All-white Jury Research Articles

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

A Bandage on A Broken System: Moving Beyond Peremptory Challenges To Increase Indigenous Juror Representation In Canada

In 2016, Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Indigenous man, was fatally shot by Gerald Stanley, a white farmer. Stanley was later acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter by an all-white jury. Peremptory challenges became the major legal focus, with the all-white jury attributed to the defense attorney’s peremptory dismissal of five Indigenous individuals from the final jury panel. Following a raucous public debate, just two months after Stanley’s acquittal, Canada’s Government quickly introduced Bill C-75, eliminating peremptory challenges. While some legal actors view the ban on peremptory challenges as a step toward improving Indigenous juror participation, others argue that this elimination decreases Indigenous representation. As the insular debate endures, it continues to distract from numerous substantial issues with more profound implications on Indigenous juror representation. Through an analysis of the Jury Acts of Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, this Article highlights how provincial jury pool selection and summoning policies continue to encourage Indigenous exclusion. For more representative juries, Canada must move past peremptory challenges and acknowledge that sustained efforts made in partnership with Indigenous communities are desperately needed. Examples are offered of structurally-oriented, deeper reform actions to begin the process of addressing root causes of white-washed criminal juries in Canada.

THE ORGAN THIEVES: THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH Chip Jones. New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2020, 389 pages.

On May 25, 1968, the heart of Bruce Tucker was transplanted into Joseph G. Klett at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) Hospital. This was recorded as the world’s 16th heart transplant during a time when there was a feverish race for a successful heart transplant program. What made this transplant concerning is that Mr. Tucker was a working-class Black man, Mr. Klett was a successful White business man, and Mr. Tucker’s family was unaware of the “donation” at the time that it occurred. Mr. Tucker suffered a traumatic head injury after falling off of a 3-foot wall the day before. Mr. Tucker’s brother, William, sued MCV and lost at the hands of an all-White jury. The events surrounding the transplant and the subsequent legal case are detailed in The Organ Thieves. In The Organ Thieves, the author presents a historical account of a disturbing confluence of issues, many of which remain relevant today: access to healthcare; distrust of the healthcare establishment; the moral, ethical, and legal complexities of organ donation and transplantation; the heart transplant race; and physician/hospital authority at the expense of patient rights. The book provided a thorough description of how MCV’s growth relied on the theft of human bodies for purposes of dissection and medical experimentation. This sordid past cultivated fear and distrust in the Black community toward MCV, which is the backdrop in which Mr. Tucker’s heart was removed. There were other strengths of the book such as the rich description of the role of this legal case in advancing the legal definition of death that exists today. However, there are three concerns about The Organ Thieves. First, Mr. Tucker’s voice is absent from the book. We learn superficial things about him such as his occupation, employer, income, family structure, and hometown, but we learn little about who he was as a person. The reader is left wanting to know more about his previous interactions with the healthcare establishment, what kind of personality he had, and his relationship with his family. In the Afterward of the book, the author acknowledged his unsuccessful attempt to interview Mr. Tucker’s son, but this explanation does little to fill the noticeable void. Second, the civil unrest of the time was addressed only tangentially. There was an overemphasis on factors that contextualize the transplant race (e.g., overly detailed descriptions of space missions and Lyndon B. Johnson’s poor health), while considerably less attention was paid to the context that might shape decisions about the value of human life. Mr. Tucker’s race and social class mattered. The socio-political context of that time dictated how race and class would intersect to determine the value of human life. The Civil Rights Movement was at its height with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. just the month before. Jim Crow laws provided structural, political, and cultural legitimization to the dehumanization of Black Americans.1Wilson CA. Metaracism: Explaining the persistence of racial inequality. Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO1985Google Scholar It is well known that racist paradigms bias scientists and clinicians alike;2Washington HA. Medical Apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial times to the present. Doubleday, New York2006Google Scholar yet these issues were addressed only superficially by the author. Finally, the author inaccurately described the Tuskegee Syphilis study as one in which “the US Public Health Service recruited hundreds of African American men and gave them the painful, fatal disease.” It is well established that the Public Health Service studied the effects of untreated syphilis,3Jones JH. Bad blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. The Free Press, New York1981Google Scholar but this type of basic inaccuracy raises questions about whether there were others in the book. In summary, The Organ Thieves made good on its promise to explore medical ethics. Because William Tucker’s case against MCV focused on whether the removal of his heart terminated his brother’s life, so too did the book. This was squarely a legal question that was ultimately decided in court, regardless of whether one agrees with the decision. But historians and scholars of the medical and social sciences are left wondering how issues of race and class inequality contextualized the surgeons’ decision to remove Mr. Tucker’s heart. The author of this manuscript has no conflicts of interest to disclose as described by the American Journal of Transplantation.

Settler silencing and the killing of Colten Boushie: naturalizing colonialism in the trial of Gerald Stanley

ABSTRACT A particularly egregious example of settler injustice was the murder of a young nehiyaw man named Colten Boushie in August, 2016, shot in the head by a white farmer named Gerald Stanley. An all-white jury in Saskatchewan acquitted Stanley in February 2018, touching off demonstrations across the country. This article contextualizes the Stanley trial within settler colonial history, and argues that the trial and its aftermath provide a window into the ways settler colonialism tries to silence Indigenous peoples. Divided into four parts, the article first explores the concept of settler silencing, while the second looks at the context of settler colonialism in with a focus on Treaty 6 lands in Saskatchewan, and how the Treaty has been silenced for over a century. I then move to a detailed engagement with the killing of Colten Boushie and the trial which followed. I draw liberally on the trial transcript, demonstrating various techniques used to silence Indigenous peoples while confining speech and the articulation of what constitutes the norm to a handful of non-Indigenous legal professionals. I focus here on multiple examples of how settler silencing works in practice, before in the final part make several conclusions.

Failing Private Till: John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File

Écrire pour sauver une vie : le dossier Louis Till constitue pour John Edgar Wideman l’ultime tentative de regarder une photo qui le hante depuis des décennies : celle du cadavre d’Emmett Till, jeune garçon noir de Chicago qui fut lynché dans le Mississippi en 1955 pour avoir osé aborder une femme blanche. Wideman plonge dans l’archive du père d’Emmett, Louis, qui fut soldat en Italie pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale et fut condamné à mort par une justice militaire expéditive l’accusant de viol et de meurtre. Les tortionnaires d’Emmett furent acquittés, justifiés par les minutes du procès du père, versées au dossier du fils pour accabler ce dernier. Wideman rouvre le cas Louis Till et se penche sur ses probables mensonges, dans une enquête historique, fictive, et autobiographique. Pourtant l’écrivain reconduit, tout au long de ce mémoire, le constat de l’échec de ses mots à saisir cette vie fantôme et ces spectres raciaux de l’Amérique, de sorte que l’échec de la représentation met finalement en déroute toute ambition d’enquête historique ou de restitution, révélant la faille éthique et méthodologique de l’enquête officielle sur le cas Louis Till. L’échec y est politique en cela qu’il décèle la nature téléologique, et par conséquent fictive et idéologique, de l’enquête. Pourtant, cet échec du récit à produire un contre-récit est la trame même de cette vie et de cette Histoire que le texte figure, poétiquement.

Mississippi Goddamn: Flowers v Mississippi’s Cheap Racial Justice

I am not the only scholar who has been critical of Flowers and Batson from a racial justice perspective. Thomas Ward Frampton cited Flowers as an example of “the whiggish tone that dominates the Court’s recent pronouncements on race and the jury.”45 Dorothy Roberts observed, “By misidentifying the relationship between jury selection and white supremacy, the Court in Flowers went off track. Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion did nothing to invalidate all-white juries as violations of the Fourteenth Amendment’s antislavery ideals. To the contrary, Justice Kavanaugh made it clear that the Court’s aim was the opposite—to maintain the current jury selection system.”46 Writing about Batson and its progeny, Tania Tetlow stated, “The Court also relied on the rather circular logic that the idea that race and gender matter to jury deliberations is ‘the very stereotype the law condemns.’ The court does not want race or gender to matter, so it pretends that they do not.”47

“Armed and Dangerous”: The Criminalization of Angela Davis and the Cold War Myth of America’s Innocence

AbstractThis essay explores the arrest, imprisonment, and trial of Angela Davis as the most politically charged legal defense case of the détente era of the Cold War that drew international attention over a nearly two-year period (1970–72). It demonstrates that the life of this young black female intellectual in post-civil rights America became inseparable from securing (or contesting) the dominant narrative of U.S. democratic superiority. Davis, her family, and legal team insisted that racism and politics motivated the criminal charges against her and that a transnational movement was imperative to ensuring her safety as a black woman communist in the American justice system. U.S. leaders and mainstream journalists dismissed the veracity of such claims, ridiculed Davis’s fears for her safety, and asserted that political trials and racism existed only “over there” in the communist universe. They racialized Davis as a “black militant,” invoking traditional sexist–racist tropes of black women as emotionally unstable, sexual sirens, in order to reassure the American public of the righteousness of U.S. democracy and of Davis’s concomitant guilt. After an all-white jury acquitted Davis of all criminal charges, the mainstream press hailed the acquittal as evidence not of Davis’s innocence but as proof that she was wrong about America. Davis persisted in contesting on a world stage America’s Cold War claims of democratic moral superiority and traveled to the Soviet Union to thank leaders for helping spearhead the international campaign that she credited for saving her life.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

CLA JOURNAL 123 Jones, Tayari. An American Marriage. Algonquin Books, 2018. 336 pp. ISBN: 9781616208776 . $26.95 Hardcover. Tayari Jones, a Georgia native and New York Times best-selling author, has penned four novels with An American Marriage being her latest contribution. An American Marriage is part of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club and has received praise from former President Barak Obama. Prior to her recent acclaim, Jones received several awards including the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and the United States Artist Fellowship. Jones is also a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and her literature predominantly features this important regional locale. An American Marriage is set in the US South, divided among Georgia, Louisiana, and the African American soul. In this epistolary novel, Tayari Jones paints each character and scene with vivid strokes of imagination and realism. The story centers Roy O’Thaniel Hamilton and Celestial Gloriana Davenport, a young married couple with dreams of success for their futures when “a meteor crashed their life,” after approximately 18 months of marriage. As a result of an unfair justice system toward Black people, Roy is accused and convicted of a crime and his wife, Celestial is left to fend for herself on the outside. Anchored by its strong themes, the novel leads readers to grapple with racism, the importance of education, boundaries within marriage and being true to yourself. Jones’ commitment to verisimilitude emerges through the experience of a Morehouse educated Black male unfairly placed in the hands of an all-White jury and judicial system in the back woods of Louisiana. While the characters’ challenges are crushing, therelationshipsforgedreflecttheresilienceof thehumanspiritandserveasatestament to African Americans’ ability to persevere. The narrative serves to illuminate a dark reality while simultaneously revealing the light and optimism of collective community efforts. Jones’ use of petitioning and advocacy for those in prison acknowledges the work of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative. This inclusion reinforces the realism that pervades the novel and fortifies its themes. One of the many strengths of Jones’ novel is her rendering of complex dynamics amid familial relationships. Emotionally intelligent and descriptive, the portrayals of husband/wife, mother (in law) /daughter (in law), father/son relationships are vivid and evoke a visceral response. Jones illustrates an age-old question regarding inter-sex relationships, indicating that friendships between men and women are only platonic when both parties are uninterested romantically. Ponderings such as this unfold in an enticing narrative of love, devastation and the human spirit. The novel employs similes, allusions, and paradoxes as it transports readers to a Popular Culture past. Along the way, readers have encounters with icons like Thelma from “Good Times,” as they reminisce about Love Jones, “A Different World,” Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jet Magazine. Such mentionings are pleasant and familiar Book Reviews 124 CLA JOURNAL to the “grown and sexy” crowd ages 35 plus, but younger readers may have difficulty connecting. Other references include the prominence of The Black Church and the centrality of the Bible, evidenced in scriptures such as,“what God has brought together let no man put asunder.”These nostalgic recollections situate readers within the context of the novel. American Marriage strikes a balance for constant tensions between Black and White, light and dark, rich and poor, and God versus Superstition, all of which complicate the narratives of each character. Overall,Jonessuperblyshowsthecomplexitiesandtensionsof humanrelationships while identifying several voices of the African American narrative--namely the death and resurrection of the African American male. Although every character is faced with his or her own bout of self-sacrifice, that fallout is one with which each must contend. By the novel’s end, Roy realizes the cause of his undoing “was the state of Louisiana.” And yet, in spite of his experience, he chooses to see the brighter side, as he confides, “You don’t know what you need until somebody gives it to you exactly the way you need it gave.” At a time when seeing the brighter side is difficult, and the world is constantly confronted with the death of African American men at the hands of White men, the...

“Not Too Far Removed from Slavery”: Police Brutality and Rights Activism in Valdosta, Georgia, 1945–55

Abstract The historiography of police brutality usually frames the phenomenon in urban settings, one that has existed since the first police forces of the antebellum period and was given its ultimate succor in the development of ethnic enclaves policed by white cops in the throes of the Great Migration and proliferating in the aftermath of World War II. This analysis interprets police brutality as a function of the structure and culture of policing. The violence of southern policing is in no way ignored by historians but is framed less as a function of racism in policing and more as a function of southern racist culture, of which policing is a constituent part. But the systematic police brutality that existed in the small-town South in the decade following World War II was a brutality that was fundamentally dependent on a racist culture in the police force and carried out by white officers who abused the rights of Black citizens, assuming that their status as policemen and the racial assumptions of all-white juries would protect them. Such was the case in Valdosta. The murder of Willie Watson, featured in this article, would bring federal charges and national attention, but it did not exist in a vacuum. It was part of a culture of racist postwar police brutality that existed in Valdosta and southwest Georgia. Police brutality in places like New Orleans and Birmingham is significant for understanding the evolving postwar demographics of the urban South, but the region was still predominantly rural at World War II’s close, relying on more moderately sized cities as cultural and economic hubs. There were, in other words, far more Valdostas in the postwar South than there were New Orleanses, making the smaller southwest Georgia city a better representative model for the broader postwar southern experience with race and policing. It also serves as a representative model for the trajectory of responses to police brutality more broadly, as the traditional civil rights narrative places responses to the violence of law enforcement as an outgrowth of new Black militancy later in the movement, a northern phenomenon and creature of the mid- to late 1960s.

Black to the Future: State Action Doctrine and the White Jury

In 1967, Charles Black described the “the ‘state action’ problem” as “the most important problem in American law,” and in 2019, racial inequality is one of the most important problems in the American criminal justice system. This article asserts that Black’s critique of state action doctrine applies with equal force to courts’ analysis of claims that a criminal jury has not been selected from a fair cross-section of the community. The Sixth Amendment right to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of one’s community is a fundamental constitutional guarantee, essential to both the perception and reality of justice. Jury pools across the country, however, fail to include sufficient numbers of African-Americans and Latinos, even as those same groups are disproportionately overrepresented among criminal defendants. But when defendants argue that their constitutional right to a fair cross-section has been violated, courts almost always deny their claims. This article exposes one reason for those denials: courts are applying the wrong legal standard. Specifically, courts are importing state action doctrine from the Fourteenth Amendment into fair cross-section analysis. State action doctrine is not only a poor fit with the affirmative rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, its application to fair cross-section cases is plagued by the same incoherence that has engendered such scathing critique in the equal protection context. As a result, courts are undermining the government’s constitutional obligation to produce racially representative jury pools by sidestepping the substantive task of balancing constitutional values. Courts are replacing this necessary balancing with a formalist emphasis on drawing lines between categories (public vs. private, action vs. inaction) that are porous and imprecise. The courts’ failure to engage with the hard constitutional questions underlying Sixth Amendment fair cross-section claims has produced – just as Charles Black observed fifty years ago in the Fourteenth Amendment context – an incoherent doctrine that deprives people of a remedy for constitutional injuries. And although the constitutional injury is visited on African-American and Latino defendants who face all-white jury pools, the damage done to the public’s faith in the justice system has repercussions for us all.

Jurors' cognitive depletion and performance during jury deliberation as a function of jury diversity and defendant race.

Racial diversity in juries, meant to ensure representation of minority voices, can also reduce racial bias in verdicts and improve group performance during deliberation (Sommers, 2006). Although jury diversity might increase cognitive depletion because it involves interracial interactions (Richeson & Shelton, 2003), it might also reduce racial disparity in verdicts and deliberation quality by improving the quality of deliberation for Black defendants. In 6-person juries that included 2 White or 2 Black confederates, White jurors viewed trial evidence including a defendant race manipulation (White, Black) and completed measures of cognitive depletion and case facts recall. Deliberation transcripts were coded for the number of total, correct, and new case facts mentioned by jurors. As predicted, jurors in diverse versus all-White juries were more depleted after deliberation, but depletion was not related to deliberation performance. For the Black defendant, jurors on diverse (vs. homogeneous) juries discussed more case facts; for the White defendant, the effect was not significant. Jurors on all-White juries discussed more case facts when they judged a White (vs. Black) defendant, but this difference was not significant for jurors on diverse juries. Thus, jury diversity reduced racial disparity in the quality of deliberation. Before and after deliberation, jurors were less likely to convict the Black (vs. White) defendant regardless of jury composition. These findings reinforce the importance of constructing racially diverse juries, given that they may be better equipped to evaluate trial evidence for both Black and White defendants despite the cognitive demand of deliberating within a diverse group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma by Karlyn Forner

Reviewed by: Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma by Karlyn Forner Camille Walsh Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma. By Karlyn Forner. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 350. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7005-5; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7000-0.) Selma, Alabama, has been a defining symbolic location for twentieth-century U.S. history, as most recently memorialized in the popular film Selma (2014). Yet as Karlyn Forner deftly shows in her book Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma, these snapshots of the city as a timeless icon of the civil rights movement run the risk of oversimplifying the long history of struggle before and after 1965. More crucially, Selma as symbol nourishes a triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement as past rather than present and erases the decades of political exclusion and economic dispossession that continued long after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the spirit of several historical works over the past decade that have complicated understandings of the unfinished work of economic transformation in the civil rights movement, this book highlights the resilience of communities both in the city and on the farms of Dallas County in the Alabama black belt that historically linked many black families to the region. Drawing on a rich array of sources from local and state agencies, personal papers, government minutes and census records, oral histories, personal interviews, and newspapers and organizational pamphlets, Forner provides the reader with a complex story and a clear, powerful narrative. Because Forner focuses so consciously on a sense of place, the reader is able to watch over decades as black tenant farmers were gradually forced off their land through intertwined systems of racial and economic control at the local, state, and national levels. Forner exposes the complex tools with which white supremacy operated over the twentieth century to ensure that black Alabamians bore the brunt of economic hardship in a geographic area in which black people had long outnumbered white people. She traces these processes as they circled back to each other, including the better-known histories of the Great Depression, the boll weevil outbreak, and the New Deal agricultural policies that often benefited white landowners at the expense of black tenant farmers, as well as the interwoven stories of agricultural extension officials, consolidated livestock farming, anti-union intimidation, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the systematic targeting of any black leader who spoke in favor of economic justice. [End Page 231] Forner traces the experiences of local leaders and groups in Selma and Dallas County through the demographic and economic shifts during and after both world wars, showing how these major global events solidified particular kinds of black community organizing as well as specific types of white supremacist opposition. The roles played by the farm bureau and the chamber of commerce receive as much attention as the state and national Democratic Party, speaking to the important historiographical trend of focusing on local processes and systems in addition to national politics and parties. Forner also emphasizes the mounting frustration over decades of Jim Crow segregation and the cold, casual brutality of white economic control, as the community came together to respond to black men brought to trial before all-white juries, to create a petition to desegregate Selma's schools the year after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and to provide political education on the theft of labor to Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) antipoverty organizers. By the time Forner's story reaches SNCC's voter registration efforts, Bloody Sunday, and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, the reader has a clear understanding of how and why the voting rights movement reached its peak in Selma—and also why it was never just about the vote. Camille Walsh University of Washington Bothell Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham by Melanie S. Morrison

Reviewed by: Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham by Melanie S. Morrison David A. Varel Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham. By Melanie S. Morrison. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 256. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7117-5.) This book tells the little-known story of Willie Peterson, an African American veteran who was wrongly convicted of murdering two white women (and attempting to murder a third) in Depression-era Birmingham, Alabama. The case mirrors that of the Scottsboro Boys—which occurred only five months earlier in a nearby rural county—in many ways: it involved a black man who was accused of assaulting white women; it galvanized white southern mobs and stoked fears of communism; it became a national cause célèbre; the NAACP and the International Labor Defense (ILD) vied for control; and, of course, a similar miscarriage of justice ultimately prevailed. Yet the differences are also notable: the women were from affluent families; Walter White and the NAACP learned from Scottsboro and ultimately pushed aside the ILD and took charge of Peterson's defense; and amazingly, in the first trial, an all-white jury could not reach a unanimous decision of guilt, resulting in a mistrial. Peterson was, however, found guilty in the second trial and sentenced to death. This sentence prompted years of protest by African Americans and communists that ultimately pushed the governor of Alabama to commute Peterson's sentence to life imprisonment in 1934. Peterson, long riddled by tuberculosis, nevertheless died in prison only six years later. In casting light on this neglected story, Melanie S. Morrison succeeds admirably in moving the literature beyond Scottsboro, which has garnered the lion's share of historians' attention. Morrison is at her best when she unearths legal records to explain how the criminal justice system was stacked against Peterson. Over the course of twenty-two brief chapters, she documents police officers' malicious interrogation tactics, judges' outright bias and hostility, the power of public pressure to shape legal proceedings, and the ever-important role of money in securing a proper defense. In Morrison's hands, the Jim Crow justice system avoids caricature and emerges as a living, breathing system in which injustice is that much more evident and pernicious. Yet Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham will likely frustrate historians and other scholars reading this journal. The book is a narrative history that rarely pauses to analyze or explain the larger historical significance. The scholarly reader is interested not merely in what happened, but also in why it matters and how it relates to other scholarship. The narrative approach employed here minimizes those discussions and leaves the reader wanting. Furthermore, Morrison—not a historian by training—relies above all on newspapers to weave the story together, making the book a bit light on archival research and secondary sources. Endnotes span only twenty-three pages. The result is that Morrison does not contextualize the Peterson case as fully as she might have or adequately connect it to historiographical debates. She does, near the end of the book, rightly suggest that the Peterson case reveals a longer history of the black civil rights struggle. But that thought is not developed, and the wide literature on that subject is not referenced. [End Page 200] Still, the book is compelling and beautifully written. Its presentation and subject should appeal to a wide audience. The story has a direct connection to present-day struggles over criminal justice, and it deepens the scholarship on important cases of Jim Crow injustice—and subsequent political protest—in the second quarter of the twentieth century. David A. Varel University of Mississippi Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature by Deborah E. Barker (review)

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature by Deborah E. Barker Michele Curran Cornell Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature Deborah E. Barker Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015, 288 pages, Hardcover, $47.50, ISBN: 978-0-8071-6062-6 During the Jim Crow era, all-white juries and white vigilantes defended white supremacy by using the southern rape complex to justify violence against African American men in the name of protecting the so-called honor and purity of white women. Court-ordered executions and lynch mobs killed thousands of black men in the 19th and 20th Centuries, who were accused of raping or even flirting with white women. The southern rape complex vilified black men as rapists and threats to southern culture, and provided white men a discourse to support the actions they took to reinforce white male privilege and racial hierarchy. In Reconstructing Violence, Deborah Barker shows how variations of the southern rape complex in American film and literature racialized cinematic conceptions of violence throughout the 20th Century. Across an introduction, six chapters, and a coda, Barker explores how six film—Birth of a Nation (1915), The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Sanctuary (1961), Touch of Evil (1958), Cape Fear (1968), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1968). —all of which were adapted from literary novels, reconstructed ideas about sexual violence and race for American audiences from the 1910s through the 1960s. Barker explains how authors, directors, and film studios influenced the process of adapting books into movies. Through this process, she distinguishes the similarities and differences between the original stories and final theatrical cuts to show how tropes of southern rape culture influenced each film's development. The films all take place in the American South during times of national crisis such as Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement. Barker uses D. W. Griffith's Reconstruction tale, Birth of a Nation, as a point of origin for many of the themes she discusses. She explains that Griffith's earlier Civil War films presented "troubling images" of former Confederates dealing with "cowardice and shame" after the Civil War (25). In Birth of a Nation, however, Barker argues that Griffith used southern rape culture to reconfigure "the defeated Confederate as the victorious Klansman" (26). In the film, southern men create the Ku Klux Klan to protect white women from the sexual aggression of black men and to protect southern whites from black rule when the government failed to do so. Using Birth of a Nation as a point of comparison, Barker shows how the tropes of the southern rape complex "are used across genres, in different time periods, in different stylistic modes, and with significant variations in narrative and character" (4). In the remainder of the book, Barker explores racial symbolism within other films by employing theoretical concepts such as racial coding and the "state of exception," both to be explained below. In most of the films Barker analyzes, white actors play the cinematic rapists, but Barker argues, "a character can be encoded as one race while visually signifying another" through "such things as speech, dress, and behaviors" (74). For example, the plot of Cape Fear explores Max Cady, an ex-convict and serial rapist who stalks and attacks the family of Sam Bowden, the prosecuting attorney who convicted him. Barker asserts that filmmakers encoded Cady as black through his defiant behavior, the familiar language he uses with black workers, his casual dress, and objects "'supercharged' with primitive power," such as Cady's "ever-present cigar and rakish Panama hat" (159-160). Furthermore, the police refer to him as "boy," and attempt to use vagrancy laws—originally designed to control the movements of black men—to force Cady to leave town (161). Barker suggests that Cady's ability to outmaneuver the legal measures Bowden [End Page 84] takes to exile him, create a frightening character for white audiences because, "as a bestial, white male rapist, Cady evades the restrictions of Jim Crow segregation" (155). Likewise, in The Story of Temple Drake, the setting is the Depression Era south where Barker explains that hillbillies, gangsters...

"A Low Caste White Man with Lust in His Heart": Race, Deviance, and Criminal Justice in Jim Crow New Orleans

"A Low Caste White Man with Lust in His Heart":Race, Deviance, and Criminal Justice in Jim Crow New Orleans Jeffrey S. Adler (bio) On the afternoon of February 10, 1930, Charles Guerand, a white, off-duty New Orleans policeman, fatally shot fourteen-year-old Hattie McCray, an African American dishwasher, after she rebuffed his sexual advances. Repeatedly over the course of the day, the inebriated Guerand had gone into the kitchen of Matt's Place, a local oyster restaurant, and "started fooling around" with McCray. Twice she "repulsed" his overtures. Just before 3:30 p.m., Guerand tried a third time "to have sexual intercourse" with McCray, and the young girl "repelled" him yet again. After determining that Bessie Piacun, the wife of the restaurant's proprietor, Matt Piacun, was not in the building, Guerand announced, "I am going back there and kill that G——D——Nigger wench" and charged from the dining room to the kitchen. A moment later, Matt Piacun heard two shots. "I ran to the kitchen," he told police investigators, "and seen the girl that washes dishes for me lying on the floor in a pool of blood and Officer Guerand standing there with a gun in his hand."1 For New Orleanians, white and African American alike, the aftermath of this shooting proved to be more shocking than the murder itself. White [End Page 245] men often sexually assaulted African American girls and women in early-twentieth-century Louisiana and typically did so with impunity.2 Moreover, a white policeman killing an African American resident "hardly surprised many in the Negro community," and such violence had always gone unpunished in New Orleans. Yet, in an era when the local criminal justice system rarely punished anyone for murder, let alone a white cop charged with killing an African American resident, an all-white jury convicted Charles Guerand and sentenced him to death, an exceedingly rare punishment and one usually reserved for the most vicious, predatory killers of white residents.3 Although Guerand eventually escaped execution, his conviction and incarceration made this case stand apart from the other 2,117 homicide cases in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945.4 Both national and local observers declared that the verdict heralded the dawn of a new era in race relations. The Chicago Defender called the jury's decision "totally unexpected," reporting that it was "the first time that a white man has been convicted of first-degree murder for having taken the life of a member of the Race in this state [Louisiana]." A white New Orleans newspaper proclaimed the verdict "epochal," while an African American Louisiana newspaper hailed the jury's decision as "the forerunner of a better day in the courts for the colored group.""Every Negro in the city," the Louisiana Weekly continued, "is rejoicing at the turn of justice in the mind of their white brothers."5 [End Page 246] This essay, however, argues that the Guerand verdict reinforced the racial order of Jim Crow New Orleans. For local law enforcers, and especially for Eugene Stanley, the Orleans Parish district attorney who spearheaded the prosecution, the trial and conviction of Charles Guerand was an expression of a more zealous and more unyielding embrace of Jim Crow and a hardening of racial boundaries. Anxious about the demographic, ecological, and political changes of the 1920s, criminal justice officials believed that social order hinged on regulating the conduct of African Americans, but it also required protecting the racial hierarchy from all perceived threats to the racial order, including challenges from working-class whites whose violent and predatory behavior undermined notions of white superiority and civilization.6 Prosecuting Hattie McCray's killer, therefore, had less to do with racial justice than with managing white class relations in order to protect white supremacy.7 The legal historian Lawrence M. Friedman has recently observed that high-profile trials are "didactic theater." They are intended "to instruct, to teach, to send a message." Such "open-air" rituals transform "rules, roles, norms, and punishments into living, breathing flesh," making them "real, corporeal, [and] effective."8 Using classical sociological theory, particularly Emile Durkheim's formulation of deviance, I...

Blinded by the White: A Comparative Analysis of Jury Challenges on Racial Grounds

Indigenous peoples in Australia, the United States and Canada are significantly overrepresented as defendants in criminal trials and yet vastly underrepresented on juries in criminal trials. This means that all-white juries mostly determine the guilt of Indigenous defendants or white defendants responsible for harming Indigenous victims. In this article, we explore cases in which Indigenous defendants have perceived that an all-white jury’s prejudice against Indigenous people would prevent them receiving a fair trial. It focuses on Indigenous defendants (often facing charges in relation to protesting against white racism) challenging the array of all-white juries. Across these cases, Australian courts rely on formal notions of fairness in jury selection to dismiss the Indigenous defendant’s perception of bias and foreclose an inquiry into the potential prejudices of white jurors. We compare the Australian judicial ‘colour-blindness’ towards all-white juries with that of the United States and Canada. We argue that the tendency for courts in the United States and Canada to question jurors on their biases provides useful lessons for Australian judiciaries, including in relation to the impending trials of Indigenous defendants in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, accused of committing crimes in response to white racist violence. Nonetheless, across all jurisdictions where there is a challenge to the array based on racial composition, courts consistently uphold all-white juries. We suggest that the judicial view of the racial neutrality of white jury selection misapprehends the substantive biases in jury selection and the injustice perceived by defendants in having a white jury adjudicate an alleged crime that is committed in circumstances involving protest against white prejudice.

Foster v. Chatman: A Missed Opportunity for Batson and the Peremptory Challenge

In the 2015 Term, the United States Supreme Court decided that the prosecutors in Foster v. Chatman exercised race-based peremptory challenges in violation of Batson v. Kentucky. The Court reached the right result, but missed an important opportunity. The Court should have acknowledged that after thirty years of the Batson experiment, it is clear that Batson is unable to stop discriminatory peremptory challenges. Batson is easy to evade, so discriminatory peremptory challenges persist and the harms from them are significant. The Court could try to strengthen Batson in an effort to make it more effective, but in the end the only way to eliminate discriminatory peremptory challenges is to eliminate the peremptory challenge.In this capital case from Georgia, petitioner Timothy Tyrone Foster, an African-American man, claimed that the prosecutors violated Batson by exercising race-based peremptories and striking four African-American prospective jurors. Foster was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. What made this case so unusual was that Foster, through the Georgia Open Records Act, was able to obtain the prosecutors’ notes. In the notes, the prosecution had highlighted the names of African-American prospective jurors on the venire list, circled their race on their questionnaires and noted it on their juror cards, and put them on a “definite NO’s” list. As the notes make clear, the prosecutors focused on the African-American prospective jurors’ race, even though they gave seemingly race-neutral reasons to explain why they removed them.The Court in Foster undertook a close reading of the prosecutors’ reasons and found race to be the basis for the prosecutors’ peremptory challenges. This Article identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the Court’s opinion in Foster. However, Foster’s case was unusual because the prosecutors’ notes were in effect a “smoking gun.” Without such notes, the prosecutors’ seemingly race-neutral explanations would have sufficed under Batson. The Court needs to recognize the ineffectiveness of Batson. It could tweak the Batson test in different ways, such as by giving more weight to discriminatory effects or practices or by devising a stronger remedy. In the end, however, the only remedy that is adequate to the task is the one that Justice Marshall proposed in his Batson concurrence thirty years ago: eliminate peremptory challenges.

Book Review: The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship—Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship-Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. By Patricia Bell-Scott. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. xix + 454 pp. $30.00 (cloth).When the dominant culture the United States becomes truly conscious and appreciative of significant contributions to the common life by individuals from marginalized groups, it seeks, arguably, to claim these individuals for itself, for its own institutions and processes. The transformative ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent advocacy for the civil rights of African Americans and the poor, for example, has become for the mainstream a national holiday. This past spring, two women-one of them African American-were similarly incorporated. The U.S. Treasury revealed that Eleanor Roosevelt, who broke many gender barriers her lifelong work for human rights, will be featured on the back of a redesigned five dollar bill, and Yale University announced that a new residential college will be named for Pauli Murray, an alumna of the Law School, as well as a writer and civil rights activist who, 1977, became the first African American woman to be ordained a priest the Episcopal Church. Such claiming by the dominant culture is not inherently wrong and can express authentic respect. Yet it also elucidates the power of Patricia Bell-Scott s new book about the friendship of these two women. Although the book honors their importance to the history of American social justice, and therefore needs to be widely read, its purpose is foremost to show their claim on one another.In 1952, after a visit by Murray and her two aunts to the Roosevelt home Hyde Park, New York, Murray expressed to Roosevelt, a thankyou note, that in our spiritual way, we consider you a member of the family (p. 210). Drawing from such correspondence over nearly a quarter-century, as well as diaries, interviews, memoirs, biographies, and other sources, BellScott tells exquisite detail the story of how the relationship between the two women grew into such intimacy. The narrative begins and ends with the firebrand, a term of affection Roosevelt once used for Murray an Ebony magazine article, and is structured around major stages of Murrays personal history, all the while documenting how the lives, advocacy, and sociopolitical views of the two women interwove with and influenced one another.The book will be of interest, of course, to students of U.S. history, especially those who view history not just as the progression of national events, but also as the are of individual lives and interrelationships. It also will appeal to anyone seeking to learn more about the civil rights movements the mid-twentieth century. The friendship of Murray and Roosevelt had early roots their shared hope for anti-lynching legislation and concern for poor sharecroppers, and took hold during their advocacy for Odell Waller, an African American sharecropper whose conviction 1940 by an all-white jury of murdering a white landowner raised national awareness regarding the injustice of poll taxes and their effect on jury lists. …

Racial Discrimination and Jury Selection

In an effort to eliminate a long history of racial discrimination in jury selection, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), that jurors cannot be excluded on the basis of race through a prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges. Despite that ruling, racial discrimination in jury selection has remained a persistent problem. In May 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided yet another case, Foster v. Chatman, finding that prosecutors’ use of peremptory challenges to exclude all eligible potential African American jurors to achieve an all-white jury in Georgia violated Batson. That jury sentenced 18-year-old Timothy Foster, an African American man, to death for the murder of an elderly white woman. Nearly 30 years later, the Court concluded that the prosecutors were motivated in substantial part by race when they struck two potential jurors from the jury. Emphasizing the seriousness of racial discrimination in jury selection, the Court admonished: “Two peremptory strikes on the basis of race are two more than the Constitution allows.” The Supreme Court may have granted Foster a new trial based on Batson, but that is unlikely to stop racial discrimination in jury selection. Since the Court decided Batson 40 years ago, issues of racially motivated use of peremptory challenges frequently arise. In that time, several cases have reached the Court, and countless more have gone to state and federal courts of appeals. In view of the intractable problem presented by the use of peremptory challenges, commentators have recommended a variety of solutions to eliminate racial discrimination in jury selection and achieve more inclusive and representative juries. In this ethics column, we explore the problems with Batson as a constitutional rule as well as the legal ethics of racial discrimination in jury selection. We also consider alternatives to peremptory challenges, and conclude by endorsing alternatives to the current system of peremptory challenges as the best alternatives to curb racial discrimination in jury selection.

Democracy, Epistemology and the Problem of All-White Juries

ABSTRACT Does it matter that almost all juries in England and Wales are all-White? Does it matter, even if this result is the unintended and undesired result of otherwise acceptable ways of choosing juries? Finally, does it matter that almost all juries are all-White if this has no adverse effect on the treatment of non-White defendants and victims of crime? According to Cheryl Thomas, there is no injustice in a system of jury selection, which predictably results in juries with no minority members, so long as this result is not deliberate and does not adversely affect the treatment of minority defendants and victims of crime. My view is different. In and of itself, I believe, something is wrong with a system of jury selection that predictably results in all-White juries in a diverse society, such as our own. Absent reason to believe that we lack a better alternative to current modes of jury selection, a commitment to democratic government and to the equality of citizens – or so I will argue – condemns existing arrangements as unjust, whether or not they have adverse effects on jury decisions, or on the ways in which our society approaches issues of race and crime.