Song in a Weary Throat by Pauli Murray

Author:Pauli Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

A more immediate consequence of our 1944 campaign was the discovery that ultimate victory over Jim Crow in the city of Washington did not require the enactment of civil rights legislation by Congress. Professor A. Mercer Daniel, our law librarian and the oldest member of the law school faculty, recalled talk among older Washingtonians of an earlier civil rights law in the District of Columbia. If such a law had existed, no one seemed to know what happened to it.

“Poppa” Daniel, as we students affectionately called him behind his back, did not pretend to be a brilliant legal theoretician, but he possessed a plodding patience necessary to sustained legal research. He conscientiously rummaged through forgotten dusty volumes in the library stacks and, one day toward the end of the school term, gleefully showed me what he had unearthed in a book entitled Compiled Statutes in force in the District of Columbia in 1894.

The volume included an act passed in 1872 by the Second Legislative Assembly of the District of Columbia (a local body to which Congress had delegated legislative authority during the years 1870–74), which made it a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $100 and forfeiture of license for a period of one year, for proprietors of restaurants, ice cream saloons, soda fountains, hotels, barbershops, and bathing houses to refuse to serve “any respectable, well-behaved person without regard to race, color or previous condition of servitude . . . in the same room, and at the same prices as other well-behaved and respectable persons are served.” (An act of 1873, discovered later, strengthened and extended the coverage in the 1872 law.)

With the galling Thompson’s cafeteria fiasco fresh in my mind, I could hardly contain myself when I read those words, and I set out to discover why this law had fallen into disuse. Preliminary research showed that it did not appear in any code of laws for the District of Columbia after 1894; yet I could not find an express repeal of the statute. Nor could I find any citation that it had been declared invalid by judicial decision.

The D.C. Code of 1901 omitted the civil rights ordinance but contained an enabling clause which declared that all laws hereinbefore enacted but not expressly repealed were held to be in full force and effect. I concluded that the omission was deliberate on the part of the compilers of the 1901 code. The law had fallen victim to the general disregard of civil rights following the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 in the Civil Rights Cases decision of 1883. By the early 1900s, and particularly during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, a rigid pattern of segregation by custom had been imposed, which escaped legal challenge by a later generation of lawyers who were unaware of the existence of the earlier local law.

Elated over these preliminary findings, I went around the law school waving the statute and arguing that the old civil rights legislation was still in force.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.