Library Guides: Primary Sources in African-American History: Legal Status of African Americans

Legal Status of African Americans

Key legal codes, court cases, and other government documents pertaining to the status of persons as property, as slaves, as persons, or as citizens. Documents pertaining to emancipation of individual slaves by owners and to the local regulations affecting free African Americans when slavery was legal.

Slaves and the Courts, 1740 to 1860
Some of the items presented in this Library of Congress online collection, such as the report of the trial of Castner Hanway in 1851, are the only primary source on their subjects. All but one of the items are available both as online images and as searchable text; the exception is an unpublished handwritten slavery code for the District of Columbia, which is available as images only.
Slavery In America and the World: History, Culture and Law
This HeinOnline collection brings together, for the first time, all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery. Cases go into the 20th century, because long after slavery was ended, there were still court cases based on issues emanating from slavery.

The Black Laws In the Old Northwest: A Documentary History by Stephen Middleton
ISBN: 0313064490
Publication Date: 1993
This book reprints and discusses laws affecting African Americans in the Northwest Territory and its "successor states" of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. These laws show the ways in which whites and non-whites were legally distinct, with whites favored, even in these states where slavery was outlawed.
In the Matter of Color by A. Leon Higginbotham
Call Number: Law Library KF4757 .H53
ISBN: 9780195027457
Publication Date: 1980
Judge Higginbotham chronicles in unrelenting detail the role of the law in the enslavement and subjugation of black Americans during the colonial period.
Equal Protection and the African-American Constitutional Experience by Robert P. Green
Call Number: MU Law Library KF4756 .A3 2000
ISBN: 9780313303500
Publication Date: 2000
Trace the roots of the concept of equal protection from the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution through its application through the end of the 20th century using this collection of 177 sources.