TV cameras followed the group’s progress to the legislative chambers, where they were stopped by police officers, Seale shouting, “Is this the way the racist government works—[you] won’t
Trang 1secession, urging the president to maintain a strong Unionist stance
In a shuffle of cabinet offices in December
1860, Black served for a short time asSECRETARY
OF STATE During his brief tenure, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union, and Black was a key adviser to Buchanan in handling the crisis
In January 1861, with only a few weeks left
in his own term as president, Buchanan named Black to a seat on the U.S Supreme Court that had been vacant for eight months Republican senators, anxious to give the incoming president,
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, his first appointment to the Court, opposed Black Furthermore, although Black was a strong supporter of the Union, he was not an abolitionist As a result, his nomina-tion was harshly criticized by the Northern antislavery press and by Democrat STEPHEN A
DOUGLAS, who had just lost the election to
Lincoln Also, Southern senators who might have supported Black were resigning from the Senate to join the Confederacy Had Buchanan acted earlier to fill the seat, Black could have been easily confirmed Instead, he was rejected 26–25
Deeply disappointed at his narrow defeat, Black returned to his home in York, Pennsylva-nia He then suffered a number of personal setbacks, including the loss of his life savings, which he had entrusted to a relative for investment, and a rapid decline in health In late 1861 Black’s health gradually started to improve and he resumed practicing law In December of that year, he was appointed reporter of decisions for the U.S Supreme Court, a position created by Congress in 1816
As reporter, Black was primarily responsible for editing, publishing, and distributing the Court’s opinions The reporter was paid a modest yearly salary and usually earned additional income selling copies of the bound volume in which an important case appeared or printing and selling
a significant opinion separately in a pamphlet
In those days, the volumes produced by a particular reporter usually bore the reporter’s name on the spine Black served as reporter for three years and produced Black’s Reports, two volumes of opinions that earned him high praise
In 1864 Black left the Court and returned
to private practice in Pennsylvania He handled several important cases before the U.S Supreme Court, including EX PARTE Milligan, 71 U.S (4 Wall.) 2, 18 L Ed 281 (1866) In Milligan, the Court held that the president lacked the power
to authorize military tribunals to try civilians when they could be tried in civil courts Black also remained involved in the continuing litigation over California land titles, and earned high fees for his services
Jeremiah Sullivan
Black.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
Jeremiah Sullivan Black 1810–1883
❖
1810 Born,
Stony Creek, Pa.
1830 Admitted to the Pennsylvania bar
1844 Appointed president judge of the Court
of Common Pleas
1851 Appointed
to Supreme Court
of Pennsylvania
1857 Appointed U.S.
attorney general under President Buchanan
1861–64 Served as court reporter for U.S
Supreme Court
1861–65 Civil War
◆
1868 Impeachment trial against President Johnson
1873 Helped revise Pennsylvania Constitution
1876 Served as counsel to Samuel Tilden
in contested 1876 presidential election
1883 Died, York, Pa.
◆
Trang 2Black was a close friend of PresidentANDREW
JOHNSON, who assumed the presidency after
Lincoln was assassinated Black was initially
engaged to represent Johnson in his
impeach-ment trial but withdrew after disagreeimpeach-ments
with Johnson’s other lawyers arose He also
served as counsel to SAMUEL J TILDEN, an
unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate,
in an investigation of the disputed results of the
1876 presidential election
Black continued to practice law and remain
active in civic affairs until 1883, when he died at
the age of seventy-three
FURTHER READINGS
Black, Jeremiah S Essays and Speeches of Jeremiah S Black
(1885) Reprint, 2009 Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ.
Library.
Congressional Quarterly 2004 Guide to the U.S Supreme
Court 4th ed Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly.
Elliott, Stephen P., ed 1986 A Reference Guide to the United
States Supreme Court New York: Facts on File.
BLACK LETTER LAW
A term used to describe basic principles of law that
are accepted by a majority of judges in most states
The term probably derives from the practice
of publishers of encyclopedias and legal treatises
to highlight principles of law by printing them
in boldface type
BLACK MONDAY
See STOCK MARKET
BLACK PANTHER PARTY
No group better dramatized the anger that
fueled the 1960sBLACK POWER MOVEMENTthan the
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) For
five tumultuous years, the Panthers brought a
fierce cry for justice and equality to the streets of
the largest U.S cities Its members flashed
across TV screens in black berets and leather
coats, shotguns and law books in hand,
confronting the police or storming the
Califor-nia Legislature Political demands issued from
the party’s newspaper; loudspeakers boomed at
rallies for jailed Panther leaders Behind the
scenes, theFEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION(FBI)
spent millions of dollars in a secret
counterin-telligence program aimed at destroying the
group By the time a 1976 congressional report
revealed the extent of the FBI’s efforts, it was
too late Shoot-outs with police officers, con-flicts with other groups, MURDER, prison sen-tences, and internal dissent had destroyed the Black Panthers The details surrounding the
1969 shooting deaths of two party leaders by Chicago police remain unclear The other party leaders split in 1972 and one of them, Bobby Seale, ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, losing
in a runoff By 1975, the last of the group, a splinter faction under ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, had disappeared
Before the advent of the Panthers, the mid-1960s saw gradual progress in the struggle for
CIVIL RIGHTS This progress was too slow for many African Americans Traditional civil rights groups such asMARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’sSOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC) were focusing their efforts on ending segregation in the South, but conditions in urban areas were reaching a boiling point Younger activists increasingly turned away from these older groups and toward leaders such as STOKELY CARMICHAEL, whoseSTUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMIT-TEE (SNCC) demanded not merely integration but economic and social liberation for African Americans Black power was Carmichael’s mes-sage, and in Mississippi he had organized an all-black political party that took as its symbol a snarling black panther The ethos of black power spread quickly to urban areas in the North, East, and West, where integration alone had not soothed the problems of racism, poverty, and violence
Police violence against African Americans was a common complaint in impoverished Oakland, California By 1966 two young men had had enough One wasHUEY P.NEWTON, age
23, a first-year law student With his friend Bobby Seale, age 30, Newton founded the BPP, with the intent of monitoring police officers when they made arrests This bold tactic—
already being employed in Minneapolis by the nascentAMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT(AIM)—was entirely legal Also legal under California state law was the practice of carrying a loaded weapon, as long as it was visible But legal or not, the sight of Newton and Seale bearing shotguns as they rushed to the scene of an arrest had enormous shock value To police officers and citizens alike, this represented a huge change from the previously nonviolent demon-strations of civil rights activists Although they did not use the guns and maintained the legally required eight to ten feet from officers, the
Trang 3Panthers inspired fear They also quickly won respect from neighbors who saw them as standing up to the predominantly white police force The law books they carried—and from which they read criminal suspects their rights—
appeared to many in the community to give the Panthers a kind of legitimacy
Attracting new members through their high visibility, the Panthers sprang to national attention in 1967 Antagonism toward the party
by law enforcement officials had prompted California lawmakers to considerGUN CONTROL
In May 1967 legislators met in Sacramento, the state capital, to discuss a bill that would criminalize the carrying of loaded weapons within city limits To Seale and Newton, chairman and minister of defense of the BPP, respectively, the proposed law was unjust
Governor RONALD REAGAN was on the lawn of the state legislature as 30 armed Black Panthers arrived and entered the building TV cameras followed the group’s progress to the legislative chambers, where they were stopped by police
officers, Seale shouting, “Is this the way the racist government works—[you] won’t let a man exercise his constitutional rights?” He then read a prepared statement:
The Black Panther Party calls upon American people in general and black people in particular
to take full note of the racist California legis-lature which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless, at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people
The Panthers kept their guns, left the building, and were subsequently disarmed by the police
No sooner had the demonstration ended than the national media denounced the Panthers as antiwhite radicals For many white U.S citizens, the Panthers symbolized terror The party denied being antiwhite, but a new political focus now superseded its original goal
of SELF-DEFENSE In a ten-point program, the Panthers called for full employment, better
On May 2, 1967,
armed members of the
Black Panther Party
enter the California
state capital to protest
a bill restricting the
carrying of arms in
public.
AP IMAGES
Trang 4housing and education, and juries composed of
African Americans It denounced the war in
Vietnam and the military draft Some of its
demands went further Point 3 said the group
wanted an end to the robbing of the black
community by the whites Another point called
for the release of all African American men
from prison The group’s major political
objective was self-determination It demanded
United Nations–supervised elections in the
black community, which it dubbed the black
colony, for blacks only, so that“black colonials”
could determine their own national destiny
To advance its cause, the party published the
Black Panther newspaper Its articles, cartoons,
and imagery reflected a hardening stance The
police were caricatured as pigs—introducing a
term of condemnation that would enter the
national vernacular—and a recurring image was
that of a Black Panther holding a gun to the head
of a pig in a police uniform However extreme
such rhetoric may sound in the early 2000s, it
galvanized young African Americans coming of
age in the Vietnam era BPP chapters sprang up
nationwide, and by 1968 as many as 5,000
members worked from BPP offices in 25 major U.S cities Prominent activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, joined the party
Cleaver had achieved national prominence for his 1967 essay collection Soul on Ice As the BPP’s minister of information, he had a voice that struck exactly the tone the Panthers wanted, a blend of determination, outrage, and threat.“These racist Gestapo pigs,” Cleaver told reporters, “have to stop brutalizing our community or we are going to take up arms and we are going to drive them out.”
On another front, the Panthers proceeded with charitable services to African American communities, called Serve the People programs
They organized health clinics and schools
Holding food drives, they rounded up groceries and distributed them for free Morning break-fast programs for African American children served food and spirituals, as kids sang “Black
Is Beautiful.” White liberals supported the Panthers, writing supportive articles in intellec-tual journals such as the New York Review of Books; writing books that showed admiration for their style, like Norman Mailer’s The White Negro; and inviting them to fashionable
Elridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) minister of information, outside
of BPP headquarters
in Oakland in September 1968 after two of the city’s police officers fired shots into the building.
AP IMAGES
Trang 5fund-raising parties, as did composer and con-ductor Leonard Bernstein But this support was far from unanimous; the author Thomas C
Wolfe coined the phrase radical chic to satirize it
The successes achieved by the Panthers in Oakland and beyond were soon overshadowed
by violence as tense confrontations between the police and Panther members erupted in gunfire
In October 1967, after a gun battle left one officer wounded and another dead, Newton was arrested “Free Huey!” became a cry at protests across the United States while Newton remained in jail From his cell, he told national
TV audiences that the plight of African Amer-icans was similar to that of the Vietnamese
“The police occupy our community,” he said,
“as a foreign troop occupies territory.” Con-victed of murder, he remained in prison until August 1970 An appeals court later threw out the conviction
The violence continued, as the police began raiding BPP offices In 1968 a confrontation
in West Oakland left three officers and two Panther members wounded A 17-year-old Panther was killed Seale announced on televi-sion that black people should organize so that they could retaliate against racist police brutality and attacks
In 1969 Seale too was in court The police had arrested him at an antiwar demonstration outside the 1968 Democratic National Con-vention in Chicago He was charged with rioting During the trial of Seale and other demonstrators—dubbed the Chicago Eight—
federal district court judge Julius J Hoffman ordered the vociferous Seale handcuffed to a chair and gagged, a move that inspired such public revulsion that a mistrial was declared
However, in 1970 Seale and several other Panthers were back in court, in New Haven, Connecticut The charge was the 1969 alleged murder of suspected Panther police informant Alex Rackley Seale and fellow Panther Erica Huggins were ultimately acquitted, but two other Panthers, including Warren Kimbro (who plea-bargained), were sentenced to prison
Seale’s controversial trial inspired a “May Day” riot at Yale University in New Haven, prompting the federal government to send in 2,500NATIONAL GUARDmembers after a substan-tial amount of mercury (a bomb-making ingredient) was taken from a Yale chemistry lab and several rifles were discovered missing
The Panthers affected the highest circles of federal law enforcement J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, considered them a black nationalist hate group In November 1968 he ordered FBI field agents to begin destabilizing the group by exploiting dissension within its ranks This end was to be achieved through the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTEL-PRO), a surveillance and misinformation pro-gram widely used in the late 1960s against civil rights, black power, and various leftist groups The FBI infiltrated the Panther membership with informants, wiretapped telephones, mailed fake letters to leaders, and spread innuendo both inside and outside the party Documenta-tion of the counterintelligence campaign would emerge in a report issued in 1976 by the U.S Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations, titled The FBI’s Covert Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party The report revealed that the FBI had gone to great lengths, some of them illegal, to pit the Panthers against themselves and other groups
The destabilization worked The FBI man-aged to exacerbate a bloody feud between the Panthers and another California-based group, United Slaves (US) It poured resources into making leaders suspicious of each other, notably aggravating a rift between Newton and Cleaver Perhaps its most egregious involvement came during a 1969 operation against Fred Hampton, the Chicago-based chairman of the Illinois BPP
In late 1967 the FBI launched a disinformation campaign against the 19-year-old, and his file in the FBI’s Racial Matters Squad soon swelled to more than 4,000 pages When Hampton fell under suspicion in the murder of two Chicago police officers, an FBI informant provided authorities with a detailed floor plan of his apartment On December 4, 1969, police officers raided the apartment Hampton and another Panther member were killed; four others were wounded The Panthers alleged that the incident was anASSASSINATION
Several official and private inquiries were conducted, including one led by ROY WILKINS, executive director of the NAACP, and Ramsey Clark, former U.S attorney general Lawsuits brought against the FBI by the victims’ survivors dragged through the courts until
1983, when the federal government agreed
to pay them a $1.85 million settlement U.S district court judge John F Grady imposed sanctions on the FBI for having covered up facts
Trang 6in the case For the Illinois Panther chapter,
however, the raid in 1969 had signaled the
beginning of the end
In disarray in 1972, the Panthers soon
collapsed Its leadership feuded, police and
FBI harassment took a heavy toll, and the black
power movement had nearly expired Charged
with murder, Cleaver had fled to Cuba and
Algeria, where he continued to urge African
Americans on to revolution Cleaver maintained
his Black Panther faction in exile until 1975
Seale and Newton preferred nonviolent
solutions After the Panthers disbanded, Seale
ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, winning a
third of the vote He later became a public
speaker and a community liaison on behalf of
Temple University’s African American studies
program Newton earned a doctor’s degree from
the University of California, Santa Cruz, but his
legal problems continued In March 1987 he
was convicted for being a felon in possession
of a firearm—despite the overturning of his
original murder conviction—and sentenced to
three years’ imprisonment In 1989 he was again
in prison, serving time for a parole violation for
possessing cocaine He died in August 1989,
after being shot during a drug deal in the
neighborhood where he began the Panthers
Conversely, fellow Panther Kimbro was
accepted into a graduate program at Harvard
while still in prison, and was released after
serving little more than four years of his
sentence He became an assistant dean at a
local university and later served as director of
Project More, a halfway house and
prison-alternative program in New Haven He was
quoted in a 2000 issue of the Christian Science
Monitor as wanting to be known as “a guy who
made some mistakes, turned his life around,
and learned to help other people.”
The legacy of Newton and Seale’s party is
debatable Its alliance with international
revolu-tionary leaders—Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and
Ho Chi Minh, to name a few—cost it credibility
in the eyes of mainstream U.S citizens An
organization devoted originally to the aim of
self-defense for beleaguered urban African
Americans, it nose-dived into violence and
terror For this reason, the BPP is customarily
dismissed as an extremist, self-destructive
exponent of the black power movement But
this transformation owed something to the
harassment of the Panthers by law enforcement
agencies In turn, the calculated federal and local campaigns against the Panthers initiated the group’s most tangible effect on U.S law:
highlighting FBI counterintelligence against U.S citizens was a noteworthy gain In the years following the death of FBI director Hoover, pressure for reforms dismantled the apparatus
he single-handedly used against his political enemies
Drawing attention to the issue of urban police brutality was another major Panther contribu-tion, one that grew as a concern in subsequent years In addition, the group’s focus on the questionable number of African American men fighting the U.S war in Vietnam inspired black intellectuals to criticize the role of race in the U.S
military Moreover, in the party’s passionate ten-point program were the seeds of ideas that eventually took root in the U.S legal system:
By the 1990s, juries increasingly reflected the racial composition of the communities in which defendants lived As the history of theCIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT demonstrates, such change came slowly, begrudgingly, and often at great personal cost to the men and women who fought for it
The original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is not to be confused with an entity that emerged in the late 1990s, calling itself the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and adopt-ing the originalSTALKINGpanther logo The newer group allegedly violated a 1997 Texas state court order prohibiting them from “referring to themselves by any name containing the words Panther, Black Panthers, or Black Panther Party.”
In 2003, lawyers representing some of the original Panthers, e.g., The Black Panther Party, Inc (which brought the Texas action) and the Huey P Newton Foundation, contemplated filing a federal trademark infringement suit after
an August 2002 cease and desist letter apparently went unheeded
FURTHER READINGS
& Business (January) Available online at http://www.law.
com/jsp/law/LawArticleFriendly.jsp?id=1045793329369;
website home page: http://www.law.com (accessed July
7, 2009).
Newsletter Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale (October).
Christian Science Monitor (September 7, 2000).
“A Panther Generation Gap.” Editorial Chicago Tribune (October 30, 2002).
Trang 7Yale Univ Library Manuscripts and Archives, Record Unit
16, 1996 Guide to the Inventory of May Day Records, 1970–1972, 1976 New Haven: Yale Univ Library.
CROSS REFERENCES Black Power Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam War.
BLACK POWER MOVEMENT The Black Power movement grew out of the
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT that had steadily gained momentum through the 1950s and 1960s
Although not a formal movement, the Black Power movement marked a turning point in black-white relations in the United States and also in how blacks saw themselves The movement was hailed by some as a positive and proactive force aimed at helping blacks achieve full equality with whites, but it was reviled by others as a militant, sometimes violent faction whose primary goal was to drive
a wedge between whites and blacks In truth, the Black Power movement was a complex event that took place at a time when society and culture was being transformed throughout the United States, and its legacy reflects that complexity
In the 1950s and early 1960s, groups such as the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) and the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE(SCLC) worked with blacks and whites to create a desegregated society and eliminate racial discrimination
Their efforts generated positive responses from
a broad spectrum of people across the country
Rev MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr., who headed the SCLC, made significant headway with his adherence to nonviolent tactics In 1964 Pre-sidentLYNDON B.JOHNSONsigned theCIVIL RIGHTS
Act and a year later he signed the Voting Rights Act
Civil rights legislation was an earnest and effective step toward eliminating inequality between blacks and whites Even with the obvious progress, however, the reality was that prejudice could not be legislated away Blacks still faced lower wages than whites, higher crime rates in their neighborhoods, and unspoken but palpable racial discrimination Young blacks in particular saw the civil rights movement as too mainstream to generate real social change What they wanted was something that would acceler-ate the process and give blacks the same opportunities as whites, not just socially but
also economically and politically Perhaps more important, they felt that the civil rights movement was based more on white percep-tions of civil rights than black perceppercep-tions Not all blacks had been equally impressed with the civil rights movement Malcolm X and theNATION OF ISLAM, for example, felt that racial self-determination was a critical and neglected element of true equality By the mid-1960s, dissatisfaction with the pace of change was growing among blacks The term“black power” had been around since the 1950s, but it was
STOKELY CARMICHAEL, head of the STUDENT NON-VIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC), who popularized the term in 1966
Carmichael led a push to transform SNCC from a multiracial community activist organi-zation into an all-black social change organiza-tion Late in 1966 two young men,HUEY NEWTON
and Bobby Seale, formed the BLACK PANTHER PARTYforSELF-DEFENSE(BPP), initially as a group
to track incidents of police violence Within a short time groups such as SNCC and BPP gained momentum, and by the late 1960s the Black Power movement had made a definite mark on American culture and society The Black Power movement instilled a sense
of racial pride and self-esteem in blacks Blacks were told that it was up to them to improve their lives Black Power advocates encouraged blacks to form or join all-black political parties that could provide a formidable power base and offer a foundation for real socioeconomic progress For years, the movement’s leaders said, blacks had been trying to aspire to white ideals of what they should be Now it was time for blacks to set their own agenda, putting their needs and aspirations first An early step, in fact, was the replacement of the word “Negro” (a word associated with the years ofSLAVERY) with
“black.”
The movement generated a number of positive developments Probably the most noteworthy of these was its influence on black culture For the first time, blacks in the United States were encouraged to acknowledge their African heritage COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
established black studies programs and black studies departments Blacks who had grown up believing that they were descended from a backwards people now found out that African culture was as rich and diverse as any other, and they were encouraged to take pride in that
Trang 8heritage The Black Arts movement, seen by
some as connected to the Black Power
move-ment flourished in the 1960s and 1970s Young
black poets, authors, and visual artists found
their voices and shared those voices with others
Unlike earlier black arts movements such as the
Harlem Renaissance, the new movement
pri-marily sought out a black audience
The same spirit of racial unity and pride that
made the Black Power movement so dynamic
also made it problematic—and to some,
dangerous Many whites, and a number of
blacks, saw the movement as a black separatist
organization bent on segregating blacks and
whites and undoing the important work of the
civil rights movement There is no question that
Black Power advocates had valid and pressing
concerns Blacks were still victims of racism,
whether they were being charged a higher rate
for a mortgage, getting paid less than a white
co-worker doing the same work, or facing
violence at the hands of white racists But the
solutions that some Black Power leaders
advocated seemed only to create new problems
Some, for example, suggested that blacks receive
paramilitary training and carry guns to protect
themselves Though these individuals insisted
this device was solely a means of self-defense
and not a call to violence, it was still unnerving
to think of armed civilians walking the streets
Also, because the Black Power movement
was never a formally organized movement, it
had no central leadership, which meant that
different organizations with divergent agendas
often could not agree on the best course of
action The more radical groups accused the
more mainstream groups of capitulating to
whites, and the more mainstream accused the
more radical of becoming too ready to use
violence By the 1970s most of the formal organizations that had come into prominence with the Black Power movement, such as the SNCC and the Black Panthers, had all but disappeared
The Black Power movement did not succeed
in getting blacks to break away from white society and create a separate society Nor did
it help end discrimination or racism It did, however, help provide some of the elements that were ultimately necessary for blacks and whites to gain a fuller understanding of each other
FURTHER READINGS Carmichael, Stokely, Charles V Hamilton, and Kwame Ture 1992 Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America New York: Vintage.
Cross, Theorore 1984 The Black Power Imperative: Racial Inequality and the Politics of Nonviolence New York:
Faulkner.
Van Deburg, William L 1992 New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture Chicago:
Univ of Chicago Press.
CROSS REFERENCES Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely; Civil Rights Acts;
Malcolm X; Nation of Islam; NAACP; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Voting Rights Act of 1965.
BLACKACRE
A fictitious designation that legal writers use to describe a piece of land
The term Blackacre is often used in comparison with Whiteacre in order to distin-guish one parcel of land from another
vBLACKFORD, ISAAC NEWTON Isaac Newton Blackford achieved prominence as
a jurist He was born November 6, 1786, in
Isaac Newton Blackford 1786–1859
❖
❖
1786 Born, Bound Brook, N.J.
◆
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
1806 Graduated from Princeton
1817–53 Served on Indiana Supreme Court
1811 Moved to Indiana territory
1813 Became clerk and recorder
of Washington County, Indiana
1816 Indiana became a state; Blackford became speaker of Indiana legislature
1832 Served
as president elector of the Clay ticket
1855 Appointed U.S.
Court of Claims judge
1859 Died, Washington, D.C.
1861–65 U.S Civil War
1775
◆
Trang 9Bound Brook, New Jersey A graduate of the Col-lege of New Jersey (later Princeton University), Blackford served as clerk and recorder of Washington County, Indiana, in 1813 The fol-lowing year he became a territorial court judge
Blackford served as a member of the Indiana state house of representatives from 1816–1817
He was also a candidate for Presidential Elector for Indiana in 1824 The following year he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S Senate seat for Indiana
Blackford participated in state politics as
a county delegate to the Indiana legislature, serving as speaker of the state’s house of representatives in 1816 In 1817 Blackford returned to the judiciary and sat as a justice of the Indiana Supreme Court until 1853 He subsequently served as a U.S COURT OF CLAIMS
judge from 1855 to 1859
Blackford died on December 31, 1859, in Washington, D.C., and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis
BLACKLIST
A list of individuals or organizations designated for special discrimination or boycott; also to put a person or organization on such a list
Blacklists have been used for centuries as
a means to identify and discriminate against undesirable individuals or organizations A blacklist might consist, for example, of a list
of names developed by a company that refuses
to hire individuals who have been identified
as union organizers; a country that seeks to boycott trade with other countries for political reasons; aLABOR UNIONthat identifies firms with which it will not work; or a government that wishes to specify who will not be allowed entry into the country
Many types of blacklists are legal For example, a store may maintain a list of individuals who have not paid their bills and deny them credit privileges Similarly, credit reports can effectively function as blacklists by identifying individuals who are poor credit risks
Because the purpose of blacklists is to exclude and discriminate, they can also result
in unfair and illegal discrimination In some cases, blacklists have done great damage to people’s lives, locking them out of employment
in their chosen careers or denying them access
to influential organizations For example, if a
labor union makes a blacklist of workers who refuse to become members or conform to its rules, it has committed anUNFAIR LABOR PRACTICE
in violation of federal laws Blacklists may also necessitate disclosure laws State and federal fair credit reporting acts, for example, require that access to information in a credit report must be given, upon request, to the person to whom the information applies
The most famous instance of blacklisting
in U.S history occurred in the entertainment industry during the 1940s and 1950s Motion picture companies, radio and television broad-casters, and other firms in that industry developed blacklists of individuals accused of being Communist sympathizers Those firms then denied employment to those who were named on the blacklists
Blacklisting in Hollywood came about largely through the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was formed to investigate the activities of Communist, fascist, or other supposedly sub-versive and “un-American” political groups Though the committee purported to be con-cerned with all types of potential subversion, afterWORLD WAR II ended in 1945 and relations with the Soviet Union subsequently deteriorated,
it focused largely on COMMUNISM as a threat to the internal stability of the United States In highly publicized hearings in 1947, 1951–52, and 1953–55 the committee sought to ferret out Communist sympathizers, conspiracies, and propaganda in the entertainment industry The HUAC hearings produced lists of individuals who either had been identified by witnesses as Communists or had refused to answer questions in appearances before the committee on the grounds of theFIRST AMEND-MENT, which protects free speech and free association, or the FIFTH AMENDMENT, which protects against SELF-INCRIMINATION Entertain-ment industry companies, fearing that they would be perceived by the public as pro-Communist if they employed people named in the hearings, then used these lists as blacklists They refused to hire hundreds of actors, writers, and other entertainment professionals named in the HUAC hearings Many promising careers were thus ended and much potentially edifying art was lost
Some of the first victims of Hollywood blacklisting were known as the Hollywood Ten
Trang 10In the October 1947 HUAC Hearings Regarding
Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture
Industry, ten Hollywood screenwriters and
directors—Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman,
Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner
Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel
Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo—
appeared underSUBPOENA, or court order, before
the committee Each of them refused to answer
questions regarding affiliation with the
Com-munist party on the grounds that such
ques-tions violated their First Amendment right to
privacy, or a right to remain silent, regarding
their political beliefs or affiliations The courts
rejected this argument, found the Hollywood
Ten guilty of contempt of Congress, and gave
them prison sentences lasting from six months
to one year
Nine of the ten were blacklisted in the film
industry (Ironically, the man conducting the
1947 HUAC hearings, Representative J Parnell
Thomas [R-N.J.], joined Lardner in federal
prison in 1950 after Thomas was convicted of
stealing government funds.)
Subpoenaed witnesses in these hearings faced a dilemma: On the one hand, they could invoke constitutional protection such as the Fifth Amendment, thereby implying current or former membership in the Communist party, putting themselves on the blacklist, and ending their chances of ever working in the entertain-ment industry again; on the other hand, they could“name names,” or identify their friends as Communists, thereby betraying those close to them In many cases, people were blacklisted for past political affiliations that they had aban-doned During the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped the nation in the 1950s, Congress’s investigations into the Hollywood film industry went unchecked and the resulting blacklists destroyed numerous promising careers
FURTHER READINGS Bernstein, Walter 2000 Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist New York: Da Capo.
Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner 2004 Hide in Plain Sight:
The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–
2002 New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vaughn, Robert 1972 Only Lies: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting New York: Putnam.
The Hollywood Ten were photographed in January 1948, before their arraignment on charges of contempt
of Congress Nine of the ten were later blacklisted from the film industry.
AP IMAGES