The Faculty Lounge

Charleston, Black Originalism, and a Living Constitution (Part B)

The connections across time of the physical space of the old Mt. Zion church where the South Carolina Black Convention was held in 1865 and the modern A.M.E. churches at Mother Emanuel and Mt. Zion in Charleston that I discussed in my prior post have led me to think about how the voices from that convention 150 years ago still speak to us.  I previously quoted from the convention documents, but after the shooting at Mother Emanuel I re-read the document and was struck by the following:

  “. . . we have been deprived of our natural rights, which are founded in the laws of our nature, which consist of personal liberty, the right to be free in our persons, and the right of personal security and protection against injuries to our bodies or good name.”

What would the participants that week in 1865 meeting in Mt. Zion have thought about the June 18^th killings?  How frustrated would they have been that security from racial violence remains, 150 year later, so fragile and elusive even in the very congregation that some of the leaders and members attended?  If those authors were correct (and surely they were) that the “right of personal security and protection” is essential to liberty and equality, then the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment remains a promise unfulfilled.  It is unfulfilled when police departments fail to protect African-American and other communities of color from violence; it is unfulfilled when police officers wrongly perceive black men and women as "threats" and needlessly resort to violence; it is unfulfilled when victims of domestic violence cannot depend on state agencies to protect them from abusers; it is unfulfilled when a culture of violence clothes itself in rights only to perpetuate itself on the innocent.  

Charleston, Black Originalism, and a Living Constitution (Part A)

I was going to write an arid final summary post on Black Originalism to finish my guest stint here at the Lounge.  But in light of the horrific act of racial terrorism at Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston and the window the country has had on the past and present of a remarkable institution and people of Mother Emanuel, I have decided to do two final entries recalling something from an earlier post and look at how Reconstruction history lives with, around, and in us. 

Mt. Zion A.M.E. Charleston

I previously discussed the African-American convention in Charleston of November 1865, held at what was then the Mt. Zion Presbyterian church.  I have been learning more about Mt. Zion the past few weeks and wanted to explore its connections to Emanuel A.M.E. and also the connections between the ideas from the Charleston Convention and what they might say to us after this month’s tragedy.  In this post I will focus on the Reconstruction history of the two A.M.E. churches and in my final entry I will consider the convention and what it might say to us. 

 

Black Originalism Part 5: Frances Watkins Harper and the Intersectional Perspective

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

As I have suggested in prior posts (here, here, here, and here), ideas of freedom and citizenship developed in the black public sphere in ways somewhat different than in the dominant white sphere of the mid-nineteenth century.  Of course a parallel alternative discourse was occurring in the women’s movement.  Prior to the war there was some overlap and coordination in these two spheres, although the fissure between the two was already present before the war and famously became a chasm afterwards.  Nevertheless, ideas of equality and freedom in each sphere influenced the other.  And for black women such as Mary Ann Shadd Carey and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, it was critical to negotiate this post-war split in order to press for more progressive positions in each area.

 

The work of someone like Frances Harper was even more critical given the hazards of the newly emerging citizenship, forged in battle and relying heavily on a martial and exclusively male framing of full citizenship.  One of the most common synonyms for citizenship and its rights and privileges in the black public sphere was “manhood.”  In such a context Harper’s May 1866 speech at a national women’s rights convention is one of the most important statements of the intersections of race, gender, and class of the nineteenth century.  

The First Memorial Day (with a few thoughts on public meaning)

Union Soldiers Cemetery, "Martyrs of the Race Course", Charleston, S.C.

Despite the “sales events” and “blow outs”, Memorial Day still holds a special place as an American holiday.  My sense is that it remains a day when many people take time to remember and reflect on the sacrifices of the more than one million soldiers who have died in wars for the United States.  For those who have lost loved ones recently, it is especially strong and emotional.  But for everyone it is a day of collective memory, and its solemn nature facilitates reflection in a way that is harder on other holidays like the Fourth of July.  

The juxtaposition of grief and celebration, of graves and picnics, may seem hard to comprehend.  I find it helps balance these to think about what the historian David Blight has identified as the first Memorial Day.  On May 1, 1865, amid the ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, several thousand blacks–most formerly enslaved—held a memorial for the Union dead.  Here is Blight’s description from his New York Times op-ed published a few years ago: 

More Negro Motorist Green Books Available

From the Journal of Southern History's twitter feed @JourSouHist I see that the Schomberg Library in New York has put a bunch of editions of the Negro Motorist Green Book up on the net.  For more on these travel guides for African Americans in the waning days of Jim Crow, here's a discussion about them from the radio show Your Weekly Constitutional.  I've been looking through editions to see what places listed there still exist -- and through the magic of google maps street view I'm seeing that a lot are now gone.   This testifies to me how much urban renewal changed the face of African American communities -- and in some cases erased them.

The image is of the Southern Queen Hotel in the Shake Rag section of Bowling Green, Kentucky.  It was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book.

More on Appomattox at 150

As a footnote to Al's post on the 150th anniversary of Appomattox, two nice pieces were recently posted about Appomattox and Reconstruction in memory and history: The Unlikely Paths of Grant and Lee by Jamelle Bouie over at Slate and The Civil War Isn't Over by historian David Blight writing in The Atlantic.  Definitely worth a read.

Black Originalism, Part IV: South Carolina Convention of 1865

Alonzo Ransier

In my last post I discussed the Nineteenth Century Black Convention Movement and how the 1864 National Convention in Syracuse started a brief but important series of conventions.   For this post I look at one of the more prominent of the state conventions, held in Charleston, South Carolina, in November of 1865. 

Richard Cain

The Charleston Convention is frequently cited both because it produced an interesting set of substantive documents and because it included several future political leaders in Reconstruction South Carolina, such as Richard  H. Cain, Francis L. Cardozo, and Alonzo J. Ransier.    

Francis Cardozo

This convention has received some attention by originalists because it mentions the right to bear arms, and it is the one black convention from the period to have made its way into a Supreme Court footnote (in McDonald).  The problem, however, as I discuss below the fold, is that extracting the right to bear arms from the document in this way does not do justice to either the richness of the document or the role and context of the right to bear arms for the members of the convention.  

Black Originalism Part 3: The Syracuse Convention of 1864

Having set the stage in prior posts (here and here), I want to delve a bit into texts from the Civil War/Reconstruction black public sphere.  The first I will highlight is the National Convention of Colored Men, held in Syracuse in October 1864. 

The Black Convention Movement of the nineteenth century is an important and undervalued source of public debate in the black public sphere.  The movement itself arose as part of the abolitionist movement, and a number of important conventions had been held in the north prior to the war.  (The Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware has a wonderful resource webpage for these conventions here.)  Both because it was held as the war’s end was in sight, and because of the issues addressed, the Syracuse Convention of 1864 can be seen as the first Reconstruction black convention.  In the ensuing five years many more—local, state, and national—would follow (including the Colored National Labor Union Convention of 1869, pictured to the right), in part as an extension of the civil society movement the Syracuse Convention aided by founding the National Equal Rights League at Syracuse. These leagues, along with Union Leagues, were critical focal points for early Reconstruction black activism and community-building. 

Black Originalism, Part 2

Crispus Attucks

In my last post I introduced the idea of “black originalism.”  Before delving more into some of the materials I am looking at, I want highlight what are likely to be some key points that frame the project.  Some of these might be described as methodological, others normative.  But in either event from what I have looked at so far, I think these provide a bit of the framework for the project (subject to ongoing revisions, of course!).       

John Brown

First, Black Originalism as a project should prioritize the Reconstruction Amendments and their implementation.    A common theme of black writers and speakers from the 1860s is that the antebellum United States—not just the South, but the entire country—contained important parallels to British America, with the Civil War being a second Revolution.  As activist and lawyer John Rock said, “the John Brown of the second Revolution is but the Crispus Attucks of the first.”   Reconstruction was a second founding, and should be treated as such.  This will be a markedly different view than is usually taken by originalists, who tend to privilege the founding and see Reconstruction as a restoration to a more correct (more perfect?) constitution without slavery.  

Black Originalism, Part 1

In prior posts I wrote about two speeches/dialogues from 1865: Henry Garnett’s speech and sermon in the House (here and here), and the exchange between William Sherman and Garrison Frazier in Savannah.   As I mentioned, these are two sources that I am looking at in my project of exploring African-American writings, speeches, and actions from the period to help think about the possible meanings of the Reconstruction Amendments.  I'll now take a break from my 150-year anniversary posts to give an overview of the project.

By the 1860s African Americans had built a well-established discourse and activist community in the North.  It developed with the abolitionist movement, but it also functioned as a support network for building African-American civil society in the Jim Crow culture of the North.  With the end of slavery, southern black communities immediately engaged in public discussions and debates about the meaning and implementation of freedom and citizenship.  And with Reconstruction, black representation in local, state, and national government was brief but substantial. The ideas discussed and advanced within the black public sphere provide an important source for how freedom and citizenship were being thought about at the time by the people for whom it meant the most.  And while historians have been exploring black history from this period for a number of years, very little of this has made its way into legal or constitutional analysis.

The main exception to this has been the use of African-American sources in the Second Amendment cases, Heller and McDonald, relying in part on work by scholars (Akhil Amar, Robert Cottrol & Raymond Diamond, and others), and in Justice Thomas’s opinions on affirmative action (e.g. Grutter).  Both the majority opinion and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in McDonald cite black newspapers and black conventions to support an individual rights reading of the amendment as incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment.  I don’t know about you, but this struck me as odd. 

Henry Highland Garnet’s Speech, Part 2

Last week  I noted the anniversary of Henry Highland Garnet’s sermon/discourse in the House of Representatives from 1865.  Carla Peterson also had a piece as part of the NYT Disunion series about Garnet’s work before this speech and the speech itself, which I definitely recommend.  For this post I will reflect on the portion of Garnet’s speech that I quoted last time.  There are several themes running through this passage, themes which, standing alone, will be familiar to modern readers, but when woven together are likely to create confusion or dissonance for us today.     

For instance, Garnet employs the basic theme of legal or formal equality: the cause of antislavery reformers will be secured, he asserts, “when all invidious and prescriptive distinctions shall be blotted from our laws, whether they be constitutional, statute, or municipal laws.”  He similarly argues against “class-legislation” and for a time when blacks “shall be equal before the law, and shall be left to make his own way in the social walks of life.”  This sounds today much like the conservatism promoted by Justice Thomas, among others, particularly in opposition to government programs and affirmative action (Thomas cited a similar passage from Frederick Douglass in Grutter for this point—more on that below). 

But Garnet weaves this theme with others that are not so commonly advocated by modern conservatives: voting rights, government supports, and eradication of private prejudice.  Immediately after his first mention of formal equality, Garnet states that the demands of reformers will be met “when emancipation shall be followed by enfranchisement, and all men holding allegiance to the government shall enjoy every right of American citizenship.”  Voting, and its concomitant, political power, was an essential component for enforcing and maintaining equality and freedom, and was itself a basic right of citizenship.   This sounds much more like the arguments made by supporters of the Voting Rights Act.  And in the same breath that Garnet states that blacks should be left to make their own way, using a poetic metaphor of storms and ships he askes that blacks also “be furnished with rudder, helm, and sails, and charts, and compass.  Give us good pilots to conduct us to the open seas; lift no false lights along dangerous coasts.” This resembles arguments made in support of the Great Society and War on Poverty, arguments about an equal opportunity society championed by modern liberals.

“Let the Monster Perish”: Henry Highland Garnet’s Memorial Discourse to Congress

Today marks the 206^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, which also makes it the 150^th anniversary of his last birthday in 1865.  Not coincidentally, it is also the 150^th anniversary of Henry Highland Garnet’s landmark sermon/speech in the House of Representatives (extended excerpt available here), in which he exhorted Congress to "Emancipate, Enfranchise, Educate.”

To commemorate the recent passage by the House of the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31^st, the House chaplin, with support of congressional Republicans and the Administration, invited Henry Highland Garnet to be the first African-American to deliver a Sunday sermon in the House to a general audience (apparently a common use of the chamber when the House was not in session), and to do so on Lincoln’s birthday. 

Garnet was in many ways an unusual choice for this role.  He had been a leader of what is often described as the black nationalist wing of the abolition movement.  In 1843 he had famously called for slave rebellion and praised Denmark Vesey and Nathanial (Nat) Turner.  And he had been a founder of the antebellum emigrationist movement. 

The fact that he was invited to deliver this speech shows just how far things had moved by 1865.  The war had affirmed Garnet’s violent resistance position and  obviated the immediate need for emigration. Garnet had worked to establish black army units and recruit black soldiers.  He was also serving as minister at the Fifteenth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.  Accompanied by his church's choir (which was considered one of the best in the country), Garnet spoke to a standing-room audience.  By all accounts they rocked the House.  

EJI Report: Lynching as Terrorism

The Equal Justice Initiative released a major report yesterday on lynching as terrorism, titled  Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.  Like the EJI report from 2013 on the slave trade in Montgomery, this is a remarkable piece of applied history.  It comprehensively documents almost 4000 lynchings of African-Americans as part of the terrorist campaign against blacks to enforce Jim Crow and white supremacy.  Lifting from the EJI web page: 

EJI researchers documented 3959 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 700 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.

Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation.  Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.

Bryan Stevenson and the people at EJI do great work in so many areas.  Just based on the summary document available online, there is a lot of important research and analysis in this report.  In addition to the painstaking historical research involved, as a piece of history-based advocacy it makes a powerful case for how capital punishment and the criminal justice system more generally today are the direct consequence of the racial terrorism that was lynching.  The report also advocates for public history and the use of historical markers to remember the victims and the fact of our own collective responsibilities, something about which Al and others on this blog have written about so effectively.  The NYT also has an editorial on the report today that's worth a look. 

Go Set a Watchman

I should probably leave it to Steven Lubet, the faculty lounge's resident expert on Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird to discuss this.... The internets are lighting up right now with the announcement that a novel written by Harper Lee before To Kill a Mockingbird is set for publication this July.  The novel is called Go Set a Watchman.  It deals with Scout as an adult and is set in the 1950s -- some years after the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird.  Actually, it was this novel that led to Mockingbird when an editor, intrigued by flashbacks to Scout's early life in Go Set a Watchman suggested that Lee write a novel about Scout's early life.  Lee thought the novel was lost, though a copy was recently found by her lawyer, apparently attached to a manuscript of Mockingbird.

I'm going to be mighty interested in this -- for all sorts of reasons.  First, I'll be interested in the amount of law there -- and particularly whether there are the kinds of issues raised by Mockingbird, where the focus on civil rights advocacy may have overshadowed the efforts to free Tom Robinson.  If there's any significant amount of law in the novel, there's going to be a feeding frenzy among professional responsibility, trial advocacy, civil rights, and critical race scholars.  Second, I'm going to be interested in seeing how the depictions of the civil rights movement appear and what Lee makes of the generational divide between Scout and her father and whoever else populates the novel.  

I was talking recently with one of my colleagues about Tony Amsterdam's legendary memo from the mid-1970s about the future of challenges to the death penalty and how many of those challenges he accurately forecast.  It'll be exciting to see how the views that Lee lays out in the novel match up with our understanding of those difficult -- but still optimistic years -- and also how they match up with our current understandings of the options and challenges of race and equality today.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your word processors.  The image is of the Monroe County Courthouse in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.  It's from our friends at wikipedia.

Update: Richard McAdams speculates on how our view of Atticus Finch may change when we view him in the setting of the 1950s rather than the 1930s at Huffington Post.

"Your Weekly Constitutional" Discussion of Negro Motorist Green Book

Professor Stewart Harris of Appalachian School of Law hosts a weekly public radio discussion of law and often history, known as "Your Weekly Constitutional."  This week his discussion is about the Negro Motorist Green Book and I had the pleasure of speaking with him about it -- and really about Jim Crow segregation more generally.  This week's discussion is available here.  The full catalog of podcasts of past discussions are here.

Late Nineteenth Century University Building Trivia

Digging deep in my stock of nineteenth century university buildings here.... Faculty are asking that this building, which was built at the end of the nineteenth century and then renamed for a famous turn-of-the-century politician just after World War II, be renamed.  What campus is it on and who's it named after?

Though I'm generally against renaming (it permits forgetting), I think these decisions should be made by the University's community.  One way of changing names, of course, is by use.  That is, whatever the name on the building (or on university maps) is, students can call it whatever they want.  Along those lines, I'm surprised to see that this University's wikipedia page hasn't yet been altered to reflect the new (actually old) proposed name.  Student activism just isn't what it used to be.

Update:  Now that Josh Rothman (via twitter) and Brant Hellwig (via comments) have identified this building, maybe it's time to talk a little about the discussion on Clemson's campus about this building.  It was built in 1894 and was known as Main or Old Main until 1946 when it was renamed Tillman Hall in honor of Senator Ben Tillman, who was instrumental to the University's founding. Here's a very good article on the discussion about renaming at Clemson.  The comments cover a lot of ground and as I told someone yesterday, they're shockingly thoughtful for anonymous comments on the internet.  In fact, you could write a very good article about the competing visions and uses of history out of those comments.

Meanwhile, in Chapel Hill there continues discussion over the name of Saunders Hall here on our campus. There's going to be a rally on Friday at noon at the Confederate monument on campus. UNC's naming policy, which will frame the University's response, is here.

WAPO on Johnson on Racially Restrictive Covenants

Just in time for the beginning of property class comes this article from the Washington Post on an estate that LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson purchased in -- do I have this right, 1961 -- with a racially restrictive covenant on it. The Johnsons filed a declaration that the covenants were not enforceable legally or morally. Of course that was true. By 1961 the covenants had been unenforceable for nearly fifteen years. Perhaps this article should have mentioned that, rather than repeating one of the Johnsons' lawyers statements that he could not have purchased a home in the area at the time.

I'm going to see Selma when it opens in Chapel Hill. Though I almost never see movies in the theater I make and exception for ones about slavery (even when they are fiction) and Jim Crow so I need to reserve my though on just how unfair the movie is to Johnson. I'm always sad when historical figures are unfairly maligned and it seems that Selma may be particularly unfair. But I'm not convinced that the restrictive covenant in this case robustly tests Johnson's attitudes towards integration.

Still, all of this reminds me of some work I'm doing on the fight against racially restrictive covenants in Oklahoma City from the late 1920s through and just past Shelley v. Kraemer. While the house the Johnsons purchased was quite expensive, what strikes me as particularly poignant is that much of the fight against integration in Oklahoma City took place over relatively modest housing stock.  The illustration, for instance, is the home of one of the plaintiffs in a suit to enforce covenants in northeast Oklahoma City back in the 1930s.  I hope to post a bunch more photos from the 1930s and also of the neighborhood today later in the semester when I talk about the work I'm doing on the suits regarding restrictive covenants.

Muslims in the Antebellum South

I've been enjoying reading Khaled A. Beydoun's new article on Muslims in the Pre-Civil War south and in particular their relationship to law. It is called "Antebellum Islam."  Cribbing now from his abstract:

America’s first Muslims were slaves. Social scientists estimate that 15 to 30 percent of the Africans enslaved in the Antebellum South practiced Islam. Research indicates that the Muslim slave population could have been as high as 1.2 million. Despite their considerable presence in the Antebellum South, the history of Muslim slaves has been largely neglected within legal scholarship.

This Article argues that the omission of Muslim slaves from legal scholarship is a consequence of the legal segregation of Black and Muslim identity during the Antebellum Era. Two factors brought about this segregation. First, the law remade Africans into Black slaves, and state slave codes criminalized their religious activity and stripped slaves of their religious identities. Second, the state adopted a political conception of Muslim identity that converted it from a religious into a racial identity in the narrow profile of “Arabs” and “Turks” – a non-white class that racially restrictive naturalization laws barred from accessing citizenship. Muslim slaves lived at the intersection of these two irreconcilable racial configurations.

There is a lot to talk about here. First off I want to note Khaled's emphasis on the southern state laws that limited the religious rights of enslaved people. While he is obviously correct that the legal system -- statues and police practices -- sought to limit meetings of enslaved people for worship when they were unsupervised by white people, there was also great emphasis in the white community on encouraging African Americans to participate in Christian churches under the supervision of white people.  Thus, I see the story as the wiping out of prior religious ideas and the substitution of Christianity for those ideas.  (I've written some about the ways that church meetings were used to supervise and how white ministers attempted to control free and enslaved people in the context of the Nat Turner rebellion.)

Second, the article begins with a vignette about an enslaved man, Omar ibn Said, who wrote an autobiography, which begins with his life in Africa and then carries through to his life here in North Carolina.  A lot of people use the autobiography because it is such an amazing story and because there are so few other sources like it. But what I'm really excited about is that a story about Said (also known as Uncle Moreau) was published in the University of North Carolina's student literary magazine, the North Carolina University Magazine in the 1854. The magazine introduced the autobiography with a short biographical statement, which spoke of his conversion to Christianity (though that is now in doubt).  Though, of course, it has been reprinted many times since then.  One thing that I think might also worth looking at is the treatment of Muslims in the fictional literature of the old south. I'm now not remembering where I saw this, but I recall a novel that had a paragraph written in Arabic in it, I think that was supposed to have been written by a slave.  I need to look through my notes on this one; I want to say it might have been in George Tucker's Valley of the Shenandoah. And I think southern proslavery Christian literature also will convey the sense that the religious ideas of enslaved people was one marker that justified (in the minds of the slaveowners) the subordination of enslaved people. That is, I think there may have been more realization among the leaders of southern society than we now know realize about enslaved people's religious background -- even though they did not respect such ideas.

Third, there is a growing fictional literature that places enslaved people in the context of Islam.  For instance, Sharon Ewell Foster's The Resurrection of Nat Turner deals with Turner's ancestors and their religious beliefs in Africa.  And fourth, as I've thought about this some more, one of the few books that remains from the University of Alabama's pre-Civil War library (most of it was burned during the War, but a few books that were checked out have survived), is a copy of the Koran.  Perhaps that's an indicator that there was more interest -- perahaps inspired by the religious of ideas of slaves? -- than we have previously appreciated.  Along those lines, I think that it's worth looking again at the writings of proslavery academics like Thomas R. Dew of William and Mary to see what they saw about Islam and then ask how those views might be related to the cultural exchanges they had with enslaved people.

Anyway, take a look at Khaled's paper. I think you'll really find this exciting in a lot of ways.

The image is of one of the literary society buildings here on the UNC campus, which was built before the Civil War.  Thus, it is a building in existence when the students here were reading about Said in the North Carolina University Magazine.

H/t Rob Luther.

Judith Kelleher Schafer (1942-2014)

I am saddened and stunned to report that legal historian Judith Kelleher Schafer has passed away. Judith was one of the first people I met when I attended my very first American society for Legal History meeting back in 1995 and I remember well how kind she was in talking to me and taking an interest in my work, then in pretty early stages on proslavery legal thought. Judith is legendary for her kindness to newer scholars and for her important work on the legal history of free people of African descent and on enslaved people, particularly in New Orleans. Just this year I relied heavily on her Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862. She was an important pioneer on the rights (such as they were) of enslaved people to call their "owners" to account through law.  And recent work, on freedom suits by a host of historians, such as Lea VanderVelde's important Redemption Songs, builds on Judith's earlier research that demonstrated a surprising number of lawsuits for freedom (to me, anyway, who wouldn't have expected any lawsuits).  I am looking forward to the retrospectives on her work and how she reshaped our understanding of slavery and law.

H/t Diana Williams.

Update: Here is Judith's Times-Picayune obituary. H/t Leslie Harris.

Jim Crow Trivia Question

I'm going to start off December right -- that is, with a trivia question.  This one combines two of my passions -- courthouses and Jim Crow.  I think I have this story put together correctly.  First off, I was reading a series of opinions (of a state court and also the U.S. Supreme Court) in a semi-famous case involving a laughably biased prosecution of an African American man for assult of a white woman.  The prosecution, which took place only hours after the alleged crime, led to a death sentence.  (Later the judge who issued the death sentence said he was afraid of the kind of mob violence he'd remembered from about a decade earlier.)  That guilty plea, which was based on a coerced confession, was overturned at the state level.  Then, following a trial -- in another county -- where the man was convicted and again sentenced to death, the conviction was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.  Then I realized that the guilty plea took place in a county I visited recently.  I'm pretty sure they took place in the courthouse pictured here.  So this is a two-part question.  First, where is this courthouse?  And second -- and once we get the first one figured out, the second will be easy -- whose case was tried there?  (Or maybe you'll want to reverse-engineer this and think about what criminal procedure case fits those facts and then work backwards to where this was.  At any rate, there's more to this story than I'd initially thought.  Next time I'm back in those parts I want to look into this case in a little more depth.) Sorry about the quality of this picture -- I have a better one of the back of the courthouse (where the sun was in my favor), but I don't know as that one would give a good enough hint because all the images I can find are of the front.

Update: Here's the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals opinion following the first Okmulgee trial.  One of the prosecutors said during that trial "What are you going to do?  I don't want life imprisonment in this case because that is too uncertain--would rather you would turn him loose.  I think probably somebody might take care of him.  I don't know."