This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project investigates the activities and experiences of African Americans in local civil courts from the Civil War through the Great Migration. Jim Crow-era courts are usually portrayed as hostile or indifferent to African Americans, touching their lives only through criminal trials or civil rights lawsuits. Yet a whole world of black legal activity was flourishing in America's local courts, one that goes well beyond the familiar images of crime and civil rights, and one that has barely been explored. Combining archival materials with recent advances in digitized Census research, this project will identify the litigants in a sample of 3,700 civil cases from local courts in four states - Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Illinois - including roughly 560 involving African Americans. And it will combine the associated case files with other archival materials to build a qualitative analysis of the mobilization of law.
Common understandings of how late-nineteenth-century courts actually worked, how ordinary people approached them, and how people understood "the law" are largely based on evidence from appellate courts, which are not typical of anyone's legal experiences. Shifting focus from criminal to civil cases, and from appellate to trial courts, promises to yield a different yet complementary story of blacks as active legal subjects. It offers a way to put race relations - perhaps the dominant framework of African American history - in the context of intra-racial relations, given that most of the suits blacks brought were against other blacks. The project thus seeks to clarify the relationship between historically disadvantaged minority groups and legal institutions. In doing so, it will capture a bottom-up view of how ordinary Americans of all races interacted with law and legal processes.
