| Friday, February 18, 2011, 9:57 AM PST |
| WASHINGTON (AP) Democratic source: Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to retire
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Rousing scenes from Syria where people protest against the puppet and dictator Bashar Al assad and his reign of treachery and oppression.
Anti government rally in Syria 17 Feb 2011: crowds chanting La Ilaaha illa
Was there “any way
to consider the old slaves,” the authors
of the appeal asked the President, some way of “giving us
pensions in payment for our long days of servitude?”
The answer, as on previous occasions, was no, but the timing
is noteworthy. One year later, Roosevelt signed legislation
creating the Social Security system – a system from which
agricultural and domestic workers, the two largest black
employment categories, were excluded.
| Friday, February 18, 2011, 9:39 AM PST |
| ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) Obama says he is deeply concerned about violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen
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Lorenzo
I found a current interview with Matt Taibbi (not as easy
to find as you might think.)
Why is it that a reporter for Rolling Stone is producing
better financial reporting than the Wall Street Journal etc.?
You can't understand the state of the economy without
knowing this story.
Video:
http://www.realecontv.com/page/1161.html
- Brasscheck
P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.
That's how we grow. Thanks.
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Brasscheck TV
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| During and after the Civil War, African Americans made use of law in new ways, initiating cases and trying to mobilize the system on their own behalf. They did so even before emancipation, during the Civil War, with refugees and black soldiers firing off letters and complaints to federal officers and agencies. They continued after the Civil War, before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and under the notorious state Black Codes, which limited freedpeople's individual rights and barred them from using local and state courts in most instances. Freedpeople nonetheless brought complaints to federal Freedmen's Bureau officials, turning them into legal intermediaries. After the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the democratic restructuring of southern state governments, freedpeople made valiant efforts to use all the new legal arenas open to them, at the local, state, and federal levels. As the scholarship suggests, freedpeople made substantive claims about the post-emancipation social order in these legal arenas that went beyond their individual rights: they made powerful statements about economic justice, racial equality, and political democracy.49 Freedpeople turned to the legal system because of the dramatic policy changes of the era, which not only granted them individual rights that allowed new kinds of access, but also encouraged them to think that the system could now be a more reliable ally. As important as those changes were, however, they constitute only part of the story. African Americans' past experiences also encouraged them to look to the legal system. Like other southerners, they were familiar with the system's workings. More than that, they had experienced law as a system designed to protect community order. After emancipation, African Americans had every reason to think that they could assume more active roles in defining the public order, even when their claims to individual rights were tenuous. | 43 | | Those expectations are particularly pronounced in the actions of freedwomen, who did not acquire the full range of rights that freedmen did. In fact, African American women shed the legal bonds of slavery only to acquire all the legal disabilities of other free women. Yet, as records indicate, freedwomen used courts not just to assert civil and political rights, but also to address a range of domestic issues: they filed for divorce, brought charges against their husbands for neglect and abuse, informed on annoying neighbors, testified in cases involving community conflicts, and prosecuted neighbors and even family members on behalf of their children. These uses of the legal system were strikingly similar to those of white southern women of poor to modest means, who had expected the system to resolve such problems before the Civil War and continued to bring such cases afterward.50 | 44 | | African Americans' use of the legal system is important, given the trajectory of Reconstruction. The same Reconstruction-era lawmakers who extended civil and political rights to African Americans also made other changes that were not as democratic. Legislation in the late nineteenth century centralized state authority and systematized a body of state law around the concept of individual rights. Those changes built on trends from the late antebellum period, spearheaded by reform-minded southern lawmakers who tried to move governing authority away from local jurisdictions and create a uniform body of state law that slotted individuals into generic categories. Ironically, the efforts of these southern statesmen were not fully realized until after the Civil War, as part of the systematic reform of the region under the terms of the congressional Reconstruction plan and the dramatic revision of state constitutions under Republican rule. The institution of capitalist labor relations and the extension of individual rights to former slaves required a hierarchical legal system, which construed law as a set of universal rules, consistently applied within defined categories. Although most southern legal reformers who lived through the Reconstruction era bitterly opposed the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and other changes that came with Republican rule, their basic vision of the legal system was similar to that of Reconstruction-era Republicans. It is no coincidence that Democrats left these changes in place when they took over after Reconstruction.51 | 45 | | Within the political context of the post-Reconstruction era, this new version of state authority did not necessarily work to the benefit of most southerners. Consider the experience of African American men during and after Reconstruction. The extension of civil and political rights to them also formally linked possession of those rights with citizenship—in the broader sense that civil and political rights were considered essential markers of citizenship and, more than that, prerequisites to participation as full members in the polity, whether at the state or the national level. That link between individual rights and citizenship actually redefined the basis of participation in law and governance. As Redemption and Jim Crow rolled back the legal changes of the Reconstruction era, the subsequent denial of those individual rights had devastating effects for men, denying them what had become the only entry to law and governance. That outcome highlights the problems of relying on the conventional, theoretical legal subject—a (masculine) individual with an unrestricted array of civil and political rights—as the historical standard against which to measure historical change. In legal practice, most men were more like women, in the sense that they never enjoyed the full array of rights associated with that theoretical individual. Assessing change in those terms—that is, the acquisition or loss of individual rights—fails to capture the complexities of most Americans' legal status and the radical changes they experienced in that regard. Moreover, the trajectory of change in the Reconstruction-era South suggests the limits inherent within legal changes that emphasized individual rights and that usually are associated with democracy and political progress. Although individual rights held great promise, they arrived with new legal institutions that undermined other forms of access to law that had existed within a localized system. In that localized system, a person's subordination and lack of rights were not always a barrier either to making claims on the community or to participation in the basic processes of community governance. | 46 | | The emphasis on southern legal culture and African Americans' position within it thus reveals an important historical counternarrative, one in which individual rights were only one way to imagine and produce claims on the state. African Americans' persistent use of the legal system reveals not just the fight to obtain individual rights, but also the presence of a broader legal culture in which citizenship and participation in governance were not defined exclusively in those terms. Local court records indicate that many white southerners approached the legal system and other institutions of state governance before and after the Civil War laden with the same expectations. White women marched off to local officials to demand redress for the various problems in their lives. During the Civil War, they sent off missives to state leaders and Confederate officials, with every expectation that the government would deal with their personal problems. White men did so as well, requesting favors, transfers, and leaves as if the war should accommodate their desires. Even though white men could rely on their individual rights for access and could assume that their interests were central in defining the social order, they were accustomed to operating in a legal system in which individual rights were not the only way to define justice. Of course, white southerners' conceptions of that public order were very different from those of African Americans. But the way they viewed the process of achieving that order—however it might be defined—was strikingly similar. Turning our attention to people at these local levels provides a different understanding of legal and political history. In this history, ordinary men and women without civil and political rights would have more substantive roles. This history also would be based in a different narrative of political development, one defined through expansive historical contests over the content of the public order, instead of the acquisition of individual rights. | 47 |
This article first appeared as a paper for the Fourth Avignon Conference on Slavery and Forced Labor, Avignon, France, October 2002. I would like to thank Michael Grossberg, Robert Schneider, and the reviewers for the AHR, whose thorough, thoughtful critiques challenged me to clarify the central arguments in this piece. I thank Priscilla Wald, Dylan Penningroth, Giovanna Benadusi, Joe Miller, Chris Tomlins, Adrienne Davis, Gunther Peck, Jolie Olcott, the audience at the Jean Gimbel Lane Humanities Lecture at Northwestern University (2006), and the participants at the Political History Workshop at the University of Chicago (2006) for their invaluable comments. The biggest debts are to John McAllister, whose insights were crucial in shaping the article, and to Jacquelyn Hall, who read innumerable drafts and whose thoughts on writing and history have been an inspiration. I also thank Kirsten Delegard, Kelly Kennington, and Alisa Harrison for research assistance. A National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the Newberry Library, and leaves from Duke University provided time to research and write.
Laura F. Edwards is Professor of History at Duke University. She is author of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997) and Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women and the Civil War Era (2000). She is currently working on a new book project, The People and Their Peace: The Re-constitution of Governance in the Post-Revolutionary U.S. South.
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