Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue
Part 1: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners, 1861-1899
Chapter 1 A Revolution in the Courts
Chapter 2 How to Litigate a Case Against a White Southerner
Chapter 3 Challenging Whites' Bequests
Chapter 4 The Law of Contracts and Property
Part 2: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners, 1900-1950
Chapter 5 The New South and the Law
Chapter 6 Confronting Fraud Through the Courts
Chapter 7 The Law of Bodily Injury
Chapter 8 Fighting for Rights in the Courts
Epilogue
Appendix A: Notes on Methodology, Sources, and Findings
Appendix B: Tables
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Melissa Milewski is a lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex. She edited Before the Manifesto: The Life Writings of Mary Lois Walker Morris, which won the Kanner Book Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians.

Reviews

"Milewski (Univ. of Sussex, UK) offers a different story by looking at how African American litigants fared during Jim Crow in civil cases against white Southerners in former Confederate states....Outstanding for collections on US legal history, civil rights, and discrimination....Essential."--CHOICE
"Milewski's book makes a substantial contribution to Southern legal history. Weaving the stories of individual litigants into the broader histories of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, this book brings ordinary African Americans to the forefront and demonstrates how they used performative strategies and exploited white notions of paternalism to navigate the legal system and win their suits." -- Lydia J. Plath, The English Historical Review
"This is not an easy topic to research, and one of the pleasures of Litigating Across the Color Line is Milewski's discussion of the challenges posed by her research subject and the creative solutions upon which she settled....[I]mpressive archival research....[O]ffers powerful insights about dynamics of the black freedom struggle....The reconstruction of this remarkable story is a major contribution to legal historical scholarship."--Christopher W.
Schmidt, Jotwell
"Shining new light on race, rights, and justice, Melissa Milewski shows how ex-slaves found a measure of power by going to court in the Jim Crow South. This is a vivid and arresting account of legal conflict over property, contracts, fraud, and personal injury, and of challenges waged against white supremacy, disenfranchisement, and mob violence." --Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago
"In this thoroughly researched, deeply nuanced, strongly revisionist example of the new cultural history of law, Melissa Milewski unearths the fascinating human stories of nearly a thousand civil lawsuits between blacks and whites in eight southern states from 1865 to 1950. Many readers will be surprised to learn that African-Americans won a majority of the cases, that black women were parties in 41% of them, and that African-Americans quickly learned to
manipulate white supremacist beliefs to their advantage in the courts. Beautifully written, Milewski's book will be a landmark not only in legal history, but also in the history of the South and of race
relations." --J. Morgan Kousser, author of "Colorblind Injustice"
"Working from a database of ordinary civil cases in which African Americans were involved in the post-Reconstruction South, and enhanced by her exploration of the social and economic background of several of those cases, Melissa Milewski opens up new lines of thinking about how the law in a racist, grossly unequal society can both reproduce the society's power relations and deliver justice to the subordinated groups." --Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School
"In this engrossing and meticulous assessment of civil cases in local and state courts, Melissa Milewski builds on considerable research to discern African Americans' legal strategies for protecting their hard-earned rights and navigating the judicial landscape of the New South. She reveals the complexity of the region's legal culture and challenges notions that African Americans enjoyed no power within it by detailing their shrewd maneuvers to advance their
cases through a system that, while uncompromising about protecting the larger white power structure, exercised more flexibility regarding individual cases surrounding such issues as labor, property, and
physical damages. Readers will not be able to look at African Americans' participation in southern legal culture in the same way after absorbing Litigating Across the Color Line." --Kidada E. Williams, author of "They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies about Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I"