Before the Civil War, the inferior status of slaves had made it unnecessary to pass laws separating them from whites. The two races could work side by side as long as the slave recognized his subordinate place. The cities where most free African Americans lived had rudimentary forms of segregation before 1860, but no uniform pattern emerged. In the North, free blacks also worked under severe restrictions and often found segregation even more rigid than in the South. Why do lawyers wear black? Of all the curious questions one might ask in this world, this one is certainly an important one. How did the founding fathers of the law find the dress code for lawyers, and why, of all things, BLACK?! From 1887 to 1892, nine states, including Louisiana, passed laws mandating separation for public transportation such as streetcars and railroads. Although they differed in detail, most of these laws required equal accommodations for black passengers and imposed fines and even jail time on railroad employees who did not enforce them. Five of the states also provided for fines or jail time for passengers who tried to sit in cars whose race excluded them. The Louisiana Separate Car Act was passed in July 1890.
To “promote passenger comfort,” the railroads were to provide “equal but separate accommodation for white and colored races” on state lines. The KKK became a secret society that terrorized black communities and infiltrated the white culture of the South, with members at the highest levels of government and at the lowest echelons of criminal alleys. Among colonial slave societies, the United States was almost alone in developing the one-drop rule; It stemmed both from the slave culture of the South (shared by other societies) and from the consequences of the American Civil War, the emancipation of slaves and reconstruction. In the late 19th century, Southern whites regained political power and restored white supremacy by passing Jim Crow laws and establishing racial segregation by law. In the 20th century, during the Black Power movement, black racial groups inversely claimed all people of African descent as black in order to establish political power. I digress. The question was, and still is: why do lawyers wear black? You`ll be surprised to discover that most people don`t know why, they`ve just “grown up understanding” (I hope I don`t look like an evangelical preacher right now) that lawyers wear black and white. Point. No questions are asked. No need. Useless.
You may want to understand with them, after all, these people have a lot on their minds, so they barely have time to stop and think about why lawyers should wear black and white. But here`s the tricky part. Some of those who practice law don`t even know why they have to wear black and white! I mean, I`ve been to town and talked to a bunch of people, and you`ll be amazed at what some senior legal practitioners and law students had to say when asked why they wore black and white. They were just as dark as some of the other people you didn`t expect to know anyway. So let`s get to it. Why do lawyers wear black and white? Some states required separate textbooks for black and white students. New Orleans ordered the separation of prostitutes by race. In Atlanta, African Americans received a different Bible in court than whites they could swear. Marriage and cohabitation between whites and blacks was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.
In the 1940s, Walter Plecker of Virginia[25] and Naomi Drake of Louisiana[26] had an outsized influence. As registrar of statistics, Plecker insisted on labeling mixed-race families of European-African descent as black. In 1924, Plecker wrote: “Two races as materially different as whites and blacks, in terms of morality, spiritual powers, and cultural form, cannot live in close contact without hurting superiors.” In the 1930s and 1940s, Plecker ran offices under him to alter vital records and reclassify some families as black (or colored) (without informing them) after Virginia established a binary system under its Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He also classified as blacks who had previously identified as Indians. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia`s bill banning interracial marriages in Loving v. Virginia (1967), she also declared Plecker`s Virginia Racial Integrity Act and the One-Drop Rule unconstitutional. Yes, we try to make clear and concise decisions by putting contracts and agreements and things like that together, but if things were not interpreted, we would not have courts and we would not have a whole bunch of lawyers that we have today. So, no, the law is not black and white. They are all shades of gray and this is subject to interpretation. Blacks in the United States are more mixed than whites, reflecting historical experience here, including the cramped living and working conditions among the small populations of the early colonies, when contractual servants, black and white, and slaves, intermarried or formed unions. The mixed-race children of white mothers were born free, and many families of free people of color formed during these years.
80% of free African-American families in the Upper South censuses from 1790 to 1810 can be traced as descendants of unions between white women and African men in colonial Virginia, not as slaves and white men.
