Courts Still Cite Cases Enforcing the Enslavement of Black People
A project at Michigan State University College of Law professor is working to prove the lasting impacts the enslavement of Black people has had on U.S. law.
Justin Simard told AP he started the “Citing Slavery Project” because “… people are invested in trying to pretend that our history of slavery didn’t happen and that its effects are not still with us. I thought, what better way to prove that slavery had an influence on our legal system than using official legal sources?”
The project has amassed more than 7,000 direct citations of “slavery-law” precedents so far, and Simard notes that these precedents continue to guide judges and lawyers to this day.
From AP:
Most of the slavery precedents concern how property rights were protected by the U.S. Constitution, which was written by wealthy property owners in an era when much of the young nation’s economy was powered by the buying and selling and sweat of enslaved people.
The Supreme Court made slavery’s importance to the America’s founding clear when it ruled that Pennsylvania’s anti-slavery law was an unconstitutional affront to the federal Fugitive Slave Act, and ruled in favor of Edward Prigg, who had forced Margaret Morgan and her children into slavery in Maryland.
The U.S. Constitution clearly granted “to the citizens of the slaveholding states the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves, as property, in every state in the Union, into which they might escape from the state where they were held in servitude,” the court wrote.
The slaveowner’s right to “this species of property” was so fundamental to the framers of the Constitution that without it, “the Union could not have been formed,” the justices added.
Simard told AP that while working on his dissertation, he found that the citations of “slave cases” were “more numerous, widespread and recent than he imagined.”
“I kept digging and digging and digging and realizing that this wasn’t something just one judge did or some very racist judge or something,” he said. “This was just a basic feature of the legal system and it really shocked me, really surprised me.”
Simard added that many lawyers and judges are either unaware or don’t care that enslaved Black people are the “property” in question in most of these cases, and he finds that problematic.
“Not only are we ratifying their treatment as property in the past but also continuing to treat them as property in the present.”
Simard believes it’s impossible to eliminate all the cases related to Black people as property, so he and his team convinced the editors of The Bluebook, a citation guide for the legal profession, “to require case notations such as ‘enslaved party’ or ‘enslaved person at issue,’” AP reports.
Source: Douglas Rissing / Getty
This is critical race theory in practice — showing how the enslavement of Black people and U.S. law are forever connected.
Sure, the enslavement of Black people ended more than a century ago, but laws that are still cited today were created to enforce that enslavement.
As Donald Trump works to dismantle DEI initiatives and ban the accurate teaching of U.S. history, pretending the atrocities dealt to Black people in this country didn’t happen, lawyers and judges are still citing laws directly tied to the enslavement and subjugation of Black people.
There’s no way to hide from that.
Unlike what Trump and his ilk would have you believe, CRT is not something created to make white people feel bad about themselves. That is a projection on their part because the actual study of critical race theory examines how these things exist in our society.
Having 7,000 cases on the books that actively cite property laws in which the property in question is one or more enslaved Black people without even thinking about what that means for us as a society is a privilege only afforded to whiteness.
Thinking they are the victim of some negative PR campaign is their guilt at being complicit in a system that still doesn’t regard Black people as human.
Never forget that Black people are an amendment to the Constitution.
As it says on the “Citing Slavery Project” website, “the legal profession must confront its role in slavery.”
See also:
For Black People, Reparations Are About More Than Slavery