Barton J. Bernstein

Plessy V. Ferguson: Conservative Sociological Jurisprudence

For fifty-eight years Plessy v. Ferguson, the federal source of the separate but equal doctrine, had escaped judicial challenge. When the 1954 Supreme Court in effect overruled the Plessy doctrine in the Segregation Cases,2 the Warren tribunals decision was attacked as sociological jurisprudence.3 Implicit in this criticism was an assumption that Plessy was free of social theory and allegedly based upon the more solid grounds of precedent and constitutional law. However, recent studies of the tangled history of the Fourteenth Amendment establish that the Amendment did not require the Supreme Courts decision in Plessy.4 And a care-

Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen the African Slave Trade

In the tense decade before Civil War, a small group of Southerners sought to break the Union on the issue of reopening the African slave trade. The proposal evoked interest only among a few. In no state did the forces for reopening ever have a majority; it was not an issue to rally the South. Even at first, as the sectional battle lines were growing taut, this program encountered hostility in a South which recognized reopening as a threat to Southern solidarity. And when the issue threatened to split groups urging secession, the program had to be abandoned. It was clear that the economic needs of the Upper South could not be sacrified without breaking the South in two. Yet, hatred of the Union and the need for cheaper Negroes inspired some illegal importations in that decade before war. What legal reopening endangered, occasional slave-running avoided: ruining the profitable relationship between Upper and Lower South which welded the sections together.

Case Law in Plessy v. Ferguson

Critics of the Supreme Courts desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education have charged that the high court disregarded the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and a substantial body of case law to legislate equality. Defenders of the court have effectively refuted these attacks on the Warren tribunals interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. It has been established2 that this amendment

Fiftieth Anniversary of The Journal of Negro History

This is the fiftieth anniversary of The Journal of Negro History which originated in the creative and seminal mind of Carter Godwin Woodson. His preparation for this adventure was unique; he trained at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Sorbonne at a time when African and American Negro Studies were not offered in any American institution. Woodson secured the best available foundation in history and political science to which he added travel around the world where he learned to speak French and Spanish nearly as fluently as he spoke English. Since there were no authorities on the Negro in America, Woodson concentrated in history and political theory and never touched the Negro until he had completed his formal studies with a doctoral dissertation on the Disruption of Virginia which remains unpublished. Burgess, Dunning, and their numerous disciples were writing the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the point of view of the South which did not really lose the war except on the battlefields! Reconstruction historians and Southern politicians repudiated the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution while segregation and disfranchisement restored the essence of slavery which was to last for a 6entury! Woodson saw more clearly than anyone of record that unless the records of Negroes were found and published, the Negro would become increasingly, after the nadirregime, a negligible factor in the history and thought of the world! With this vision, Carter Godwin Woodson founded The Journal of Negro History in 1916 with the financial resources of a Washington, D.C. high school salary and great