Peonage laws Toney v. State – Alabama, 1904 (37 So. 332); State v. Murray – Louisiana, 1906 (40 So. 930); Ex parte Hollman – South Carolina, 1908 (60 S.E. 19); Bailey v. State – Alabama, 1909 (49 So. 886), reversed, 219 U.S. 219 (1911); Wilson v. State – Georgia, 1912 (75 S.E. 619); State v. Oliva – Louisiana, 1918 (80 So. 195)
Residential segregation laws Carey v. City of Atlanta – Georgia, 1915 (84 S.E. 456); Harden v. City of Atlanta – Georgia, 1917 (93 S.E. 401); Tyler v. Harmon – Louisiana, 1926 (107 So. 704), reversed, 273 U.S. 668 (1927)
| “When the busy worktime on the farm arrives, the laborer is generally in debt to the landowner for advances secured on the faith that he will perform the stipulated work. It is then the dishonest laborer repudiates his obligation, and not only fraudulently deprives the owner of his property, but frequently brings disaster on the landowner’s farming business. The frequency of such conduct, and its evil influence on the farming industry, called for some remedy.” - Justice Ira Jones (dissenting), in Hollman "What the state may not do directly it may not do indirectly. If it cannot punish the servant as a criminal for the mere failure or refusal to serve without paying his debt, it is not permitted to accomplish the same result by creating a statutory presumption which, upon proof of no other fact, exposes him to conviction and punishment. … [T]he statute here in question … furnishes a convenient instrument for the coercion which the Constitution and the act of Congress forbid; an instrument of compulsion peculiarly effective as against the poor and the ignorant, its most likely victims.” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, in Bailey “This indebtedness becomes the cord by which the laborer is bound to the master’s service, and the service is enforceable by most potent means, the instrumentalities created by the state to punish lawlessness and crime.” - Justice Paul Leche, in Oliva “A public policy long in existence in this state, firmly entrenched in our statutes and decisions, upholds racial integrity. … If it be justifiable to separate the races in the public schools in recognition of the peril to race integrity, induced by mere race association, then we cannot see why the same public policy cannot be invoked to prohibit the black and white races from living side by side. Segregation is not imposed as a stigma upon either race, but in order to uphold the integrity of each race and to prevent conflicts between them resulting from close association.” – Justice Beverly Evans, in Harden “If [Buchanan] conflicts with these views, then that case marks a long step backwards in the march of civilization; not so much because it interferes with the segregation of the races (which will take care of itself), but more especially because it will serve in future as a precedent against still other restrictions on the use of property, which, in time, may become necessary in the public interest; and it ought therefore to be overruled before the rolling pebble becomes an avalanche. At any rate, this court should add nothing to the growing mass.” - Justice John St. Paul, in Tyler |
EMPIRE OF LAWS - The Legal History of the 50 American States > 6. DEEP SOUTH LEGAL HISTORY > 6.5 Deep South (1877-1920): Bourbons, Straight-Outs, Jim Crow and Southern Progressivism > 6.5.1 Deep South (1877-1920): The Rise of the "Straight-Outs" and Jim Crow > 6.5.2 Deep South (1877-1920): Transportation Segregation >