Been having some fun of late in property class -- we discussed what Marc Roark over at The Literary Table calls the race nuisance and Americn jazz cases yesterday: Truehart v. Parker, a Texas case that enjoined a jazz club in San Antonio in the early 1920s, and Morison v. Rawlinson, 7 S.E.2d 635 (S.C. 1940), which enjoined the House of Prayer in Columbia, South Carolina in 1940. There's some cool stuff to talk about in both of them; how the judges invoked race in both of them as they were finding that the jazz hall and House of Prayer church were nuisances, as well as basic administrative law in Morison (like the difference between rulemaking and adjudication).
Marc puts the fear of jazz -- and thus the cases -- into context here. And let me add that the music to accompany discussion of Morison is the Smithsonian's CD from the United House of Prayer. If you want to read some more about this, I highly recommend Amy Wilson's note in the Alabama Law Review, "A Unifying Anthem or Path to Degredation: The Jazz Influence in American Property Law."
Thanks to my former student (and current co-author) Doug Thie, I have a couple of photographs of the neighborhood where the House of Prayer Church was in Columbia. Alas, the building is no longer there. One of these days I need to spend some quality time with the US Census and reconstruct a little more about the make-up of community. (Here's a link to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History website on the Waverly neighborhood, which has some useful information on the neighborhood and its transition from a white to an African American community.) Come to think of it, the 1940 census is going to be available quite soon. And I'm also looking forward to blogging soon about the work Doug and I have been doing on probate in pre-Civil War Rockbridge County.
The second photograph here is taken from Cherry street oppositve the location of the House of Prayer, looking back down the street. If you want more photographs for class, email me. Doug took a bunch, which give the sense of the architectual styles within about a block of the church. I really hope someone writes something about the racial and class composition of the neighborhood at the time of the Morison case; I'm interested in integrated neighborhoods during the Jim Crow era and this seems like this case invites some serious historical scrutiny. Perhaps some enterprising student at the University of South Carolina's looking for a note topic?!
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