{"id":796,"date":"2010-11-03T16:14:48","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T16:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/?p=796"},"modified":"2010-11-03T18:50:45","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T18:50:45","slug":"giles-v-harris-1903","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/2010\/11\/03\/giles-v-harris-1903\/","title":{"rendered":"Giles v. Harris (1903)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress<\/p><\/div>\n

In\u00a0From Jim Crow to Civil Rights <\/em>(Oxford, 2004), Michael Klarman highlights the Supreme Court decision in Giles v. Harris (2003)<\/a> as an extraordinary example where the court\u00a0admitted to being powerless\u00a0in stopping disfranchisement\u00a0methods, even if these devices created by state legislatures were acknowledged to be unconstitutional. \u00a0Klarman\u00a0writes that the Giles opinion is “among the Court’s most candid confessions of limited power” (36).<\/p>\n

Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, the former Confederate states began calling conventions to re-write their state constitutions with the goal of retaining white supremacy and disempowering African-Americans through segregation and disfranchisement.\u00a0Disfranchisement measures had\u00a0gained\u00a0steady approval throughout\u00a0the national government and popular opinion before Alabama\u00a0proposed and ratified their new constitution in 1901\u00a0by\u00a0racist\u00a0elite Democrats intent on disfranchising\u00a0African-Americans.\u00a0While the constitution\u00a0was not unequivocally discriminatory toward race, clauses were built in to effectively block blacks\u00a0from voting.\u00a0The system was created so that\u00a0one group (mainly whites)\u00a0could register once for life through a system that was easy to pass\u00a0and another group (mainly non-whites) who had to register every time they\u00a0wished to vote, having to pass a series of literacy, property and employment tests that were administered harshly.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jackson W. Giles was president and founder of the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of Alabama in 1902\u00a0when he filed a mandamus petition to the Montgomery County\u00a0Board of Registers to register himself and five thousand other\u00a0black county residents\u00a0as voters. Giles\u00a0was registered and had voted in Montgomery from 1871-1901 before he was denied\u00a0to vote\u00a0by\u00a0provisions in the new Alabama Constitution.\u00a0Giles challenged the decision all the way to the Supreme Court claiming that the voter registration provisions in Alabama were unconstitutional according to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and that he be registered to vote. On April 27, 1903, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes<\/a>\u00a0Jr\u00a0ruled for the majority\u00a0in a divided\u00a06-3 decision that even if Giles was\u00a0right in that the Alabama provisions violated the United States Constitution, the Court could not\u00a0interject and order Giles to be enrolled in\u00a0a voting\u00a0ploy that could be considered unconstitutional. Holmes also stated that if Alabama had intended to disfranchise blacks, then the Supreme Court was powerless to strike these measures down and\u00a0therefore directed Giles\u00a0to file his grievances with the Alabama legislature or Congress. The decision was a definitive message toward African-Americans that the Supreme Court would not nor could they protect their civil rights.<\/p>\n

For how important and damaging this case was for African-American voting rights, Giles v. Harris\u00a0<\/em>(1903)\u00a0<\/em>had received little scholarly attention for much of the twentieth century. In one of the best and most influential articles on the case, New York University School\u00a0of Law Professor\u00a0Richard H. Pilades <\/a>writes\u00a0that the case “has been airbrushed out of the constitutional canon.” Pilades argues in\u00a0his article Democracy, Anti-Democracy and the Canon<\/a><\/em>\u00a0how such an important case, one that “permits the virtual elimination of black citizens from political participation in the\u00a0South,” has been relatively\u00a0ignored in most Constitutional Law casebooks. In the March 2009 issue of the Michigan Law Review<\/em>, editor Samuel Brenner <\/a>analyzes the case further\u00a0with regards to Pilades argument in\u00a0his note “Airbrushed out of the Constitutional Canon”: The Evolving Understanding of Giles V. Harris<\/em>, 1903-1925<\/a>. Brenner summarizes the case and provides further analysis on the impact of the decision and how it was\u00a0interpreted by the media and scholarship over the next twenty years. A new and\u00a0principle source on Giles and the case is R. Volney Riser’s Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1908 <\/a><\/em>(Louisiana, 2010), which is partially available on Google Books.<\/p>\n

Speaking for the Court, newly appointed\u00a0 Justice Holmes is the main target of criticism for the decision. There are many biographies and other\u00a0scholarly works\u00a0on Holmes, some of the most notable being his 3 volume collection of his writings and selected judicial opinions edited by Sheldon Novick\u00a0<\/a>currently available at the Dickinson Library. Other secondary sources of note on the controversial judge\u00a0are Albert Alschuler’s book Law Without Values: The Life, Work and Legacy of Justice Holmes <\/em>(Chicago, 2000) and Gary J. Aichele’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Solider, Scholar, Judge<\/em>(Boston, 1989) which was reviewed in the American Historical Review <\/a>by Dickinson Political Science professor H. L. Pohlman.<\/p>\n

The other five judges who joined Holmes in the majority were Chief Justice Melville Fuller<\/a>, Edward D. White<\/a>,Rufus W. Peckham<\/a>, Joseph McKenna <\/a>and William R. Day<\/a>. The three dissenters David J. Brewer <\/a>joined by Henry B. Brown <\/a>and John M. Harlan<\/a>. One of the best biographies on Harlan, more famous for being the sole dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson <\/em>(1896)<\/a>, is Tinsley Yarbrough’s Judicial Enigma: The First Justice Harlan <\/em>(Oxford 1995). A new study that researches\u00a0may find interesting is Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court <\/em>(New York, 2007), which features a chapter on the contrasting personalities and opinions of Holmes and Harlan. Both books are available at the Dickinson Library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (Oxford, 2004), Michael Klarman highlights the Supreme Court decision in Giles v. Harris (2003) as an extraordinary example where the court\u00a0admitted to being powerless\u00a0in stopping disfranchisement\u00a0methods, even if these devices created by state legislatures … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12444],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-supreme-court-cases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-404pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}