Annotations of Plessy v. Ferguson (pg. 20-38):
- In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) the Court, influenced by a circuit court decision by Field, ruled that corporations, as artificial legal “persons,” come under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
- William J. Cruikshank was a member of a paramilitary group known as the White League that killed at least sixty-nine and as many as one hundred blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, as part of a campaign to keep blacks from participating in the political process.
- In the early 1870s, the Massachusetts Republican senator Charles Sumner unsuccessfully proposed a new civil rights bill.
- In the lame-duck session in 1875, motivated by Sumner’s death in 1874 and major losses in the 1874 election, the Republican-controlled Congress finally passed the new bill.
Annotations of The Mismeasure of Man (pg. 62-82):
- The “scientific” argument has formed a primary line of attack for more than a century
- One group—we might call them “hard-liners“—held that blacks were inferior and that their biological status justified enslavement and colonization.
- Another group—the “soft-liners,” if you will—agreed that blacks were inferior, but held that a people’s right to freedom did not depend upon their level of intelligence.
- The “harder” argument abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species, the descen-dants of different Adams. As another form of life, blacks need not participate in the “equality of man.” Proponents of this argument were called “polygenists.”
Gabrielle Davis Blog's 