TRANS-ATLANTIC FOOD MIGRATION: THE AFRICAN CULINARY INFLUENCE ON THE CUISINE OF THE AMERICAS

CONTRIBUTED BY: DIANE SPIVEY

In the article below, culinary historian Diane M. Spivey describes the centuries-old diaspora of African foods and cooking traditions in North and South America.

Africa has been a major contributor to the cuisine of North and South America although this contribution has long been overlooked, trivialized, or denied.  The discourse contained in volumes on American cooking is usually consistent in its themes of celebrating what is considered the European influence.  When African American cuisine is recognized, as has increasingly been the case in the past few decades, credit is often given to a culinary heritage and legacy categorized and relegated to the culinary and cultural shackle known as “soul food” which specifically includes chitlins, corn bread, fatback, greens, and fried chicken.

The story of the African culinary past begins with “Lucy” and East Africa, the cradle of humankind and civilization.  Over thousands of years East African cuisine and culture slowly migrated to every other part of the African continent, diversifying and establishing new concepts, while retaining basic aspects and characteristics of the old.  Throughout the continent, prosperity arose out of superior agricultural environments and eventually the transcontinental trade and commerce in agricultural and other goods first to Asia and eventually to Europe and the Americas.

East coast cuisine and culture transplanted itself by means of explorers, merchants, travelers, and seamen bound for India, Indonesia, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan.  Spices sold and purchased at East African trading ports and in Indonesian and Southeast Asian markets would dominate the delicious flavors of creative cooks.  The Dravidians of southern India and the Khmers of Southeast Asia (modern Cambodia and Thailand), are two of numerous ancient Eastern civilizations that still bear many African culinary and cultural imprints.

Africa’s East and West Coast cultures made their indelible culinary marks through exploration, migration, and trade expeditions on the Olmecs and Mayans of Mexico, the Chavin of Peru, the Native American Mound Builders, the Caribs of St. Vincent, and other indigenous cultures in the Americas, and these marks were made long before the so-called discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.  Migration and trade between the Americas and Africa had made the exchange and transplanting of foodstuffs between the three continents quite common.  In other words, the African culinary influence on the Americas began long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The last stage of this culinary diaspora was the forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the slave trade, beginning in the 15th century, which brought numerous culinary artists and expert agriculturalists to the Atlantic coast stretching from Argentina to Nova Scotia.  The continual influx and steady increase of Africans into the Caribbean and South America at the height of the human bondage trade ironically constantly rejuvenated the African cultural input, and fostered a culinary revolution under the influence of Africans that would permeate every aspect of cooking and cuisine in rural and urban areas of every country in the Americas.  Africans who were shipped directly to areas such as Louisiana and South Carolina, as well as those who endured the “seasoning” process in the Caribbean islands and were then transferred to the American South, all positioned their culinary standards throughout the Southern states.

West African cooks made certain that all fish, meat, vegetable, and beans and rice dishes were heavily seasoned with hot peppers and spices, such as Guinea grains, or melegueta, spicy cedar (called atiokwo in the Ivory Coast—its seeds are roasted, ground and used in soups or with leafy vegetables), tea bush (known as an-gbontoin Sierra Leone, its fragrant leaves are used to flavor meat dishes, vegetable, egusi and palm nut soups), African locust bean (harvested, boiled and fermented to produce dawadawa, an indispensable condiment in Nigerian and Cameroonian cuisine), and West African black pepper (fukungen to the people of The Gambia and Senegal), to name just a few.  Several oils were used in preparing West African dishes, such as groundnut, or peanut (which is sometimes preferred in stews), melon seed, sesame seed (gingelly), coconut, corn, shea butter, and palm, which remains the favorite in West Africa due to the reddish-orange color it imparts to foods.

Both these specific foods and the preparation and cooking methods came with the enslaved people to North and South America.  The cooking methods included frying, boiling/simmering, roasting and steaming (foods are first wrapped in banana, plantain, miraculous berry, cocoyam leaves, or corn sheaths) and baking, or combinations of two or three methods. Broiling has been added in the modern era.

Suriname, wedged between Guyana and Guiana on the northern coast of South America, was mostly populated by enslaved people whose descendants remain the majority of the population to this day. Food and cultural historians believe Suriname, at least until the early 1980s, had the best preserved African cultural patterns in the Western Hemisphere.  Suriname is home to the descendants of the Saramaka, or Saramacca, who live along the banks of the Suriname River, and the Djuka Maroons communities, formed in the early eighteenth century.  The ancestors of the Saramaka were agricultural specialists from Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and Nigeria, who cultivated an enormous array of crops introduced directly from Africa, including moringa, which yields four edibles: pods, leaves, seeds, and roots; sorghum, known as guinea corn in West Africa which botanists confused with maize for a long time.  Other crops included tamarind, legumes such as marama, Bambara groundnut (African peanut), cowpeas (black eyed peas), locust and sword beans; as well as African eggplant.  Their descendants continued to produce those crops well into the 20th Century.

Rice was the principal crop cultivated by the early Saramakans, and is still produced today.  Known locally as alesi, the seventy cultivated varieties of rice comprise much of their current diet.  Rice production continues to incorporate African utensils and methods and the process is nearly identical to that of the Senegambia region, between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers in West Africa, as well as South Carolina plantations cultivated mainly by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

A variety of game meat, fish, and birds, preserved primarily by smoking and salting, includes akusuwe, a kind of rabbit; mbata, a small deer; malole, which is armadillo; and awali, or opossum, which are eaten only when nothing else is available to accompany rice.  Rounding out their larder is the tree porcupine, known as adjindja, in addition to logoso (turtle), akomu (eel), peenya (piranha), and nyumaa, or pataka, spoken of as “the best fish in the country.”  Anamu (bush hen), maai (bush turkey), gbanini (eagle), patupatu (wild duck), soosoo (large parakeet), and pumba(blue and red parrot) are also consumed in abundance.  While not all of these foods were found in West Africa, the Saramakans learned quickly to prepare them just as their ancestors had done in what is now Guinea, Senegal, Gambia. Large quantities of meat and fish are shared through family networks, lessening the need for preservation.  Preparation of foods includes roasting, frying, boiling, or browning meats first in one or more of five varieties of palm oil, then simmering with vegetables and/ or root crops and one or more of ten cultivated varieties of hot peppers.  Fifteen different varieties of okra are cultivated, along with mboa and bokolele (mboa is amaranth, but both are called wild spinach).  Tonka (beans), seven varieties of yams, tania, cashews and peanuts, and wild limes, watermelon, lemons, oranges, and pineapples, and other fruits specifically of African origin are also grown.

If the Saramakans managed to keep in place more African foods and cooking traditions than almost any other people in North and South America, the culinary culture of the African continent nonetheless influenced in various ways the cooking of the entire Atlantic seacoast from Canada to Argentina. From the rural country kitchens in Brazil or South Carolina to the steamboat floating palaces along the Mississippi River, to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance from Boston to Buenos Aires, Africans of North and South America have been a dominating presence in America’s kitchens, and have stood at the helm as creative head chefs of farms and plantations, restaurants, hotels, steamboats, lodges and private clubs, trains, and private homes of the elites.  From the 15th through the 19th centuries, Africans, as enslaved people, contributed their labor skills, religion, music, and culinary expertise to create societies and cultures in every country in the Americas, but especially in the United States.  The preservation and reinvention of culinary traditions and social patterns based on African heritage demonstrated strong cultural persistence and resistance within plantation, as well as Maroon, communities, which were established wherever slavery existed.

Similarities in African culinary heritage, shared especially throughout the Southern United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, have left enduring legacies.  Those legacies are filled with cooking and cuisine strongly reminiscent of, or identical to, those of their African forebears and therefore continue to transmit the values and enrich the culinary experiences of not only Africans in the Americas but most other cultures in the Americas as well.  Although these nations have adopted African culinary traditions as their own, in most cases there is little or no recognition of their roots.  Certain aspects of African American cuisine, such as “soul food,” are too often seen as backward and lacking in value.  In general, the African contribution is regularly subjected to racism and societal repression.

For Africans and their descendants in the Americas, however, food and its preparation are deeply infused with social and cultural meaning, rooted in African traditions, and have always held an intrinsic role in creating, preserving, and transmitting expressions of ethnic cohesion and continuity.  It is hoped that there will be an eventual appreciation of African culinary heritage not just in the United States, but throughout the world.

COLLECTING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE TO THE OBAMA ERA

CONTRIBUTED BY: PATRICIA BANKS

In the following article sociologist and African American Studies professor Patricia A. Banks describes the rise of private art collectors and collections among African Americans. Her article also shows the growing acceptance of African American art and artists in major museums and galleries across the nation.

On October 16, 1943 Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting Flight into Egypt (see illustration) was hanging in the entrance hall of a home located at 127 Randolph Place in Washington, D.C. The occasion was the opening of the Barnett-Aden Gallery which was founded by James Herring, an artist and art professor at Howard University along with Alonzo Aden, curator of the University’s Gallery of Art. Works such as Jacob Lawrence’s watercolor Trees, Aaron Douglas’s painting Alta Knitting, and Lois Mailou Jones’s painting Still Life with Green Apples, were also displayed in the inaugural exhibition. During the next two decades Aden and Herring held gallery shows in Aden’s Washington home and purchased works from each exhibition for the Barnett-Aden Collection. Herring and Aden were part of a long tradition of African Americans who individually, and in partnership with black and non-black family members, collected work by African American artists. They were also among a distinct group of collectors who acquired work by African American artists and shared it with the public. These publicly oriented collectors presented their chosen treasures to the community by opening their homes, loaning works for exhibitions, and making donations to museums. In doing so they played an important role in shaping the value of African American art.

While many observers believe that the value of art is determined by its intrinsic properties, in reality what separates great art from less valued art is partly influenced by societal arrangements. Rare and unusual talent is not enough to vault an artist from obscurity to the spotlight. For art to be recognized as worthy it must have champions, such as collectors, who nudge it forward to be granted entrance into the canon. For several decades, the public patronage of African American collectors has played a critical role in the valorization of art by African American artists. Their commitment to these artists took on added significance because race has often made the path to consecration especially challenging for artists of African descent.

Collectors such as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (aka Arthur Schomburg) helped to sustain and memorialize visual art from the Harlem Renaissance. During this period of cultural flowering and emergent racial consciousness in the 1920s, Schomburg amassed a large collection of artifacts and art. Like other collectors of this and future eras, Schomburg was determined to excavate and preserve the historical and cultural contributions of African Americans. Concerned about the financial prospects of black artists, Schomburg purchased prints by artists such as Albert Alexander Smith and William Ernest Braxton. Combining his passion for history with his interest in art, he commissioned Braxton to create etchings of historical figures like Frederick Douglass. Schomburg’s private collection became public patrimony in 1926 when the Carnegie Foundation agreed to purchase the collection for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. The collection was housed in the Harlem library’s Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints. The Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints would in 1940 be renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature in honor of this early collector.  In subsequent decades the library was given its current name of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  Other collectors such as poet Countee Cullen also helped to sustain the visual production of the Harlem Renaissance. A central literary figure in this cultural movement himself, Cullen collected the work of his friends such as Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden, and Hale Woodruff.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, African American collectors continued to support African American artists. While the Federal Arts Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) was an important source of government patronage for African American artists during its run from 1935 to 1946, opportunities for African American artists continued to be restricted by racial barriers. Indeed, it was racial segregation in 1940s Washington, D.C. that partly led Aden and Herring to establish the Barnett-Aden Gallery. They hoped to redress racial segregation in the city’s art world by showing the work of African American artists alongside white artists and artists from other racial and ethnic groups.

In the 1960s and 1970s the political forces that were transforming all other sectors of American life also rocked the art world.  The African American museum movement was in its infancy and institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968, began to appear in major cities across the United States. Protesters also picketed outside major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art to publicly contest the lack of diversity in exhibitions and acquisitions. Black artists in groups such as Spiral created work that responded to shifts in the sociopolitical order. Detroit, Michigan gallerist George N’Namdi, who started his personal collection in the 1960s, describes how the political spirit of the day informed his collecting ethos: “One of the reasons I started collecting was that the rebellion of the 60s induced in me this strong desire to preserve the culture of African-American people and I began to wonder specifically how I could preserve the culture through supporting and preserving visual arts, theater, dance and so on.”

Paul Jones of Atlanta, Georgia first started acquiring art in 1967. He made a commitment to focus on African American artists after noticing that they were rarely represented by galleries and their work had scant representation in museum exhibitions and collections. Among Jones’s first acquisitions were works that he selected from the Atlanta University Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists. The Atlanta Annuals, which ended soon after Jones started collecting, was one of the few juried art shows for African American artists during the course of its run from 1942 to 1970. In the 1970s The Barnett-Aden Collection, which was then under the care of Adolphus Ealey, was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Collection was also exhibited at two institutions that were part of the first wave of the black museum movement—the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

By the 1980s and 1990s multicultural values, though still contested, infused all sectors of the art world. Museums presented exhibitions that highlighted racial and ethnic minority themes. Acquisitions at non-ethnically specific museums also became more diverse as support groups like the African American Art Alliance at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin and the African American Art Advisory Association at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston were established. African American collectors both influenced and were influenced by this newfound level of institutional diversity.  In 1986/1987, Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800-1950 showed at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas. After seeing the show, Harriet and Harmon Kelley were inspired to begin collecting African American art in their home city of San Antonio. Almost a decade later their collection was presented in a touring exhibition, The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art, that showed at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 1994. In the 1990s the acquisitions of other major collectors of African American art also toured the United States. The collection of David Driskell, an artist, curator, and art historian who was then a professor at the University of Maryland, was presented in the exhibition Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection. The exhibition showed at museums such as the University of Maryland Art Gallery and the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine.

The increasingly growing field of African American museums was also bolstered through private collections in the 1980s and 1990s. As part of the growing yet still stalled effort to establish a national African American museum in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution renewed efforts to exhibit African American culture and history in existing buildings. In 1995, an exhibition of the Kelley’s collection—The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art—was shown as part of the National African American Museum Project in the Arts and Industries Building. African American museums also acquired major private collections of African American art. In 1986 the Hampton University Museum purchased the Countee Cullen Art Collection. At that time the collection not only included works selected by Countee Cullen before his death but also those by his wife, Ida Cullen Cooper, who further developed the collection.

In the late 1990s John and Vivian Hewitt sold their collection of African American art to NationsBank (which in 1998 merged with Bank of America). The bank pledged the collection to the Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture) in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the years prior to the cultural center’s re-opening the Hewitt collection toured nationally. The Barnett-Aden collection was also the leading collection for a newly founded African American museum. In 1989 the Florida Education Fund purchased the collection for the Museum of African-American Art in Tampa, Florida. After the museum closed, Washington D.C. entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), bought the collection in 1998.

Significant public patronage by collectors of African American art continued into the 21st century. For over a decade the African American art and artifacts collection of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey of Los Angeles, California has toured nationally. The Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection in San Francisco will embark on a national tour in Fall 2017. This collection is distinguished by its focus on abstract work by artists from the African Diaspora such as Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Mark Bradford.

Major private collections of African American art have also been gifted to museums by African Americans in the first decades of the 21st century. The University of Alabama and the University Museums at the University of Delaware acquired work from Paul Jones’s collection; Walter O. Evans of Detroit bequeathed works from his collection of African American art to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD); and Larry and Brenda Thompson of Atlanta gave works from their collection to the Georgia Museum of Art. The donations are part of broader efforts to institutionalize African American art at these institutions. The Paul Jones Initiative, which supports teaching and research about African American art, was launched at the University of Delaware. SCAD opened The Walter O. Evans Center for African-American Studies and the Thompsons funded an endowed curatorial position focused on art from the African Diaspora at the Georgia Museum of Art. In 2001, The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora opened at the University of Maryland. The Center houses The David C. Driskell Archive of African American Art.

On September 24, 2016 efforts to establish a national African American museum were realized when President Barack Obama presided over the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. A year earlier, Robert L. Johnson, a member of the museum’s council, donated works from the Barnett-Aden Collection to the museum. Among the works finding a new home at NMAAHC was Tanner’s Flight into Egyptwhich was hanging in the entrance hall when the Barnett-Aden gallery opened almost a quarter-century prior.

FIGHTING JIM CROW IN THE 19TH CENTURY SOUTH: THE UNTOLD STORY

CONTRIBUTED BY: MELISSA MILEWSKI

Most historians have considered the period between 1877, the end of Reconstruction, and 1900 to be “The Nadir” or the low point in terms of African American political rights.  Some have even described it as the worst period for blacks since emancipation.  Historian Melissa Milewski does not challenge that assessment.  She does, however, find a surprising number of court cases where blacks won their lawsuits despite white power and the then dominant ideology of white supremacy. This has been an untold story until now as she explains in her new book, Litigating Across the Color Line Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to Civil Rights.

As a young doctorate student digging through various archives to find a topic for my dissertation, I struck up a conversation with a curator at the Georgia Archives. I explained that I was interested in studying race in the US South but hadn’t found the right angle yet to approach the topic. The curator suggested that I take a look at the state supreme court cases involving African Americans in the archive’s collections, noting that the cases were rarely examined by historians but were a very rich source. I took him up on his suggestion and requested a few file boxes that the curator mentioned included cases involving African American litigants.

I was immediately fascinated by the case files that I found. As the cases had made it to the state’s highest court, the case files were surprisingly well preserved. Often the file for each case was hundreds of pages long and contained detailed records of the testimony in the trial as well as petitions, accounts of proceedings, and appeals. Some cases were still tightly tied in their original faded ribbon, seemingly untouched for over a century.

One of the first cases I encountered involved a man named William Walker, the son of a wealthy white slaveholder and an enslaved mother. When his father died, he emancipated his seven enslaved children and their four mothers and directed that all of his property be used to settle them in the African country of Liberia. The emancipated African Americans, with 17-year-old William Walker in their midst, moved to Liberia in 1859, just two years before the beginning of the US Civil War. Almost two decades later, in 1878, a 38-year-old Walker returned to the United States to initiate a court case against his former master’s relatives, claiming that they had never sent over the vast bulk of the bequest left for settlement in Liberia.

Several aspects of this case shed interesting insights on black litigants’ experiences in the courts in the US South. I was particularly interested in the way in which Walker marshaled white support for his claim, including hiring a white lawyer and seemingly working with his lawyer to gain witnesses who testified on his behalf.  Walker’s own testimony was also fascinating, shedding light on his experiences as a slave, his life in Liberia, and his interactions with whites in the South upon his return. In addition, Walker seemed to be shaping his testimony to strengthen the claims of his case and persuade white southern jurors to decide in his favor. He testified, for instance, that he had no intention of staying in the US South after the trial, thus removing any concerns that white jury members might have about a newly wealthy black man joining their community if they awarded him his claim.

I was surprised as well at Walker’s initial legal success.  A case between a black man from Liberia and wealthy white landowners in Georgia seemed in many ways as if it would be an open-and-shut case for a white or largely all-white jury in post-Reconstruction Georgia. Yet I found that the jury in the county court found that the former slaves were entitled to recover almost $40,000. It was only when the white heirs appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia in 1880 that the higher court overturned the earlier decision.

After that research trip to the Georgia Archives, I began to wonder if there might be more cases involving black litigants in other states and additional cases at the Georgia Archives.  Certainly, very few other scholars seemed to have discussed such cases, largely assuming that few such suits existed. But my husband, who was in law school at the time, suggested I search the legal database LexisNexis using some keyword searches to see if I could find additional cases in southern courts with black litigants. It took time to figure out the right keywords to search for but soon I had produced lists of thousands of cases in eight southern state courts that mentioned one of my keywords. I realized that my search was only bringing up cases in which the court explicitly labeled the race of litigants in the official court reporter summary or opinion. However, I pressed on and built up a list of well over a thousand cases that seemed to involve black litigants in various southern archives.

I then began traveling to archives in eight states around the South to try to unearth the archival case files of these cases that I had discovered. To my relief, the vast majority of the case files still survived, and—like the cases that I had discovered in the Georgia Archives—the records were often extensive, numbering hundreds of pages. Here I found more fascinating stories. Perhaps my favorite case was that of Mary Ray, a young black woman from North Carolina who brought a civil suit in 1889 against the local county commissioners, the most powerful white men in the county where she lived. Her suit pointed to a deed to her father to claim the land upon which the local courthouse and jail were located. Clearly well aware of just what she was up against, Ray testified that a change of venue was needed as she “cannot obtain justice in this Cause in said county” because of the interested nature of local leaders and judges.  She explained: “That besides being gentlemen of marked personal influence and magnetism in said county, around which many interests are drawn and adhered, they as such Commissioners have under the law the control & supervision of the Jury system as well as all other official matters appertaining to the affairs of the County.” In the end, Ray experienced a number of delays and difficulties in obtaining witnesses to appear, and eventually lost the suit. However, her boldness in taking on these powerful white men in the post-Reconstruction South riveted me.

In a remarkable number of cases, the black litigants did win their suits. I turned to quantitative analysis to determine how many suits black litigants won against white litigants and found that they won 59 percent of the 980 such suits I located across eight state supreme courts. There was the case of Henry Buie who litigated a case against his former master in 1868 North Carolina over a mule that Buie had found during the Civil War. Buie not only won the suit but discarded his former master’s last name in the process of the legal action. Then there was the case in Kentucky in 1910 where a black laundress named Rebecca Sallee fell into a large open hole on the street as she made her way to a church service. Sallee sued the city to recover damages and obtained the value of a year’s worth of wages and her lawyer’s fees from the city. In addition, there was the suit in 1935 of Mary Jackson who refused to give up her 10-acre plot of land in Mississippiwhen a white neighbor sought to lay claim to it, only leaving when an anonymous group of white men came “during the darkest hours of the night” and brutally beat her. Jackson then initiated a civil case against the white neighbor to confirm her claim to the property and the highest court in Mississippi upheld her ownership of the land.

In the end, as I sifted through these suits the central question for me was how black litigants managed to both litigate—and often win—these civil suits at a time in which they faced increasing disfranchisement and segregation and experienced vast inequality in the criminal justice system. From the very beginning, I saw the actions of black litigants in these suits as a key part of the answer to this question. Over time, I became increasingly interested as well in the roles of white southerners in these suits and their attitudes towards these cases. In the end, the answer that I came to about why these cases occurred factored in the actions and perspectives of both black and white southerners.

I argue in my book that these cases took place in large part because of a disjuncture in how many black and white litigants viewed them. Black litigants often saw their participation in these civil cases as having life-altering economic consequences and so usually did all they could to win their suits. This included hiring white lawyers and using their knowledge of the law and of local race relations to shape their testimonies in ways that would be viewed most favorably by judges and juries. In contrast, white judges and jury members typically did not see the civil cases that black litigants were especially successful at litigating as dangerous or as having the power to upset the status quo. To them, some of these cases even seemed to support white supremacy. For instance, in their view, cases over white men’s bequests like the suit of William Walker upheld white men’s property rights. By carefully calibrating their testimony and arguments, black litigants and their white lawyers played an important part in perpetuating this disjuncture.

I contend, too, that the black litigants who held onto hope that the courts might change their lives for the better and the white judges and jury members who saw the courts as upholding the system of white supremacy both had valid points. On the one hand, white southerners were all too accurate in their realization that these civil cases had enormous limitations. To litigate and win these cases black litigants had to operate within a white-dominated legal system, using white lawyers and making arguments that largely white jury members and judges would find acceptable. Yet black southerners also had valid reasons to turn to the courts in civil actions, even after losing the vote and seeing segregation written into law. After 1890, the courts were often more accessible to African Americans than other branches of government. In part this was because whites saw the courts as less threatening than the black vote, and so did much less to try to block black southerners from operating in the courts.

In the end, while these civil suits between black and white southerners have tremendous limitations, they are more radical, and more important, than they might first appear. At a time of tremendous racial terror and segregation, some individual black southerners defended their rights against the actions of white members of their communities. The successful outcomes of many of the cases had immensely important economic effects in the lives of individual African Americans. Just as importantly, after having largely lost their ability to operate within any other government institutions, some black southerners were able to negotiate—and win within—the last remaining southern political institution they had access to. Finally, these cases illuminate a history in which black southerners continuously exercised their rights of citizenship through some of the most difficult years of southern history by pragmatically shaping and shifting their cases as the societal and political landscape changed. They show, then, the ways in which everyday individuals could take on a biased system, and at times win.