An Antebellum Protest against Segregation and the Criminal Law Response: A Preview of Jim Crow Law and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Abstract Historians have documented resistance to racial segregation in the United States South during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, decades before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To these protests should be added the until-recently overlooked 1859 case of Pringle, Henry, and Morgan Jackson. They were mixed-race South Carolina men who resisted racially segregated seating in a church’s pews. Some of the white parishioners responded by prosecuting the Jacksons for riot and assault and battery, even though the Jacksons were considered to be white under their state’s laws. This article describes the social and legal context of this antebellum racial segregation, protest, and prosecution. An evaluation of the press report of the trial follows, suggesting that the proponents of this segregation previewed the first phase of Jim Crow law, when they invoked the race-neutral criminal law to enforce their “private” segregation. This episode, therefore, could have served as a warning of one way that southerners would continue to impose de jure racial segregation after the Civil War Amendments were ratified. It can also contribute toward the creation of a more coherent Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence, which includes “private” racial segregation among the badges of slavery that the Amendment prohibits.