During the Jim Crow era—ranging from the end of Reconstruction to the 1965 Civil Rights Act—political, legal, social, and economic systems rendered African Americans second-class citizens nationwide, particularly in the South. One of the most dramatic sites of racial discrimination, Eatmon argues, was the criminal courtroom. In the Jim Crow South, where violence against black people was socially acceptable, few criminal courts would convict white people for harming African Americans.
But the law is not a monolith. If a white person were to face consequences in criminal court for anti-black violence, Eatmon says, a jury would have to find the defendant guilty of an injury against the public. In civil court, however, a jury must only find the defendant guilty of an injury against an individual. So, African Americans could bring tort cases—suits against corporations or people that caused them harm—and win compensation for injuries, even if the attack was not necessarily determined to be illegal.
While writing her history dissertation at Northwestern University and conducting research for her forthcoming book, Eatmon uncovered a vast history of African Americans filing tort claims against white attackers. Even though few of them had access to legal education, she found, black Southerners initiated a robust body of lawsuits. The cases were impressive, and she wanted to know more about how these black Southerners grew to understand the law. She turned her attention toward black newspapers, whose legal sections spurred the “democratization of legal education,” she says, and created what she calls a “black legal culture.”
This rich history of black civil suits surprised Eatmon’s mentors. “In many people’s minds, [the Jim Crow era] is a period when African Americans have been abandoned by the Constitution,” says Martha Biondi, a history professor who served on Eatmon’s dissertation committee. “It is not a time, typically, when you would think of African Americans seeking any kind of redress through the law or having any hopes…that they could prevail in any legal struggles.”
FROM A YOUNG AGE, Eatmon has been troubled by injustice. She learned about the Holocaust and slavery in her Chapel Hill, North Carolina, schools. “I didn’t really understand,” she says, “how people could just kill other people because they didn’t look like them or believe in the same religion.”
Eatmon’s parents were separated, so she lived with her mother and her maternal grandfather, who had moved to Chapel Hill from a plantation in Chatham County, North Carolina, during the Great Depression. Though her grandfather would frequently tell stories from his World War II service, he never talked about racism back home. “The mythology was that Chapel Hill…may have been segregated, but it wasn’t racist,” she says. “I had this itch to learn more about what Chapel Hill was like during Jim Crow.”