A Rift in the Clouds

Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900-1910

Brent J. Aucoin

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781557288493
• eBook ISBN: 9781610753463
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

A Rift in the Clouds chronicles the efforts of three white southern federal judges to protect the civil rights of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, when few in the American legal community were willing to do so. Jacob Treiber of Arkansas, Emory Speer of Georgia, and Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama challenged the Supreme Court's reading of the Reconstruction amendments that were passed in an attempt to make disfranchised and exploited African Americans equal citizens of the United States. These unpopular white southerners, two of whom who had served in the Confederate Army and had themselves helped to bring Reconstruction to an end in their states, asserted that the amendments not only established black equality, but authorized the government to protect blacks. Although their rulings won few immediate gains for blacks and were overturned by the Supreme Court, their legal arguments would be resurrected, and meet with greater success, over half a century later during the civil rights movement.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Dark Clouds
• Chapter Two: Judge Jacob Trieber
• Chapter Three: Judge Emory Speer
• Chapter Four: Judge Thomas Goode Jones
• Chapter Five: Conclusion
• Appendix A: Revised Statutes, U.S. Compiled Statutes 1901
• Appendix B: Judge Jacob Trieber’s Charge to the Jury, Helena, Arkansas, October 6, 1903
• Appendix C: Judge Jacob Trieber’s “A Rift in the Clouds” Letter to Judge Thomas Goode Jones, October 14, 1904
• Appendix D: Judge Jacob Trieber to President Theodore Roosevelt, February 27, 1905
• Appendix E: Opinion of Judge Emory Speer in the Case of United States v. Thomas McClellan and William F. Crawley, March 15, 1904
• Appendix F: Judge Thomas Goode Jones’s “Suggestions in the Bailey Case”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author