New Law Library Digital Exhibit: "Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice"

The Law Library and Riesenfeld Center are pleased to announce a new digital exhibit: 

"Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice: Selected Materials from the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center"

The digital exhibit preserves online the Riesenfeld Center's new fall exhibit, which aims to continue a number of important and ongoing conversations at the Law School regarding race and the law. In particular, the exhibit draws on the extensive collections at the Riesenfeld Center to highlight important moments in the Black American struggle for racial justice, from the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibit considers historical legal cases, legislation, and events that saw civil rights denied, limited, and advanced, from early anti-slavery movements, to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s, and projects for police reform in the 1980s.  

The physical exhibit is also open by appointment this fall. For additional information on particular items in the exhibit, please see recent blog posts (here and here). For more information, please contact Ryan Greenwood (rgreenwo@umn.edu; 612-625-7323).

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

New Library Exhibit: "Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice"

The Law Library is pleased to announce a new exhibit now open in the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center:  

"Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice: Selected Materials from the Riesenfeld Rare Books Center"

Despite founding ideals of freedom and common civil rights, the United States has a long history of systemic racial disenfranchisement. Many forms of exclusion and control based on race have been enforced by American law, deeply affecting the lived experience of minority communities. The unequal treatment of diverse racial and ethnic populations endures today, continuing to challenge us to critically examine our practices and beliefs and to recommit ourselves to a more fair and equal society.

"Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice" highlights material in the Center's collections related in particular to the Black American struggle for equal rights, as seen in historical cases, legislation, and the evolving aims and achievements of civil rights movements. The exhibit calls attention to historical exclusion, to moments of progress, and to ongoing obstacles faced by communities of color as they have sought racial justice. It is hoped that historical perspectives will stimulate further reflection on the scope of these challenges and help us to envision a future in which rights are fully and equally protected for all.

The exhibit is open by appointment, and a digital version of the exhibit will be released this fall.  For more on particular items in the exhibit, see several recent blog posts (here and here).  For more information, please contact Ryan Greenwood (rgreenwo@umn.edu; 612-625-7323).

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections 

Upcoming Exhibit: Commission on the Harlem Riot, 1935

In our upcoming fall exhibit, "Law and the Struggle for Racial Justice," several items are reports and petitions that reflect on the causes and remedies of social injustice. All of these, including a subcommittee report written in the wake of the Harlem riot in 1935, offer recommendations for reform that still resonate today.   

The Harlem riot of 1935 has been called by several scholars the first modern race riot. A Black Puerto Rican youth, Lino Rivera, was apprehended by a Harlem, New York, shop employee for stealing a penknife. The boy bit the employee but was later released by police. A false rumor that Rivera had been beaten to death in the shop led to a riot the same night, during which more than one hundred were injured and arrested, and three African Americans were killed. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia set up a biracial commission of noted figures to investigate the causes of the riot, likely at the recommendation of Walter White, then secretary of the NAACP.

The commission included Eunice Hunton Carter, the first African-American woman prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office; Morris Ernst, co-general counsel of the ACLU; A. Philip Randolph, the prominent labor and civil rights leader; and Countee Cullen, the poet and novelist, among others.    

The commission set up several subcommittees, tasked with reports in areas including Crime and Police, Housing, Education and Employment Discrimination. More than 150 witnesses testified at a series of public and private hearings before the commission. 

Published a year later, the resulting report was more than 100 pages. It outlined the events of March 19th that led to the riot and recommended reforms by the City government in Harlem in relation to housing, health care, education and policing. 
  

The subcommittee report displayed in the upcoming exhibit is a separate typescript addressed to Mayor LaGuardia by Arthur Garfield Hays, a noted lawyer and the subcommittee chair. One other copy of the report is recorded, held at the New York Public Library. The report discusses the events of the riot and subsequent incidents involving police. Just as the overall report acknowledged the professionalism of many officers involved in the events, the subcommittee report thanks the police chief and several officers for cooperating with the investigative commission. 

Nevertheless, the report addresses the incidence of police brutality during and after the riot, citing particular officers for avoidable and unnecessary deaths and other instances of violent misconduct. Among remedies, the subcommittee recommends that police be better trained on the limits of their authority to use force and on due process rights; that rapport with the community should be fostered rather than antagonism; and that greater accountability was necessary. Regarding the last, the report recommends the creation of a biracial committee in Harlem to receive and evaluate complaints of police misconduct, then to report them directly to the office of the Commissioner of Police. The subcommittee advises that resulting criminal misconduct cases be punished not only internally but turned over to the District Attorney's Office for prosecution. The report concludes by arguing, as the general report would examine in greater detail, that in Harlem the wider social inequalities faced by the Black community in relation to housing and rent, employment and schools also had to be addressed in order to restore social order. 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

Upcoming Fall Exhibit: Racial Justice and the Law

This fall, the Riesenfeld Center will open a new exhibit on racial justice and the law, continuing a number of ongoing conversations at the Law School regarding race and criminal and civil law in American society. The exhibit will consider the struggle for equal rights through legal cases and events that saw those rights denied, limited, or advanced, amidst determined and continuing movements for equality.

The Center's rare book collection holds an important set of titles related to 19th-century anti-slavery movements, and to civil rights movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries. As leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois remarked in the early 20th century, while Reconstruction had real but limited effects, civil rights movements suffered a grave setback with the end of Reconstruction in 1877. 

At the same time, organizations dedicated to the achievement of equal civil rights emerged. The Afro-American League, led by Timothy Thomas Fortune, and the Afro-American Council - the latter of which held its annual meeting in 1902 in St. Paul - were eventually succeeded by the NAACP, founded in 1909 by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey, among others. These and other organizations arose in response to segregation enforced by law, and lawless violence, including lynching, faced by African Americans. In the late 19th century, many states passed segregationist Jim Crow laws, and with the moral blindness of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) segregation was ruled a constitutionally-protected principle.   

The NAACP initiated lawsuits targeting segregation and discriminatory laws, and made progress in some cases. It pursued anti-lynching laws, and lawsuits following race riots, which eventually resulted in some expansion of federal jurisdiction over states' criminal justice systems. A prominent case with strong NAACP support was that of Dr. Ossian Sweet, which features in our collection and reflects on the history of segregation in America. The following description is based on the excellent, detailed account of the Sweet trials by Mike Hannon for our Clarence Darrow Digital Collection. 

In 1925, Dr. Sweet, an African American medical doctor, moved with his family into a segregated white neighborhood in Detroit. Throughout America, segregation was maintained informally and formally. Often racial covenants prevented African Americans from owning houses in white neighborhoods (the practice flourished in Minneapolis, for example). The 1920s were a time of nation-leading demographic growth in Detroit, which saw an influx of African American and white workers looking for jobs and housing. The Ku Klux Klan also had a presence in the city and local political clout. In the case of Sweet, as in other cases, white neighbors resorted to tactics of intimidation and violence to drive African Americans from their homes. 

In September 1925, just after moving into a house on Garland Street, the Sweet family faced a mob massing outside their home. Family members and friends were called to help while the crowd began to hit the house with rocks and yelled epithets. Shots rang out from the house and struck two people, one of whom was killed. In the subsequent trials of Dr. Sweet, his family and friends, only Henry Sweet, Ossian's brother, would admit firing into the crowd.

The defense of Sweet, his family and friends was organized by the NAACP, which recruited the services of the nationally-renowned trial lawyer, Clarence Darrow. (Darrow's storied career is preserved in our library, which holds the largest collection of his letters, and material from his life and cases. Darrow was friends with founders of the NAACP and served as a member of its general committee.) At the first trial, for murder and conspiracy, Darrow and the defense team consistently argued that the Sweet family acted in self-defense while in direct fear of their lives. 

One aspect of Darrow's argument was that the 'reasonable man' standard, applied to gauge the fear of the defendants, had to be that of a black man in a similar situation of violence and threatened violence. The arguments at the first trial were bolstered by the testimony of several other African Americans, who had been chased from their Detroit homes by fear of violence and threats; and others who testified that between 400 and 500 people were present outside the Sweet home on the fateful day. 

In a long closing argument, Darrow argued that suffering due to race and deep inequality were at the heart of the case, appealing to a white jury to see past their own racial prejudice. In his jury instructions, Judge Frank Murphy noted that a black man's home was his castle in the same way as that of a white man: there was no right to invade or assail it (familiar as the 'castle doctrine,' with its long provenance). The jury deliberated for 46 hours and came back deadlocked; the judge declared a mistrial.  

Jury in the Henry Sweet trial

The prosecution vigorously pursued a retrial, and Darrow filed for the defendants to be tried separately. The first tried was Henry Sweet. The trial followed similar lines of argument; Darrow now had more success in hounding prosecution witnesses. In part, he pressed for admissions that a neighborhood homeowners association was organized to keep African American owners away and would use violence to do so. During the closing argument, attended by hundreds inside a packed courthouse, Darrow asked the all-white jurors again to set their prejudices aside and put themselves in the shoes of the Sweet family. He attacked the prosecution's case for eight hours, asking jurors to understand the defendant's plight and the history behind it. After jury instructions of more than two hours, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty in three hours; no further cases were tried.

The case was a notable victory for the family, the NAACP and Darrow, and reflected on issues of race and justice in 1925 that are still with us today. Racial covenants were not struck down until 1948, and de facto segregated communities have left their legacy across urban and suburban American landscapes. Self-defense doctrines have come back into the spotlight more recently in broader debates over lethal force used by police and private citizens, particularly when victims are minorities. In all of these, the problems of racial injustice that we still struggle with, and must continue to struggle with for a more equitable future, have come directly back to the foreground.

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections  

Recent Rare Books Acquisitions: Criminal Law

Over the late spring and summer, the Riesenfeld Center has added notable titles to its collection, several of which fall in the area of criminal law. Our most important active collecting area related to criminal law is the Clarence Darrow collection, which not only includes the nationally preeminent trove of Darrow letters, but writings by and about the famous American trial lawyer, who championed criminal defendants facing great odds throughout his career. At the same time, other areas of the collection touch significantly on notable criminal trials, criminal law reform, and the philosophy of punishment. 

Among works of philosophy, we recently acquired the Essays (1824) of the English barrister and jurist Basil Montagu (1770-1851), a friend of William Wordsworth and James Mackintosh, who rejected the harshness of the death penalty in England, wrote to reform bankruptcy law, and advocated for his beliefs in a range of published works and as a member of several societies. Montagu's essays add to key reformer Jeremy Bentham's Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802), a recently-acquired first edition published first in French, which lays out Bentham's revolutionary utilitarian views on law and punishment. 

Another acquisition, a copy of the Report from the Select Committee on the Criminal Law of England, bound together with the Further Report (London, 1824), is among the very few copies listed in institutions. The parliamentary committee that authored the reports contributed importantly to the movement for 19th-century English criminal law reform, begun under the influence of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and figures like Samuel Romilly and James Mackintosh in Parliament. In 1819-20, popular support for reform led to a more urgent awareness among lawmakers, and in 1823 the death penalty was made discretionary in cases not involving treason or murder for the first offense. In 1824, Parliament took up forgery, which became the focal point of death penalty reform efforts and of our reports. The committee treated in an analytic way what kind of crime forgery was, and its relation to fraud; and surveyed the history of forgery legislation in England. The work was the product of extensive legal expertise, and the reform of forgery law became a key precedent for 1830s reforms, which saw many of the over 200 capital offenses in England abolished by the end of the decade. 

A more recent work, the Hand Book of the Minnesota State Prison (1910), is a very rare edition of a handbook published to describe and tout Minnesota's new prison complex in Stillwater, then still under construction. The pamphlet outlines the prison's principles and objectives, organization, features, and finances, and is based generally on a utilitarian approach to the rehabilitation of its inmates. Arguing for the necessity of the new prison, it proclaims that the prison will be one of the most modern in the country, if not the world. Adding to the interest of the manual, and certainly meant as an additional advertisement, are two fold-out illustrations of the floor plan of the prison and an artist's bird's eye view of the prison and its grounds.

Even more recently, in the late 1940s and early 50s, the trials of the "Trenton Six" raised key issues of due process, in a murder trial that captured national attention and helped to catalyze the civil rights movement. Six young African-American men were convicted in 1948 of the murder of an elderly shop-keeper in Trenton, New Jersey, and sentenced to death. The men came to trial based on coerced confessions resulting from days of interrogation without access to attorneys, and were arrested without warrants in a wide sweep of the city. After a publicity campaign, the convictions were reversed on appeal in the New Jersey Supreme Court, for failing to specify what degree of murder the defendants were guilty of. After a new 13-week trial, four of the six defendants were acquitted, while circumstantial evidence resulted in convictions for the remaining two, one of whom died soon after, while the other was paroled in 1954. From these significant trials, we acquired a pamphlet published by the NAACP that formed part of the publicity effort to bring the case to a national audience; and a typed, signed censure by the judge in the first trial, which faults several of the defendants' attorneys for violating the New Jersey Bar's code of ethics. The censure sheds light on contemporary issues: the attorneys were reprimanded for speaking publicly about their clients' innocence and campaigning for it locally and nationally during the trial. Among other things, the judge also suggested that the attorneys, from New York, were raising money through their representation for other causes. The documents vividly bring the circumstances and sensation of the case to life, and encourage discussions about defendants' rights and the role of the media in trials, issues that are of continuing importance.

- Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections