Race and the Law in South Carolina

John W. Wertheimer teaches history at Davidson College in North Carolina.

This first title in the "Law, Literature & Culture" series uses six legal disputes from the South Carolina courts to illuminate the complex legal history of race in the U.S. South from slavery through Jim Crow. The first two cases--one criminal, one civil--both illuminate the extreme oppressiveness of slavery. The third explores labor relations between newly emancipated Black agricultural workers and white landowners during Reconstruction. The remaining cases investigate three prominent features of the Jim Crow system: segregated schools, racially biased juries, and lynching, respectively. Throughout the century under consideration, South Carolina's legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of non-white people, but it occasionally provided a public forum within which racial oppression could be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power.