Dear Reader,

  Welcome to the website accompanying my new book The Journey to Separate But Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era. 

     Sometime around 2010, the title of a law review article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Reviewcaught my eye: “The Tyranny of the Minority: Jim Crow and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty.” The central point of the article, written by Gabriel Chin, then a law professor at the University of Arizona Law School, and Randy Wagner, then a researcher at the same school, was that the violent overthrow of Reconstruction-era governments across the South raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the current governments of those states. The article cited a case I had never heard of, Hall v. Decuir, describing it as involving a Louisiana “non-discrimination statute, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1877.” Having studied Supreme Court civil rights decisions of the era, I found it difficult to believe that such a decision existed and that I had never heard of it. Despite all I knew about the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Congress’s program of Radical Reconstruction, I doubted that the Supreme Court of the United States had invalidated a state antidiscrimination statute. I immediately read the opinions in Hall v. Decuir and then, in a short while, found the complete printed record in the case. A bit more research, including a couple of trips to Louisiana to read the original state court files and visit “the scene of the crime,” and I was off on a years long journey to document this little-known first step toward Supreme Court approval of race-based segregation in US society.

     The purpose of this website to enrich readers’ understanding and experience of the volume that grew out of that research, to be published in April, 2021 by the University Press of Kansas. In addition to ordering information, this website will contain images of people and documents related to the case, as well as a link to the printed record of the litigation that resulted in the Supreme Court’s opinion. It’s sort of a mini-museum of the events and people involved in the book. I hope you enjoy reading the book and experiencing this website as much as I enjoyed writing it and putting it together.

Jack Beermann

Boston, Massachusetts, November 2020

Tell me when and where and I'll try to be there!  Nothing planned right now.

To order Venmo to @Jack-Beermann or Zelle jackbeermann@gmail.com or mail a check to Jack Beermann, 9 Sumner Street, Swampscott MA 01907 to order a signed copy directly from the author at the publisher's retail price, $39.95 for a Hardcover or $26.95 for a Paperback, with free shipping in the continental United States.  (Other destinations pay actual cost, use the contact me page to ask about the shipping cost.)   For non-signed copies, from the publisher, visit  https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-3183-4.html.  The book is also available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, among other booksellers. .