White Men’s Law: The Roots of Systemic Racism by Peter Irons

Abstract

Reviewed by: White Men’s Law: The Roots of Systemic Racism by Peter Irons William H. Chafe White Men’s Law: The Roots of Systemic Racism. By Peter Irons. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xx, 291. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-091494-3.) Peter Irons has written a powerful overview of systemic racism in the United States. A retired scholar of constitutional law, he brings passion, insight, and a lifetime of personal experience fighting racism to this extraordinary assessment of just how little progress this country has made—despite pretensions to the contrary—toward eliminating racism in American society. White Men’s Law: The Roots of Systemic Racism begins with a detailed chronicle of how, in 1935, a deputy sheriff in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, personally presided over the lynching of a Black man named Rubin Stacy. A white woman claimed that Stacy had threatened her with assault. The white deputy captured Stacy, tied a clothesline around his neck, hung him from a tree branch, and then led the white crowd as they fired bullets into his dead body. This story highlights the underlying theme of Irons’s book: how our legal system—and the law itself—have sustained “race [as] the one factor that has most divided the country for more than four centuries” (p. 18). It was not always so. Irons points out that in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the “horror” of slavery, saying that the “execrable commerce” of that institution should end (p. 32). But those words never appeared in any official document, and slavery became a centerpiece of southern society. Indeed, Irons blames the eruption of the Civil War on “the legal system and its judiciary” (p. 59). Despite the hopes of Black Americans and some white northerners for major changes after emancipation, Irons recounts that during Reconstruction, “only 20 percent of Blacks—most of them younger—claimed to be literate” (p. 83). Nor did the legal system help. In United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Supreme Court struck down the Enforcement Acts that were enacted to uphold the Reconstruction Amendments, declining to hold white terrorists accountable for the murders of Black voters. Upon his election as governor of South Carolina in 1890, Benjamin R. Tillman “lauded ‘the triumph of democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy’” (p. 101). Tillman also declared that southerners had “‘reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man’s country and the white man must govern it’” (p. 103). This process continued as the Supreme Court “gutted the ‘public accommodations’ provisions of the 1875 Civil Rights Act” in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and paved the way for segregated schools in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (p. 105). As a result, Irons writes, “Black children in the South . . . were robbed of decent educations by White men in black robes” (p. 110). By 1900, “Only 45 percent of Black adults were literate, compared to 95 percent of Whites,” and in the 1890s, “at least 1,100 Blacks were lynched, more than two every week” (p. 113). [End Page 337] Beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, positive changes slowly accumulated. An “informal group known as the ‘Black Cabinet,’” composed of forty-five Black federal officials, came into being (p. 139). Irons notes that this group especially sought to ensure that a proportionate number of Black Americans received relief from New Deal programs—a goal in which “they achieved some success” (p. 139). He also notes an increase in the literacy rate among Black people to 84 percent by 1940. And he describes how, finally, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Still, racism remained systemic. In 1960, 55 percent of Black Americans lived in poverty, and Black income was only 55 percent that of whites. Although these figures improved in the 2000s, the fact of two different societies “one black, one white—separate and unequal,” as the Kerner Commission declared in 1968, remained a central American reality (p. 213). With passion and power, Irons documents the role of law and the...