Freedom Suits Research Articles

What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. By Ariela J. Gross. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. xii, 368 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-03130-2.)

In 1790, absent any explicit federal definition of citizenship, Congress restricted eligibility for naturalization to “any alien, being a free white person.” In 1952 the racial requirement was revoked. During the intervening 160 years, race and citizenship became mutually constitutive categories in American culture, as Ariela J. Gross demonstrates in her delightfully readable legal history of racial identity in the United States. The persistent inextricability of race and citizenship leads Gross to reject one strand of the history of race in the United States, the rise of the so-called one-drop rule (p. 297), as well as to call into legal-historical question claims made by whiteness studies scholars about the perceived racial alterity of immigrant groups such as the Irish and Italians. Reviewing freedom suits, miscegenation trials, naturalization cases, and myriad other proceedings, Gross persuasively exposes the shifting sands upon which the unstable but formidable (and enduring) edifice of race in America has been built. In her account, “blood” has seldom, if ever, been the sole juridical criterion for race. Rather, Gross argues, early efforts to locate race in appearance and ancestry were superseded by increased attention to civic performance, local reputation, and personal association in the nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by heightened sensitivity to science, national citizenship, and cultural practice. Taking a wider view than classic histories of race by Winthrop D. Jordan and George Frederickson and deftly incorporating the theoretical insights of such legal scholars as Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado, Gross's study is a worthy counterpart to Rogers M. Smith's magisterial analysis of the inegalitarian, ascriptive traditions of American citizenship, Civic Ideals (1997).

Slavery, manumission and the law in nineteenth-century Brazil: reflections on the law of 1831 and the ‘principle of liberty’ on the southern frontier of the Brazilian empire1

This paper aims to discuss the process of delegitimisation of Brazilian slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Several reasons contributed to delegitimise the slave regime in Brazil, such as the end of the Atlantic slave trade, the rise of the average price of a slave and the growing number of manumissions. A large number of these manumissions were obtained through freedom suits, in which slaves brought lawsuits against their masters arguing in the courts that they had the right to be freed. The paper focuses specifically on the freedom suits initiated in the late 1860s on the border of Brazil with Uruguay. In these lawsuits, slaves argued that, because they had crossed the border and stepped on free Uruguayan soil, they had the right to be freed once they returned to Brazil. Lawyers based their petitions on an 1831 law that prohibited the entrance of slaves into Brazilian territory. It also demonstrates that the free soil concept, after being considered juridically legitimate by the courts, was used by abolitionist lawyers throughout the country in the 1870s, contributing to the political movement that ended the slave regime in Brazil.

"Face to Face": Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light

Were it not for Lucy Delaney's c.1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom, she might not be remembered today. However, as Delaney's preface notes, [S]o many of my friends have urged me to give a short sketch of my varied life that I have consented, and herewith pres ent it for the consideration of my readers (vii). Delaney's brief narrative of that varied life actually begins with the false enslavement of her mother before Delaney's birth and then follows Delaney through a range of masters and mis tresses of the Berry and Wash families. As she grows, her own family is gradu ally sundered by slavery?by the sale of her father, the escape of her sister and an attempted escape by her mother, the sale of her mother, and, finally, her own threatened sale and attempted escape (after Delaney clashes repeatedly with her last mistress, Martha Berry Mitchell). Delaney's mother, Polly Wash, though, stumbles on a now little-known set of legal provisions and files suit both for her freedom and, in a separate action, for Delaney's. Most of Delaney's narrative follows the progress of her own freedom suit, through seventeen months in the St. Louis Jail (where her master demanded she be placed for what he considered to be safekeeping), a set of climatic courtroom scenes during which Delaney is represented by Edward Bates (who would later become Abraham Lincoln's Attorney General), and, finally, freedom through a victory in court. Her narra tive concludes with the complex juxtaposition of her sadness at the destruction of her family (she is, for example, reunited with her father only to find him unable to return to the life in St. Louis he had lost decades before) and her deep satisfaction at becoming a key figure in St. Louis's Black community. Delaney's text has attracted only limited notice, though, in part because it seems an anachronism: Delaney was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass,

The Dissents of John Marshall Harlan I

The Dissents of John Marshall Harlan I LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI* I want to start by offering you two quotations. Both are from Harlan’s famous dissent from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, when the restofthe Justices heldthat itwasconstitutionalto segregate people according to their race. The first quotation is famous; the second is not well-known—in fact, some ofyou may have never heard it before. Here is the first quotation: [I]n the view of the Constitution, in the eye ofthe law, there is in this coun­ try no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. And here is the second: Every true man has pride ofrace, and under appropriate conditions when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. When we speak of racial equality in the twenty-first century, we do not usually think of racial pride as anything but a barrier to the achievement of that equality. But Harlan lived in the nineteenth century, and he drew upon his own racial pride and that of his family in order to achieve racial equality. In fact, that pride explains how Justice Harlan, who came from a slave-holding family and who owned slaves himself, became the sole champion of black civil rights on the U.S. Supreme Court at the turn of the nineteenth century. Harlan was born in Kentucky in 1833. His mother was Eliza Harlan, the daughter of farmers. His father was James Harlan, a Whig politician, lawyer, and state attorney general who owned some half a dozen slaves, who worked in the house and gardens that sur­ rounded it. James was allied with Henry Clay, the great Senator from Kentucky, who urged the end of slavery through gradual emancipa­ tion. But James Harlan was no racial radical. In a letter marked with blots and strikeout, which indicate how much care he took to compose it, he once wrote during a political campaign that the man who called him an abolitionist “lies in THE DISSENTS OF JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN I 153 his throat.” James did bring what were called freedom suits—lawsuits brought on behalf of people who claimed to be unlawfully held in bondage—but such suits actually confirmed the legality of slavery in all other cases. Like many slaveholders, James Harlan told himself that he was a righteous man and a benevolent slaveholder. It was a belief that John Harlan shared. All families have stories they tell, stories that serve to identify the core values of their families. The one that the Harlan family told about James—a story they were still telling in the twentieth century—occurred one Sunday morning as he was walking to church with his son. This is the version ofthe story recorded in the memoirs ofJohn’s wife, Malvina Shanklin Harlan: One Sunday morning, on his way to church, he passed in the main street a company of slaves that were be­ ing driven to the “Slave Market” in a neighboring town. The able-bodied men and women were chained to­ gether, four abreast, proceeded by the old ones and the little ‘“pickanin­ nies,” who walked unbound. This pitiful procession was in charge of a brutish white man, be­ longing to a class which in those days were called “Slave-drivers.”... Their badge of office was a long, snake­ like whip made ofblack leather, every blow from which drew blood. The sight stirred my father-in-law to the depths of his gentle nature. He saw before him the awful possi­ bilities of an institution which, in the division offamilyestates, and the sale ofslaves, involved inevitably the sep­ aration ofhusband and wife, ofparent and children.... My father-in-law could do nothing to liberate the poor creatures then be­ fore him; but he was so filled with in­ dignation that any one calling himself a man should be engaged in such a cruel business that, walking out to the middle ofthe street and angrily shak­ ing...

The Confluence of Law and Antebellum Black Literature

This article argues that the acculturation of black Bostonians to the rhetoric of the law during the Revolutionary era was constitutive and sustaining. The article examines how three pivotal Boston-based antebellum authors—Prince Hall, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—appropriated the rhetoric of legal pleading used in Revolutionary-era government petitions and freedom suits (petitioning for redress of grievances, closely analyzing precedential texts, distilling ideas into reasoned argument, adducing factual proof, the pointed use of narrative and the interrogative mode) to produce a literature of complaint and rights–assertion. The central premise of the article is that antebellum black texts used these lawyerly discursive practices ironically, as an empowering move, to draw attention to the disparity between the rhetoric of rights and actual practice. Because these “lawyer’s words” called upon the authority and salience of the law as a source of rights in the process of claiming rights, lawyerly discourse served a sustaining strategy of empowerment for black people, and captured the sense of irony in their experience.

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master's estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth's case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude - slavery in the mid seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry - English; her religion, Christian; and the inability to be enslaved for life that stems from the first two statuses. These factors, I argue, determined who was the equivalent of white in seventeenth century Virginia.

Freedom Suits and Civil Law in Brazil and the United States

(2001). Freedom Suits and Civil Law in Brazil and the United States. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 66-82.

‘The squint of freedom’: African‐American freedom suits in post‐revolutionary Virginia

‘The squint of freedom’: African‐American freedom suits in post‐revolutionary Virginia

Our Attempt to Practice Feminism in the Women's Studies Program

Possibly no other women's studies program at a university in North America has raised so many questions about practice of women's studies as has one at California State University, Long Beach, a large, metropolitan, state-supported school that borders on California's conservative Orange County. If anti-feminism is central to politics of 1980's, and if academic conservatism is one of many responses,1 what does that mean for programs such as ours at CSULB, where feminism was practiced in classroom and in our program's governance, and what might it mean for women's studies programs across country? As ex-director of program, I would like to explore these questions. The events of spring, 1982, have now made academic history and may, perhaps, make legal history. Feminist Studies wrote in 1983 that the experience of Women's Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach, is particularly important in that, to our knowledge, it is only case in which an entire Women's Studies Program has brought suit against a university administration. 2 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has referred to our case as most significant academic freedom suit in over two decades.3 It has now been over three years since we first became aware of a right-wing attempt to radically alter our program. In February, 1982, after collecting information

The Marxist Theater of Amiri Baraka

The Marxist Theater of Amiri Baraka W. D. E. Andrews Franz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth (1961), isolated three stages in the development of the black writer: assimilation, ethnic discovery, and national socialist revolution. Ten years earlier, Sartre had postulated a similar progression, though with considerably greater recognition of negritude (Fanon’s second stage) as a necessary phase in a developing political consciousness and with a stronger internationalist per­ spective on the ensuing Marxist union of the proletariat (the ultimate realization, in Sartre’s program, of Fanon’s third stage): “The unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples together in the same struggle, must be preceded in the colonies by what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this anti-racist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial differences.”! Fanon’s and Sartre’s analyses would seem to have a striking bearing on the career of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. During the 1960’s, Baraka progressed from an integrated life-style of Greenwich Village hipsterism, through ethnic self-discovery, and then to a black revolutionary priesthood. Since the mid-1970’s, he is to be seen making the crucial move beyond uncompro­ misingly separatist black nationalism through a more inclusive Pan-Africanism culminating in international socialism. In his earlier writings, Baraka had expressly dissociated him­ self from the revolutionary model of white radicalism. The relevance of Marx and Lenin to black revolution was vehemently dismissed. Eldridge Cleaver’s efforts to align the Black Panther Party with white leftist groups were bitterly resented: “With the incarceration of Huey [Newton]”, Baraka wrote, “and the move W. D. E. ANDREWS teaches at The New University of Ulster and devotes some of his time to writing—mostly plays for British and Irish radio and television. He has also written on Pinter, Beckett, Albee, Seamus Heaney, and on Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Padraic Fiacc and the American influence on Irish poetry. 137 138 Comparative Drama of Cleaver into the chief strategist’s seat, the Panthers turned Left on Nationalism, and turned left on black people. And the love of Beverly Axelrod [Cleaver’s white ex-lawyer] has left terrible Marx on the dirty Lenin black people have been given by some dudes with dead 1930’s white ideology as a freedom suit.”2 But it was becoming increasingly clear to Baraka that if nationalism fails to be a form of preparation for socialist con­ struction or socialist revolution, it becomes as reactionary as the white variety. The black bourgeoisie were showing them­ selves ready to co-opt the message of black nationalism without ever thinking of sacrificing their middle-class privileges or aspira­ tions. The limitations of “bourgeois nationalism” were demon­ strated for Baraka in the career of Kenneth Gibson, the first black mayor of Newark, for whose election Baraka had enthu­ siastically campaigned in 1970. Gibson emerged as one of the new class of influential blacks who had risen to prominence on the backs of the black community only to become, in Baraka’s view, an apologist for capitalism and neo-colonialism and a notable disappointment to anyone anticipating meaningful change in Newark. Furthermore, Baraka’s own brand of nationalism was coming under considerable pressure from more advanced revolutionary thinking of the time. Huey Newton compared Baraka with Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti and charged him with advocating a pro­ gram that would simply mean replacing “white oppression with black oppression.”3 In 1973 the National Caucus of Labor Committees published a thirty-page pamphlet, Papa Doc Baraka! Fascism in Newark, which was a compilation of left-wing criti­ cisms of Baraka’s activities. Here, Baraka was proclaimed an anti-semitic fascist, while his kind of socialism was compared with that of Mussolini and denounced as “impressionistic, sche­ matic, devoid of any content beyond today’s ‘gut radicalism’.”4 The change that came about in Baraka may be traced through the essays that constitute the Ideological Papers of the Congress of Afrikan People. These reveal the growing influence of African socialist thinking (e.g., the theories of Nkrumah, Toure, and Cabral) to which Baraka was exposed at the sixth Pan...