Ross - The great New Orleans kidnapping case : race, law, and justice in the reconstruction era

Mention courtroom dramas that took place in the past in the American South and certain images come to mind. A courthouse with Greek revival columns and domed clock sits in the middle of a town square, a statue of a Confederate soldier standing guard. Inside, the courtroom is hot. The spectators, segregated by race, sit in crowded rows, cooling themselves with hand fans. An all-white jury of men dressed in khakis and sweat-spotted white shirts watch the proceedings from the jury box or the courtrooms front rows, while the white sheriff and his deputies pass jokes amongst themselves. Seated at the defendants table is a man accused of committing a terrible crime against someone of the opposite race. If he is white, he is in a suit and looks unperturbed, confident he will be acquitted by a jury of his peers. If he is black, he is in farmers bib overalls, staring downward glumly, equally certain of a grim result. Recreated in innumerable plays, movies, and books, it is a scene that occurred all too often in real courtrooms in Decatur, Jackson, Sumner, Meridian, and the rest of the Jim Crow South. Those stock characters, along with the appalling photographs of lynchings and vigilante acts, symbolize for many racial injustice in the South before the Civil Rights Movement.

The most famous of these trials, real and fictional, took place in the twentieth century. Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird was set in Depression-era Alabama. The real-life trials of the Scottsboro Boys and the murderers of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Yet the outcome of each seems so intertwined with the past that they can serve as allegories for the injustice African Americans had suffered in the South since the days of slavery and the Civil War. The tragic fates of Tom Robinson and Haywood Patterson, and the shameful exonerations of J. W. Milam and Byron de la Beckwith, stand in for more than a century of lesser-known verdicts poisoned by prejudice. Even though the past is complicated by instances in which African Americans, including slaves, received justice from white judges and juries, the conventional accounts retain their illustrative power. Because the law and legal procedures favored whites, justice for blacks was the exception, not the rule.

The subject of this book, the Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case of 1870, shares some similarities with the Southern courtroom dramas that are etched in the American memory. Five years after the Civil War, the state of Louisiana charged two black women with kidnapping Mollie Digby, the young daughter of an Irish immigrant family in New Orleans. The white-controlled press used Mollies disappearance to create a moral panic, claiming she had been kidnapped for use as a Voodoo sacrifice. Because all black people were now free, newspaper editors warned readers to expect ever more horrific crimes committed by black individuals unless the perpetrators were found and incarcerated. When prosecutors eventually charged two women of color with the crime, many white Louisianans assumed they were guilty well before their trial began. White editors labeled the defendants the child stealers and, even in high summer, standing-room-only crowds flocked to a sweltering New Orleans courtroom to witness the proceedings.

But there end the parallels between the Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case and the kangaroo-court trials of the Jim Crow era. Had the Digby case occurred in the early twentieth-century South, the result would have been foreordained. Black defendants charged with committing sensational crimes against whites had little hope for acquittal. Yet in 1870 in New Orleans no one could be sure of the outcome of the trial of the child stealers. The evidence against the defendants was mixed. Some facts suggested guilt, others innocence. But because 1870 was the height of Radical Reconstruction in Louisiana, the state government that prosecuted the defendants was not dominated by white supremacists bent on keeping African Americans in line. The governor was a young, idealistic Union army veteran. Blacks and whites served together in the Louisiana legislature, on the New Orleans police force, and on juries. Louisianas new constitution guaranteed black citizens due process of law, as well as equal access to restaurants, theaters, and public accommodations.