I spent roughly two hours this morning flipping through an 1889 legal treatise titled Justice and Jurisprudence, published by the Brotherhood of Liberty, a group of Baltimore-based Black lawyers committed to the fight “against denial of liberty according to race.” The book is an analysis of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution as well as a broadside against the Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), which gutted enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.
It’s a massive tome of nearly 600 pages and written in an ornate, and sometimes very difficult, 19th century style. But it also has some real bangers in it.
This passage, in particular, will give you a sense of the writing as well as the substance of the argument.
The complaint of the citizen of African descent is, that the decay of “natural and well-known repugnances” creating civic discrimination cannot be expected, so long as the judicial interpretation of our laws, directly encourages the supremacy of one class of citizens over another in the every-day, joint and several enjoyment of those civil rights, immunities, and privileges which the supreme law of the land shall be equal heritage of all classes in the state.
The African citizens protest and claim that a uniform, precise, and fixed regulation of the sovereign rights of all the individuals who now compose the state, in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law of the land, would put an end to the bickerings, rancor, and discord which foment race-antagonisms throughout the land. They say truly, that the vexatious litigation between the races incontestably establishes, what is too notorious for question, that the more numerous and powerful body in the state daily trample under foot the civil rights of a minority — of a sensitive, peaceful, unresisting, helpless and useful portion of the civic society; that the state now requires the repose which the amendments to the Constitution contemplate; that this anarchistic force in the state must be curbed, controlled, and counterbalanced by the law of the land; that an amphibious code of crude, contradictory textual rules, instead of repelling insolent despotism, encourages the spirit of race-antagonism to enter fresh fields, and, with new allies under its command, to commit new depredations upon all the other civil rights of these citizens; that their general civil right to engage in all departments of industry requires something more for its protection than a mere grammatical construction of the words employed in the Fourteenth Amendment, and an ambulatory parade around the amendment itself, with an army of pretentious learning — an imposing array of deceptive dialectical subtleties; that to meet the race-perils which confront the state, in the present condition of civil rights, there is an imperative need either of new legislation, or the enforcement of the existing laws by rules which will protect, on life’s common way, the lowliest child of the state’s adoption, making him feel that he is a man, majestic and free: rules of such strength and grandeur that they will inspire each member of the state with awe and reverence; so clear, uniform, stern, and unrelenting in their character, that the most profligate or powerful member of the state will not dare to evade or dispute their authority.
It’s, uh, a little hard to parse. But the message — the state cannot be blind to racial inequality and injustice — is as valid now as it was then.
