice”: Introduction to Issue 1

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, Alfreda M. Duster, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 18. Ibido., 18–20. “A Darky Damsel Obtains Verdict from Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad—What it Costs to Put a Colored Teacher in a Smoking Car—Verdict for $500,” The Memphis (Tenn.) Appeal-Avalanche, Thursday, December 25, 1884. Ida B. Wells Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago. Series II, Box 7, Folder 4. Ida B. Wells Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago. Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee for the Western Division, April Term (Jackson, 1887), 615. Ida B. Wells Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago. Ibid., 613. “Darky Damsel,” 4. Ida B. Wells Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago. Wells, Crusade, vii. Her emphasis, my italics. For a brilliant example of the way Wells's railroad lawsuits tie into the broader arc of her intellectual and political engagement, see Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Amistad, 2008), 12, 60–68, 69, 84, 111, 119, 124–125, 126, 132–133, 136–137, 138, 139, 140, 148, 182–183, 193, 246, 325, 343, 371, and 415. To her credit, Blair L.M. Kelley's rich discussion of 19th and 20th century railroad and streetcar protest politics cites Wells's lawsuit as part of a broader “increase in the number of suits brought by offended black passengers,” which “suggests that informal segregation was becoming more common,” see Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. Thus Kelley would likely concur that railroad lawsuits should be considered central to the armory of civil rights weaponry. I consider this essay an attempt to develop the conceptual dimension of such tactical maneuvers. Entry dated June 7, 1886. Ida B. Wells, Unpublished diary (December 29, 1885–September 12, 1887), 213 p. Series XVI, Box 9, Folder 8. Ida B. Wells Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago. Entry dated April 11, 1887. Ibid. March 18, 1882. Commercial and Financial Chronicle, as cited in James W. Early, Jr., Railroads and the American Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 287. According to Ely, Jr., “One observer even attributed the growth of law schools after the Civil War to increased travel made possible by railroads.” See Railroads, p. vii. See John Martyn Harlow, “Passage of an iron rod throght the head,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 39 (1848): 389–393 and Henry Jacob Bigelow, “Dr. Harlow's case of Recovery from the passage of an Iron Bar through the Head,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 20 (1850): 13–22. R. W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Paul Frymer, “Acting when Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935–1985, “American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 483–499. See Michael Ralph, “Movement Politics,” Social Text (Editor's introduction to forthcoming special issue by the same name). Analytically, I am inclined to trace geographies of debility as a way into the question of disability in a tradition indebted to Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar, among others (see Livingston, “Insights from an African history of disability,” Radical History Review 94 (2006): 111–126 and Puar, “Prognosis Time: Toward a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2009): 161–172). To be clear, I am not interested in displacing “disability” as a political program or as a viable program of scholastic inquiry so much as I am interested in tracking the tension between a bureaucratic category of disability (which can never account for the full range of injury people are expected to withstand) and a broader ecology of human social action, where the routine presence of environmental and technological “risks” raises the stakes of compensation and the methods of forensic inquiry that are used to gauge liability. This intellectual tradition, alluded to in this article, is developed in greater detail in Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).