Скачать или смотреть Justin Randolph on “Moonlight and Militias: The Roots of Jim Crow Police Power in Rural America”

Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice Emerging Scholar Talk - Justin Randolph

“Moonlight and Militias: The Roots of Jim Crow Police Power in Rural America”

When white supremacists convened to rewrite the Mississippi state constitution in 1890, they promulgated the legal blueprint for Jim Crow governance in America. Known best for its innovation in Black voter disfranchisement and racial segregation, the Constitution of 1890 also carried a program of police reform. Some delegates imagined formal, paramilitary law enforcement as a cornerstone of their exclusive racial order. In “Moonlight and Militias,” Justin Randolph connects a deep backstory of state police power through the militia’s founders, whose careers spanned Native removal and chattel slavery, and those Black Mississippians who resisted the armed force required to consolidate a Jim Crow racial order.

Justin Randolph (he/him) is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, where he specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social and political history. His primary research concerns the intersection of policing and inequality in the American South. He grew up in rural Alabama and received his PhD from Yale University in 2020. His first book, Mississippi Law: The Long Crisis of Policing and Reform in America’s Black Countryside, is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press.

November 11, 2021
Brown Univerisity