Thinking about Time Travel &
Cultivating Historical Consciousness
Race and Gender Issues in U.S. Law
An Overview
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.
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 thirtynine lashes, nor less than twenty lashes.
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
1848
• The First U.S. Women’s Rights Convention
held at Seneca Falls, N.Y.
• Participants listed women’s 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.
1851
Sojourner Truth (1779-1883)
Declares “Ain’t I a woman?” in
1851 at a Women’s Rights
Conference in Akron, Ohio.
Truth’s challenge to patriarchy
and to white feminists’ vested
interests in whiteness.
Feminist Claims: For whom?
Where? When?
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.
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.”
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 (18661876), the federal government declared these
acts of legal discrimination illegal.
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.”
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)
1887
• General Allotment Act
• Divided tribal landholdings among
individual Indians and thereby
undermined the tribal system and
culture it was a part of.
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.
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.
1920
• Nineteenth Amendment passed.
• Women win the right to vote; a citizen’s
right to vote "shall not be denied or
abridged by the U.S. or by any State on
account of sex."
1944
• Korematsu v. United States
• The military evacuation of Japanese
Americans to internment camps is
challenged.
• The Supreme Court upheld the forced
evacuation.
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.