A Degraded Caste of Society

A Degraded Caste of Society traces the origins of twenty-first-century cases of interracial violence to the separate and unequal protection principles of the criminal law of enslavement in the southern United States. Andrew T. Fede explains how antebellum appellate court opinions and statutes, when read in a context that includes newspaper articles and trial court and census records, extended this doctrine to the Souths free Black people, consigning them to what South Carolina justice John Belton ONeall called a degraded caste of society, in which they were in no respect, on a perfect equality with the white man. This written law either criminalized Black insolence or privileged private white interracial violence, which became a badge of slavery that continued to influence the law in action, contrary to the Constitutions mandate of equal protection of the criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court enabled this denial of equal justice, as did Congress, which did not make all private white racially motivated violence a crime until 2009, when it adopted the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Fedes analysis supports that laws constitutionality under the Thirteenth Amendment, while suggesting whyduring the Jim Crow era and beyondequal protection of the criminal law was not always realized, and why the curse of interracial violence has been a lingering badge of slavery.