Book Review

In the first chapter of his aptly titled monograph, David Delaney interweaves a series of ideas about the relationship between race, place, and the law so skillfully and effortlessly that readers may underestimate the breathtaking originality of his formulations. Reminding us that all humans are physical beings inhabiting a spatial world, he argues that African Americans experienced slavery and segregation largely in the geographical terms of where they could and could not go and where they could and could not feel safe. During the nineteenth century, for example, masters tightly restricted the movement of their slaves, and local governments carved America into "slave" and "free" states. After Reconstruction, governments and private citizens attempted to restrict black mobility in still other ways, most notably by dividing their cities into "white" and "black" neighborhoods and by shunting blacks into separate and unequal institutions. Though brief and tentative, Delaney's mapping out of the physical landscape of race provides historians with a highly original analytical lens through which to study slavery, emancipation, and segregation.	1
The author's ultimate goal, however, lies in tracing the role that court cases and legal struggles played in bolstering or undermining these spatial configurations of race. Slavery and segregation were created and regulated by laws, which were embedded within a larger "legal landscape," having its own geography of overlapping jurisdictions and its own rules for inscribing meaning onto human landscapes. Drawing upon the work of Critical Legal Studies theorists, the author focuses the bulk of his attention on the rhetorical maneuvers of lawyers and judges who created complex legal narratives and manipulated legal categories in order to translate otherwise complex racial relationships into abstract legal "maps." In turn, the decisions reached by judges as the result of these maneuverings were retranslated onto the physical landscape, thereby shaping and reshaping the spatial experiences of African Americans. While these judicial rulings temporarily created authoritative legal precedents, they contained their own inherent ambiguities, making them susceptible to reinterpretation over time.	2
Having thus developed a theoretical framework that deserves the close attention of historians and legal scholars alike, Delaney uses it to analyze a series of legal cases central to understanding America's shifting geographies of race between 1836 and 1948. For the antebellum era, he focuses his attention on state and Supreme Court cases resulting from the ambiguous status of slaves once their masters transported them into free states and free territories or once they reached these areas as fugitives. In courtrooms, lawyers and judges reworked conflicts over the geographical boundaries of slavery into arguments centering on questions regarding the nature of federalism, the legal relationships among states, the legal definitions of terms like "territory," and the relationship between slavery and natural law. The resulting judicial decisions not only determined the status of those slaves whose freedom rested on the outcome of their individual cases, but, especially in the case of Scott v. Sandford, they also intensified ideological struggles over slavery and had the potential of vitally affecting the day-to-day experiences of slaves.	3
In the 1870s and 1880s, the "geopolitics of race" shifted as southern African Americans and their supporters attempted to enlist the federal government in local battles against political violence, disfranchisement, and the denial of black access to public accommodations. In a series of now famous Supreme Court cases during the 1870s and 1880s, lawyers and judges argued over how the amendments and legislation associated with Reconstruction had affected the spatial reach of federalism. By narrowly interpreting the scope of the federal protections guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments and by narrowly defining "public" as it appeared in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the resulting decisions provided southern governments with new opportunities for enacting Jim Crow laws.	4
Delaney makes vital contributions to the historiography of Jim Crow by explaining the effects that these new laws had on a southern racial geography that was already informally segregated. In the short term, this "de jurification" of existing practices compelled some whites to observe Jim Crow traditions that they might otherwise choose to ignore, and it armed others with new legal weapons with which they could intimidate blacks and regulate their daily behavior. At the same time, however, because these laws were embedded within a larger legal landscape, lawyers could wage challenges against them on a wide range of fronts, especially given the strict limits that federal courts placed on the power of the state to regulate property and contracts. In 1917, for example, the NAACP succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional a Louisville ordinance segregating blacks and whites into separate neighborhoods precisely because it threatened the property rights of both blacks and whites. Though providing a clear victory for an emerging NAACP, this decision was sidestepped by whites who increasingly relied on restrictive covenants to achieve the same goals previously pursued through ordinances. The Supreme Court's 1926 dismissal of Corrigan v. Buckley "for want of jurisdiction" channeled challenges against such covenants into case-specific arguments over whether or not changed conditions had rendered a neighborhood "definitely colored," thereby defeating the original intention of the contract. Only in 1948 did the Supreme Court rule that restrictive covenants violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The hard-fought court victories over segregation ordinances and restrictive covenants held the promise of improving black access to adequate housing and creating more integrated geographies of race. Since the 1950s, however, informal policies of housing discrimination and the relocation of white Americans from cities into suburbs have created a physical separation between the races never achieved by white supremacists of the early twentieth century.	5
In his discussion of residential segregation ordinances and restrictive covenants, Delaney draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to fill in the gaps of a heretofore-incomplete historiography. Delaney's ultimate achievement, however, lies less in recovering forgotten histories than in his compelling reinterpretation of earlier studies. His groundbreaking first chapter's success at explaining complex theoretical ideas clearly and succinctly will ensure it a richly deserved place on the syllabi of history professors and law professors throughout the country.	6
David F. Godshalk Shippensburg University

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