Character and Conduct

The Robinsons’ lawsuit raised the question of just who embodied servitude in the post-Reconstruction US: the formerly enslaved, African-descended passenger or the normatively white railroad conductor? Focusing on the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, recent books by Julie Stone Peters, Noémie Ndiaye, and Urvashi Chakravarty offer Americanists fresh perspectives on the intersecting discourses of law, race, and slavery. This essay reads an unpublished 1879 civil rights case as an instance of “law as performance” (Peters) that contests – and revises – “scripts of blackness” (Ndiaye) in the context of Americans' post-Civil War effort to distinguish among “slavery, servitude, and free service” (Chakravarty). The sole female-initiated case to be [adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark _Civil Rights Cases_ (1883) began when formerly enslaved homemaker Sallie J. Robinson and her husband, Richard, sued the Memphis and Charleston Railroad Company for discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The railroad racialized and sexualized Robinson in a successful effort to direct scrutiny away from its conductor's unconstitutional conduct and toward the “improper character” he ascribed to his African-descended, first-class passenger. The defendant's biopolitical tactics contrast sharply with the Robinsons' formalist approach to legal personhood. The Robinsons' lawsuit demonstrated that the new constitutional order depended on white men like the conductor performing their duties – including the fundamental democratic duty to respect the rights of their fellow Americans.