Throughout the month, I’ll be
blogging about different aspects of my research, including the role of black
women in these suits, the frequent suits brought by former slaves against their
former masters, how these suits shifted over time, the strategies used by black
southerners that helped them to win suits against whites, and these suits' links to the U.S. Civil Rights movement. I’ll also be providing links to
some excerpts from the archival case files of some key cases examined in my
book, which highlight what these sources look like and may be useful for
teaching.
Before discussing what I found in my
research, though, I wanted to start by discussing how I found these court records.
These appellate civil cases are a very rich source in which much further
research remains to be done. While the suits themselves are not representative
of all civil cases litigated by African Americans in lower courts, they allow
analysis of African Americans’ experiences in both trial and appellate courts. The
archival case files of suits that reached southern supreme courts generally include
the full trial records of the lower court case as well as records of the
appeal. Often, the archival records for each case number 200 or 300 pages and
include extensive trial testimony from African Americans as well as others in
their communities.
I found these civil cases involving
African Americans by doing advanced keyword searches on the LexisNexis database in the state supreme court records of each of the states examined. The
search terms I used included “slave, freedman, freedwoman, Negro, black,
Africa, African, color, colored and Negress.” As these cases took place over 85
years, certain terms were more common during certain periods than others.
After these keyword terms produced
thousands of cases on LexisNexis, I then went through the LexisNexis record of
the court cases to determine if the case actually involved a black litigant,
and whether it took place between black litigants or between one or more black
and white litigants. In many cases it was possible to determine this from the
LexisNexis record, but in some cases it was necessary to look at the archival
record or census data to determine the racial identity that southern courts and
southern society assigned to the litigants.
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| Courtesy of the Kentucky Dept. for Libraries and Archives. |
After compiling long lists of cases
that might involve African Americans for each of the eight states, I then
turned to archives in each state to examine the original archival case files.
Generally, the case files were held by the state archives of that particular
state. In Arkansas, however, the records were at the University of Arkansas at
Little Rock’s Law Library and in Virginia, records were held by the Virginia
State Law Library, The Library of Virginia, and the University of Richmond’s William
Taylor Muse Law Library (for a complete list of all the archives I consulted,
see the Bibliography of Litigating Across the Color Line). Fortunately, the
vast majority of case files involving African Americans that I sought at these
archives and law libraries still survived.
Some case files were still tied in what seemed to be their original
faded ribbon, and several archivists noted that these records had only rarely
been requested. I concluded my search
for these cases here at the archives by examining the case files to check the racial
identities assigned to the litigants. As a result of this research, I found 980
appellate civil cases between black and white litigants and 397 appellate civil
cases between two or more black litigants in the state supreme courts of eight
southern states from 1865 to 1950.
I’ll be back again in a few days
with more about how I analyzed this data and what I found in these cases.
