Ryan Poe
Intellectual Statement
Spring, 2013
Committee:
Laura Edwards
Nancy MacLean
Jedediah Purdy
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Intellectual Statement
I was raised in what most folks call the big city, and everyone else calls a quaint little hamlet
with history. Fort Smith, Arkansas is a town of some seventy-five to one-hundred thousand
people. It was famous as the gateway to the West in the nineteenth century, a military outpost
on the border between civilization and the savage frontier territory of Oklahoma. The gallows
of Garrison Avenue and the Hanging Judge that made them famous have made my hometown
set pieces for both the Wild West and the Old South. As a result, the city has always seemed
to be on the verge of an identity crisis. It has a fascinating past as a Freedman’s Bureau town,
a safe-haven for recently-enslaved African Americans in the midst of white violence in the
Ozarks. Still, the city’s sandy streets, seedy saloons, and well-worn gallows all made up an
almost caricatured portrait of the Old West, even if it doesn’t seem very western anymore.
My interest in history, space, and law are tied intimately to my city of origin. Fort
Smith’s Catholic schools were in a part of town that in the 1950s was on the right side of the
tracks. By the time I attended them, in the 1980s and 90s, municipal neglect had eroded
surrounding neighborhoods and nearby public schools, and us uniformed Catholic-school
kids were warned not to venture into nearby streets alone. The city was then and still is
deeply segregated, owing to patterns of white flight, race-to-the-bottom municipal taxation
policies, and virulent opposition to busing and desegregation in the mid-twentieth century.
Even as a young teenager wandering the city streets my parents warned me about, I wondered
what the fuss was all about. I knew the people they avoided, and that I was to avoid. My
friends lived next door to them, they seemed harmless; we played toy soldiers and rode bikes
with their children. Fort Smith looked very different to my parents than it did to me and my
friends.
Although it took a few years of college to cultivate a serious intellectual interest in
United States history, my fascination with social problems persisted as my academic journey
took me through a variety of fields and regional focuses. Throughout, I learned to keep my
eye on the present. It took Jeannie Whayne, an amazing mentor at the University of Arkansas,
to help me realize that I really wanted to tell stories about the South, about places and people,
and the various ways invisible structures such as law or economics perpetuate inequality. The
latter question inspired me to pursue a Master’s degree with that same mentor, who
encouraged me begin with a question about the present and use the past to answer it. So I
began in my home town from a very simple question I always wondered as a naive kid in
high school history courses: Why, in a country that had a massive movement against racial
inequality and segregation in the mid-twentieth century did I attend what was clearly the
white high school, Southside, in the rich part of town, while the black high school, Northside,
was in what Southsiders called the ghetto?
Over time, my interests crept farther back into the past in search of answers, to the
social justice movements of the mid-twentieth century themselves; to agricultural
mechanization and Jim Crow segregation; then to the Civil War and Reconstruction. For my
thesis, I asked these questions of a city farther South in the state during the period of
Reconstruction for evidentiary reasons. The theme, nevertheless, remained: how have people
and the law shaped spaces in ways that give the present its order, that give railroad tracks for
racial and ethnic groups to arrange themselves or be arranged on one or the other side of? My
historical questions are deeply informed by the present, particularly when they involve the
hidden aspects of inequality, the invisible structures that pattern the way we know the world
and the groups of people in it.
After arriving at Duke University in 2010, I became interested in the interplay
between law, space, and social difference. Hopping directly into the frying pan under the
tutelage of Laura F. Edwards, I realized how much I had taken law for granted in my previous
scholarship. I depicted it simply, instrumentally, just as functionalist legal scholars had done
throughout the twentieth century. It wasn't entirely my fault, of course. Non-legal historians
have done a poor job examining the complicated connections betwen law and society. My
deeper readings in legal history methodology demonstrated the contested, incomplete nature
of the law. New legal statutes or suites did not begin or end matters, but were moments in
longer conflicts, involving people from all walks of life, not just the rich and powerful.
Competing bodies of authority and alternative understandings of certain legal categories were
rampant in the past, just as they pervade in the present. The language of the law, I found,
must be contextualized to the same extent as law's power in society.
Nevertheless, the connections between social difference and legal categories becomes
a feedback loop through which gender and racial difference is perpetuated across generations.
Law tends to establish patterns of thought and set limitations on what one perceives to be
achievable. Structural inequality thus emerges from certain legal categories, processes, and
definitions. Some of these are obvious: the lack of a married women's property rights, for
example, set hard limits on women's political opportunities in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Not surprisingly, some of the earliest feminist writings likened America's lack of
secure property rights for women to enslavement.
Indeed, property, it seems, is the legal underpinning that bounds the spatial
dimensions of structural inequality. One's private property, for example, set lines around the
dependents and slaves over which a property owner had sovereignty. For most of the
nineteenth century, this meant that property law essentially promoted a racial patriarchy by
the sheer fact that women and the enslaved had weaker (or non-existent) claims to property.
Similarly, property shaped the relationship between property owners. In the public spaces
between these litte dictatorships, power was conferred to those with the most property and the
most dependents. Emancipation challenged these legal and spatial underpinnings of
patriarchy by shifting the basis of public power away from private property ownership to
more inclusive definitions of citizenship. Moreover, women and freedpeople challenged
private power by seeking property ownership themselves, just as reformers set on blurring the
lines between private and public in an effort to end discrimination in private establishments.
How this story unfolded is still to be seen, but my interest in structural inequality
infuses it. Along the way, my subject-base grew—from the simplistic interplay between black
and white Americans to women and men of all races and classes—and my methodological
tools expanded and increased in sophistication. I also shifted the location to Virginia, whose
sourcebase far exceeds that available in any other southern state. Yet, in my focus on the
spatial aspects of structural inequality, my project doesn't seem all that far from Fort Smith.