SWAMPSCOTT — Jack Beermann’s newest book is 10 years in the making.
“The Journey to Separate But Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era,” published last month, studies the history of a relatively-unknown Supreme Court case that stopped the state of Louisiana from prohibiting racial segregation in the 1870s. Beermann first learned of the case from a footnote in a 2010 law review article, and was shocked that he had never heard of it before.
“I was skeptical, because I felt like, if the Supreme Court had decided a case like this, I would’ve known about it, because I specialize in that period of civil rights,” said Beermann, a professor at Boston University Law School. “It was the first time that the Supreme Court approved racial segregation. More than one legal historian said that it was a gap in the literature, so I said OK, I’m going to do this.”
Beermann made multiple trips to New Orleans and to Washington, D.C. in his decade studying the case of Hall v. Decuir. The book studies the case of Madame Josephine Decuir, a wealthy Black woman who was barred from the white women’s cabin on a Mississippi River riverboat. While Louisiana courts sided with Decuir, the Supreme Court did not.
Twenty years before the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1896, Hall v. Decuir established a national precedent of racial segregation.
“This was during a brief period of time when (people of color) dominated the government of Louisiana. It was when Reconstruction was going strong, and their laws prohibited that sort of discrimination,” Beermann said. “She won in the state trial court and state Supreme Court, and then she lost the United States Supreme Court, which decided that Louisiana could not apply its law on the Mississippi River because it was an interstate waterway.”
The book studies Decuir’s life, her case, the lawyers involved, and the larger historical context at play. Beermann said that he wanted to be sure that his work would be accessible to all readers, not just those interested in law.
Beermann will give a virtual talk about Decuir’s story at the Swampscott Public Library with Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Scott Kafker at 7 p.m. May 27. Register for the free event on the library website, swampscottlibrary.org.
For more information about the book, or to purchase a copy, visit jackbeermann.com.
