Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia

Introduction

Lawyers are men. “Colored” people cannot marry “white” people. Public amusements must remain closed on Sundays. On these and other matters, popular beliefs and public policy underwent changes so dramatic in the past hundred years, Virginia in the 1990s was hardly the same place as Virginia in the 1890s. This book explores the transformation. Blue Laws and Black Codes emphasizes the past century or so in the history of one state. Yet, in degree, Virginia can stand as a proxy for the entire South, even the entire nation (indeed for much of the world), as traditional ways of doing things and governing behavior have undergone change, have even disappeared, and new ways have come to the fore. Thus, while my book uses materials from the history of Virginia, it raises and addresses larger questions, first in the legal history of the U.S. South, second in American political culture. The first three chapters could perhaps have been largely crafted from materials on any American state. The next three, in particular, derive far more from the legal history of the South. The ways in which the later chapters differ from the earlier ones can help define what is southern about southern history. Changing a Constitution through Judicial Interpretation Exploring the history of Virginia in the years since the Civil War, Blue Laws and Black Codes emphasizes the period from the 1890s through the 1960s. Each of the chapters takes a fresh look at Virginia, the South, and the United States. The theme of conflict, law, and change captures the approach I offer toward linking conflict with change, explaining how Americans have made their way, on all manner of matters, from one set of social rules to another. My subtitle—Conflict, Courts, and Change—locates the venue where much of the policy conflict and legal change took place. Introduction Amending Virginia, Amending America Some years ago a book appeared under the title Amending America. It focused on formal amendment to the U.S. Constitution.1 My book has taken a related but substantially different approach. While tracing change in the statutory and constitutional law of Virginia, it emphasizes ways other than formal amendment to the U.S. Constitution or the Virginia constitution. Indeed, formal amendment appears in these chapters only briefly and on infrequent occasion, as when the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1964) banned payment of a poll tax as a requirement for voting in federal elections. Far more often, the language of the written constitution remained the same, but its meaning underwent significant reinterpretation. My book takes the approach that in successfully amending the legal and constitutional framework of life in Virginia, a wide range of actors— citizens, lawyers, legislators, judges, delegates to constitutional conventions —brought change to the way people lived in the Old Dominion. Blue Laws and Black Codes emphasizes a single American state while frequently framing the inquiry in broader regional and national contexts. Life at the end of the twentieth century was organized around rules that often contrasted sharply with the rules that governed life a hundred years earlier. Social, cultural, economic, and political change had pushed, or at least facilitated, changes in the legal system. At the same time, the legal system had fostered many kinds of change. In seeking to shape the world through changes in the law, people used various political tools, from electoral and legislative politics in the state and in the nation to civil or criminal cases in state or federal court. The law mediates conflict, and it mirrors change, causes change, legitimates change. Blue Laws and Black Codes offers a series of case studies in how the law interacts with change in society, culture, the economy, and the political system. In different ways each chapter illustrates how Americans have routinely employed legal concepts and legal venues to work out their differences and either promote or retard some kind of change. A legal idiom— a discourse about what “the law” is or ought to be and whether a given statute is “constitutional”—has played a central part in American political culture; the comment “there ought to be a law” is applied to almost anything at all. Law and policy have been changed—or not—in legislatures and constitutional conventions, through access to the state and federal courts, through appeal to the state and federal constitutions, through formal amendment to constitutions, and through reinterpretation of existing language. At the outset it...