In honor of our paper assignment…

In Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, Kevin Boyle presents a detailed narrative history of 1920s America, wrought with explosive class tensions and racially-charged mob violence. The years immediately following WWI witnessed the Great Migration, in which over 30,000 African-Americans moved to northern cities. Significantly, the Sweet trial occurs in Detroit, a beacon for both European immigrants and black Americans escaping Jim Crow. In book’s first few chapters, Boyle provides us with ample material for discussion, and I think the following points are especially worthy of consideration: (1) Dr. Sweet’s personal journey, and (2) the ossification of residential racial segregation in the North.

(1) In the 1920s, black expression and thought found a voice in the Harlem Renaissance and the “New Negro,” who called for political equality, an end to segregation, and in certain cases, armed self-defense. Throughout the book, Ossian Sweet comes to occupy a central role in this nascent Civil Rights movement. He embodies a spirit of self-determination that enables the “slow, hard, thoroughly American process of transforming himself” (71). Along his journey, Boyle makes a point of underlining Sweet’s personal influences, from the AME Church that instilled in him the values of self-respect, education, and the “discipline that racial uplift required” (52) to the notion of the “Talented Tenth,” the well-educated black class that W.E.B DuBois claimed would lead the way to racial equality. Despite his professional successes, however, Dr. Sweet constantly runs up against the fact that “no matter what he achieved or where he went, he was never safe from the mindless fury of the mob” (97). Boyle writes, “To back down would be to admit that he wasn’t willing to live up to the principles that had been preached to him ever since Wilberforce [University], that he had no claim to a place among the Talented Tenth” (156). As Sweet achieves upward social mobility and joins the middle class, his personal triumphs are simultaneously undercut by violence and by immense pressures to be a representative example of his race.

(2) More broadly, Arc of Justice helps situate 1920s racism within larger processes of urban development and the modern real estate industry. Boyle shows that the supposedly desegregated North was just another reflection of the Jim Crow South, abetted by “economic structures that transformed hatred into organized violence” (343). What became “common business practice” (108)—discriminatory lending, biased government policies and unethical real estate agents—precluded black Americans from joining the early twentieth-century suburbanization movement. Instead, these legal structures confined the majority of the black population to marginalized inner city ghettos like Detroit’s Black Bottom.

A literal “color line” was drawn through urban centers through a joint campaign of owners, salesmen, developers, and neighborhood associations who strove to link neighborhood values with racial identity. Urban community builders, such as the Waterworks Park Improvement Association, were historically able to create homogeneous neighborhoods by launching organized efforts to enforce racially restrictive covenants. Such legal actions encoded racial difference in urban areas and helped encourage racial stereotypes that associated black residence with declining property values. As Lopez notes in White by Law, “Segregation laws increased the stability of racial categories by fixing mutable racial lines in terms of relatively immutable geographic boundaries…This link between space and race functions as a matter of both external and internal identification—as a matter of what others believe of our identity, and of how we think of ourselves” (120). I think that it is important to note that today the identification of black culture with deteriorating neighborhoods has remained a major part of exclusionary real estate practices designed to maintain control of metropolitan areas; indeed, Detroit continues to be one of the most racially segregated cities in the country (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/housing_patterns/pdf/censr-3.pdf).

A few questions to consider as we move forward in our discussion: Why do you think Boyle decided to call this narrative “Arc of Justice”? What surprised you about the notions of justice and injustice in post-WWI Detroit? How can we use Lopez’s framework of “Law as Coercion” and “Law as Ideology” to further our understanding of the book?

[I didn't realize that Lombardo only posted the first page of the act. Here is the full text. --sml]

1. Be it enacted by the general assembly of Virginia, That the State registrar of vital statistics may, as soon as practicable after the taking effect of this act, prepare a form whereon the racial composition of any individual, as Caucasian, Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains, and if there be any mixture, then, the racial composition of the parents and other ancestors, in so far as ascertainable, so as to show in what generation such mixture occurred, may be certified by such individual, which form shall be known as a registration certificate. The State registrar may supply to each local registrar a sufficient number of such forms for the purpose of this act; each local registrar may; personally or by deputy, as soon as possible after receiving such forms, have made thereon in duplicate a certificate of the racial composition, as aforesaid, of each person resident in his district, who so desires, born before June 14, 1912, which certificate shall be made over the signature of said person, or in the case of children under fourteen years of age, over the signature of a parent, guardian, or other person standing in loco parentis. One of said certificates for each person thus registering in every district shall be forwarded to the State registrar for his files; the other shall be kept on file by the local registrar.

Every local registrar may, as soon as practicable, have such registration certificate made by or for each person in his district who so desires, born before June 14, 1912, for whom he has not on file a registration certificate, or a birth certificate.

2. It shall be a felony for any person wilfully or knowingly to make a registration certificate false as to color or race. The wilful making of a false registration or birth certificate shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for one year.

3. For each registration certificate properly made and returned to the State registrar, the local registrar returning the same shall be entitled to a fee of twenty-five cents, to be paid by the registrant. Application for registration and for transcript may be made direct to the State registrar, who may retain the fee for expenses of his office.

4. No marriage license shall be granted until the clerk or deputy clerk has reasonable assurance that the statements as to color of both man and woman are correct.

If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race, when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are “white persons” as provided for in this act.

The clerk or deputy clerk shall use the same care to assure himself that both applicants are colored, when that fact is claimed.

5. It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term “white person” shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act.

6. For carrying out the purposes of this act and to provide the necessary clerical assistance, postage and other expenses of the State registrar of vital statistics, twenty per cent of the fees received by local registrars under this act shall be paid to the State bureau of vital statistics, which may be expended by the said bureau for the purposes of this act.

7. All acts or parts of acts inconsistent with this act are, to the extent of such inconsistency, hereby repealed.

[quick disclaimer: sorry that this post is late! I apologize to anyone who tried to comment earlier]

In Ian F. Haney Lopez’s White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, the author reiterates the point we have come across before that “races are social products,” yet he makes an important distinction that the legislation put into effect serves as the precursor and catalyst for the creation of racial definitions (111).  I think this is an interesting point that Lopez makes, as I previously considered these laws as the byproduct of society’s views on race, a system implemented only to justify America’s attempt at exclusion and the curbing of immigration.  In Lopez’s version of what came first—the chicken or the egg—he adamantly asserts, “law constructs race” (113), as made evident by examining first how legal rules fashion races and, second, the role that legal actors play.

Lopez considers the ways in which legal rules shape our perceptions of race by highlighting three main points: first, how legal rules mould physical appearances and alter the systems on which race is constructed; second, how law creates racial meaning to attach to appearance; and third, how law contributes to racial construction through establishing material conditions like that of citizenship (116-119).  In his first point, Lopez highlights that through legislative efforts such as exclusion acts and anti-miscegenation laws, the United States established a racial hierarchy that led to what Dubois referred to as the “problem of the color line”.  Here, we see how these laws contributed to the country’s white phenotype through prohibiting interracial mixing and endorsing the concept of naturalization.  When these laws proved to be insufficient preservers of racial boundaries and hierarchies, the need to legally define what constituted a “non-white” or “black identity” soon arose.  The examples that Lopez cites on page 118 highlight the discrepancies between states on what constitutes “black”.  That states could all have such different legal definitions (all of which warranted the same “non-white” label) illustrates the erratic social nature of race construction.  I cannot help but wonder, how would one even know if someone had a single drop of “negro blood”?  What even constitutes an “appreciable mixture of negro blood” (118)?  This system of classification seems to arbitrarily ascribe labels.

When addressing the role that legal actors play, Lopez touches on the issues we have discussed in conjunction with Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates about enforcement versus resistance.  People involved in the legal systems are “both conscious and unwitting participants in the legal construction of race” (113), and Lopez uses the prerequisite cases to shed light on the duality of this occupational role.  But, to what degree and for what do we hold those who occupy legal positions accountable for?  Are judges, lawyers, and immigration officials at fault for enforcing the laws that the government has passed down?

Lopez’s disclaimer towards the beginning of the chapter that the legal construction of race is not “normatively good or bad” (115) really resonated in me.  Remembering the exercise where we were asked what came to mind upon hearing the word “race,” almost all of the answers imparted negative connotations or touched on the taboos associated with present perceptions on the term.  I find that in the discussions we’ve had thus far, I have come to see the construction of race and racialized dialogue in legislation as inherently bad.  Lopez also considers the way in which the construction of race both produces and excuses the use of violence (122), which I see as normatively bad.  I suppose I am unsure as to how the construction of race can be considered “good” or beneficial to our society.

D.W. Griffith — 1915 — first feature length film.

Selected clips: