Jack M. Beermann - The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuirs Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era

Jack M. Beermann

University Press of Kansas

2021 by the University Press of Kansas

All rights reserved

Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beermann, Jack M., author.

Title: The journey to separate but equal : Madame DeCuirs quest for racial justice in the Reconstruction era / Jack M. Beermann.

Description: [Lawrence] : University Press of Kansas, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020036228

ISBN 9780700631834 (cloth)

ISBN 9780700631841 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Race discriminationLaw and legislationUnited StatesHistory19th century. | Equality before the lawUnited StatesHistory19th century. | Race discriminationLaw and legislationLouisianaHistory19th century. | African AmericansCivil rightsLouisianaHistory19th century. | LouisianaRace relationsHistory. | Reconstruction (U.S. history, 18651877) | DeCuir, Josephine.
Classification: LCC KF4757 .B343 2021 | DDC 342.7308/73dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036228 .

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.

Printed in the United States of America

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The paper used in the print publication is recycled and contains 30 percent postconsumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

To the memory of my grandmothers,
Leona Beermann
and
Rose Stern

I cannot conclude without expressing the fond and sincere hope, that the time may speedily come when a fostering government may by wise laws and a mild administration, aided by an independent judiciary, venerable by its gravity, its inflexible integrity, its benign dignity, profound wisdom, and official independence and supported by a willing, patriotic people, inspired by a unity of political purposes, and striving for the general welfare, may submerge and do away with every necessity for investigations of causes like this, and when all distinctions germinating in prejudice, and unsupported by law, may be finally forgotten, and when the essential unity of American citizenship shall stand universally confessed and sincerely acquiesced in by the national family.

From the opinion of Judge E. North Collum,
Fifth District Court, New Orleans, Louisiana,
in Decuir v. Benson, June 14, 1873

Sometime around 2010, the title of a law review article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review caught my eye: The Tyranny of the Minority: Jim Crow and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty. The central point of the article, written by Gabriel Chin, then a law professor at the University of Arizona Law School, and Randy Wagner, then a researcher at the same school, was that the violent overthrow of Reconstruction-era governments across the South raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the current governments of those states. The article cited a case I had never heard of, Hall v. Decuir , describing it as involving a Louisiana non-discrimination statute, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1877. Having studied Supreme Court civil rights decisions of the era, I found it difficult to believe that such a decision existed and that I had never heard of it. Despite all I knew about the Supreme Courts dismantling of Congresss program of Radical Reconstruction, I doubted that the US Supreme Court had invalidated a state antidiscrimination statute. I immediately read the opinions in Hall v. Decuir