Thinking about Time Travel

1
Thinking about Time Travel Cultivating
Historical Consciousness

• Race and Gender Issues in U.S. Law An Overview

2
Indian Removal Act of 1830

• President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the
  decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court upholding
  Cherokee tribal autonomy.
• Cherokees were forcibly removed from Georgia and
  their land appropriated by white settlers.
• Other eastern tribes met a similar fate under the
  Indian Removal Act of 1830.

3
1831

• An Act to Prevent All Persons from Teaching
  Slaves to Read or Write
• From Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the
  State of North Carolina at the Session of
  1830-1831
• If a white man or woman, to be fined not less
  than 100, nor more than 200, or imprisoned
• If a free person of color, to be fined,
  imprisoned, or whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine
  lashes, nor less than twenty lashes.

4
1846-1848

• Mexican-American War
• Grew out of U.S. expansionist policy, Manifest
  Destiny
• Mexico lost half of its territory in the war, and
  territories annexed by the U.S. contained
  thousands of Mexican families

5
1848

• The First U.S. Womens Rights Convention held at
  Seneca Falls, N.Y.
• Participants listed womens grievances and
  specified demands.
• At the time, married women were regarded as
  property of their husbands and had no direct
  legal control over their own wages, their
  property, or even their children.
• Frederick Douglass spoke at the convention.

6
1851 Sojourner Truth (1779-1883) Declares Aint
I a woman? in 1851 at a Womens Rights
Conference in Akron, Ohio. Truths challenge to
patriarchy and to white feminists vested
interests in whiteness. Feminist Claims For
whom? Where? When?
7
1855

• State of Missouri v. Celia
• Pregnant and ill, after her master had repeatedly
  forced her into sexual intercourse, Celia
  defended herself one day and hit Robert Newsome
  over the head with a stick, killing him.
• Her defense rested on a Missouri statue that
  protected any woman from attempts to ravish,
  rape, or defile.
• Celia was found guilty of murder in the first
  degree and hanged.

8
1854

• People v. Hall
• The California Supreme Court decided that a
  statute barring Indians and Negroes from
  testifying in court cases involving whites also
  applied to Chinese Americans.
• The judges asserted that the Chinese are a race
  of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and
  who are incapable of progress or intellectual
  development beyond a certain point.

9
1865

• The Thirteenth Amendment is passed
• After the end of the Civil War, all people held
  as slaves were freed.
• However, the Southern States began to pass laws
  known as the Black Codes to limit the economic
  and physical freedom of the formerly enslaved.
• During Congressional Reconstruction (1866-1876),
  the federal government declared these acts of
  legal discrimination illegal.

10
1873

• Bradwell v. Illinois
• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women could not
  practice law and used the opportunity to
  carefully distinguish the rights and prerogatives
  of men from those of women.
• The court maintained that civil law, as well as
  nature herself, has always recognized a wide
  difference in the respective spheres and
  destinies of man and woman.

11
1877

• The federal government essentially abandons all
  efforts at protecting the civil rights of
  southern blacks.
• Southern states moved to legally impose
  segregation through Jim Crow laws.
• Jim Crow train car anti-miscegenation laws
  voting restrictions (poll taxes)

12
1887

• General Allotment Act
• Divided tribal landholdings among individual
  Indians and thereby undermined the tribal system
  and culture it was a part of.

13
1896

• Plessy v. Ferguson
• The Supreme Court rules on whether segregation by
  race in public facilities violated the Thirteenth
  and Fourteen Amendments and decides that
  restricting Negroes to separate but equal
  public accommodations did not deny them equal
  protection of the law.

14
1898

• Spanish-American War
• New age of American expansionism
• The U.S. gains control over former colonies of
  Spain in the Caribbean and Pacific Puerto Rico,
  the Philippines, and Guam.
• Also the year in which the annexation of Hawaii
  represents the culmination of more than 50 years
  of U.S. commercial interests in the islands.

15
1920

• Nineteenth Amendment passed.
• Women win the right to vote a citizens right to
  vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the U.S.
  or by any State on account of sex."

16
1944

• Korematsu v. United States
• The military evacuation of Japanese Americans to
  internment camps is challenged.
• The Supreme Court upheld the forced evacuation.

17
1954

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
• The Supreme Court rules, in effect, that
  separate could not possibly be equal.
• Integration of public schools, housing, and
  employment continues today.