Corrective Justice and Reparations for Black Slavery

Over the last two decades, legal scholarship has been catching up with the more than century old calls by black Americans for reparations.1 Tax scholar Boris Bittker (in)famously launched the viability of black reparations into legal scholarship with his now classic monograph, The Case for Black Reparations.2 However, it would take more than twenty years for mainstream legal scholarship to take up the robust and wide-ranging set of questions raised by the possibility of reparations for American slavery.3 In the late 1990s private law scholars leapt into the debate, discussing unjust enrichment and torts-based models of black reparations.4 While these scholars made a variety of distinct arguments, collectively, their model rested on the contention that America had wrongfully expropriated the labor of generations of enslaved African Americans and the result had been systemic unjust enrichment, or a species of mass torts. Grounded in various conceptions of corrective justice, these models conceive black reparations as a set of claims that would be litigated through the courts. Over the ensuing two decades, the private law model has become somewhat of an outlier in reparations discussions, largely set aside in favor of broader, more explicitly political approaches.

A FEMINIST READING OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, introduces the world to the tribulations of the enslaved African Americans. While as a woman writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe also pays close attention to female power and consciousness apart from the abolitionism in her work. Through the analysis of women’s domesticity and women’s strength in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this paper attempts to fathom into Stowe’s feminist ideas manifested in this book, therefore colors the understanding of this literary canon.

Material Culture in the 18th Century

Material culture refers to human-manufactured, human-altered, or human-used physical things of all sizes and materials, from houses to domestic artifacts to tools to landscapes. Material culture also refers to the study of artifacts and scholars’ use of objects as a form of evidence to ask and answer questions about the 18th century. Material culture studies is not limited to physical examination of artifacts. It also involves consideration of an array of documentary, literary, and visual sources that provide information about material life. In 18th-century colonial America, the meanings and uses of material goods changed radically. Anglo-American colonists obtained greater numbers and novel types of objects through transatlantic and global trade networks. The British manufactures that flooded the colonies fulfilled colonists’ desire to assert social status and to participate in social rituals that demonstrated refinement. Scholars have labeled these changes the “Consumer Revolution” and the system of “gentility.” Artifacts also built communities and buttressed political beliefs, particularly through non-importation or boycotts of British goods during the imperial crisis. Ideas of gender shaped how women’s growing activity of shopping was understood and critiqued, as well as the association of fashion with women. The importation of Asian and Indian goods, primarily textiles and porcelain, fulfilled fantasies of the exotic while enabling American consumers to demonstrate their worldliness and status. Material goods facilitated cultural exchange and trade between those of different races and ethnicities. At the same time, oppression and political and economic disenfranchisement shaped American material culture. Indigenous peoples expressed consumer preferences for manufactured goods during negotiations within the fur trade. They incorporated British manufactures into preexisting material practices. Enslaved African Americans entered the market as both commodities and consumers. Through their purchases and creative use of refined artifacts, bond people expressed individual identity despite their legal status as property.

Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century

Analyzing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra R. Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century. Complicating the tendency among historians to conflate masculinity within slavery with heroic resistance, Hilde emphasizes that, while some enslaved men openly rebelled, many chose subtle forms of resistance in the context of family and local community. She explains how a significant number of enslaved men served as caretakers to their children and shaped their lives and identities. From the standpoint of enslavers, this was particularly threatening--a man who fed his children built up the master’s property, but a man who fed them notions of autonomy put cracks in the edifice of slavery. Fatherhood highlighted the agonizing contradictions of the condition of enslavement, and to be an involved father was to face intractable dilemmas, yet many men tried. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved men undertook to be fathers, Hilde reveals how formerly enslaved African Americans evaluated their fathers (including white fathers) and envisioned an honorable manhood.

Literature and Visual Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, an increasingly diverse group of Russians and Americans reflected upon their changing worlds in literature and visual culture. They produced competing representations of serfs, enslaved African Americans, peasants, and freedpeople that alternately idealized and criticized the pre and post-emancipation eras. This chapter studies the work of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Kate Chopin, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Anton Chekhov, and Evgenii Opochinin.

Radical Literature on the Eve of Emancipations

This chapter compares antiserfdom and antislavery literature produced on the eve of the abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery. It studies Nikolai Nekrasov’s poetry, Aleksei Pisemskii’s A Bitter Fate, Martha Griffith Browne’s fictional Autobiography of a Female Slave, and Louisa May Alcott’s short stories. With different degrees of success, these authors used similar strategies to transform public opinion toward Russian serfs and enslaved African Americans.

Equality at the Cemetery Gates: Study of an African American Burial Ground

In Charlottesville, Virginia, the University Cemetery serves as the final resting place of many of the most prominent community members of the University of Virginia. In 2011, the University planned an expansion. During archaeological research to this end, sixty-seven previously unidentified interments, in both adult and child-sized grave shafts, were discovered on the proposed site of expansion, to the northeast of the University Cemetery. Further archival research revealed that “at least two late nineteenth century references note that enslaved African Americans were buried north of but outside the enclosed University, in an adjacent wooded area.” In one, Col. Charles Christian Wertenbaker recalls: “in old times, the University servants were buried on the north side of the cemetery, just outside of the wall.” Current research suggests that at least as late as 1898 the area of land was recognized as historically utilized by the University of Virginia for “servant” burials. Since these discoveries, a commemoration ceremony has been held. Some beautification measures have been undertaken: a specially designed fence has been installed; some trees have been planted; and at both entrances an informational sign is posted explaining the significance of the plot. Still, this newly rediscovered sacred space stands in stark contrast to the marble tombs and gilded cenotaphs of the University Cemetery and adjacent Confederate monument. Typically, descendants of the dead reserve rights in a cemetery in the form of some kind of property interest. Mourners and the children of mourners may return from time to time to pay their respects and tend to the graves of their dearly departed. In general, this is a well-established right (though further investigation will reveal that it somewhat less clear than one might expect). However, slavery in America has frustrated many rights, and its long shadow continues to disrupt others. Because of the nature of this property interest, today in Charlottesville, the cemetery rights of the descendants of those slaves interred to the northeast of the University Cemetery are arguably extinguished, or at best unclear. The owner of the cemetery, the University of Virginia, has made no attempt to exclude or to sell the land, nor likely would they, but it is unclear that they could not should they so desire. There are likely other slave cemeteries, on public and private land, that find themselves in a similar situation: specifically, slave cemeteries and African American burial grounds that, because of systemic oppression and discrimination, are rendered unprotected and abandoned—descendants’ rights vanished into nothing. In exploration of this problem, this paper lays out the historical legal landscape of cemeteries, the special issues that arise in slave cemeteries generally, and the application of these doctrines to the African American burial ground in Charlottesville. Additionally, it presents a suggested legal treatment of this special type of property interest: namely, that there should be legislative reform that, in the case of abandoned slave cemeteries, creates both a public easement allowing access and broad statutory standing so that communities can work together to maintain these sacred sites and police against desecration. Further, the development of the rights of sepulture in American common law and the accompanying legal solicitude would allow judges to read this regime into existence, even in absence of formal legislative measures.

Teaching about American slavery and its connections to Christianity and the Bible

Purpose A reluctance of social studies teachers to address religious matters prevents students from understanding the intersection of two important American institutions: slavery and Christianity. The continuing importance of religion in American life and the tension centered around race relations in this country make instruction in the connections between these two institutions invaluable. Evidence for the rich spiritual experience of enslaved African Americans is both ample and easily accessed; conversely, the misuse of Christianity by the oppressors and the biblical support for abolition commonly referenced during that period can be easily explored. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach In addition to these historical matters, modern results of the intersection of slavery and religion prove beneficial for study. While slavery itself is an irredeemable wound on American history, one that has repercussions even to this day, the encouraging impact of Christianity in the lives of enslaved African American and their progeny is worth noting. Findings Finally, this topic lends itself to progressive and engaging learning activities that are cooperative, project-based and authentic. Originality/value The teaching of history, which wrongly has a reputation for being lifeless and dull, can be improved and energized with this content of two topics still vital in America today: race and religion.

Searching for Black Confederates

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans’ gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.