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Chapter 1: The Case of “Death for a Dollar Ninety-Five”: Miscarriages of Justice and Constructions of American Identity
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25 Chapter 1 The Case of “Death for a Dollar Ninety-Five” Miscarriages of Justice and Constructions of American Identity Mary L. Dudziak One July night in Alabama in 1957, a story began that would capture, for a moment, the attention of the world. That it involved a man, a woman, and a small amount of money, all could agree. The man was black, the woman was white, the criminal charge was robbery. The penalty was death. About the remaining details, there were different stories, but one thing was clear: at stake in the case was not just the life of Jimmy Wilson but the meaning of America. This is a story about a case long forgotten. It was, as it turns out, the point of the case for Jimmy Wilson to be forgotten, so that America might emerge unsullied. Jimmy Wilson is not the first disappearance to be noted in American legal history, of course. Others have written about the ways that human beings disappear in law. Cases come to stand for principles and legal concepts , but the human whose life story gave rise to a legal dispute fades from the page. The detachment of legal idea from life story has often been described as an absence that affects our understanding of the true meaning of law and justice. John T. Noonan, Jr., has suggested that “neglect of persons . . . led to the worst sins for which American lawyers were accountable .”1 The absence of the person has also been described as imposing a false or incomplete narrative. Kendall Thomas has written that the absence of the person in legal history leaves an “ordered image that the historical narrative of constitutional progress imposes on an unruly past.” Angelo Herndon, an unjustly imprisoned African American labor organizer, was Ogletree-Sarat_pp023-112.indd 25 Ogletree-Sarat_pp023-112.indd 25 9/12/08 1:23:01 PM 9/12/08 1:23:01 PM 26 Mary L. Dudziak not forgotten by legal history, but Thomas describes the “dissection” and “dismemberment” of this human being’s encounters with the law, with episodes fitting into different doctrinal categories, obscuring the whole.2 But the erasure of the person from the law is more than a hole, an absence , an incompleteness. It also aids in the forward-looking construction of ideas about the nature of American justice.3 When legal principle is detached from human person, American justice is measured through the march of principle. Ambiguities and injustice in the individual case do not get in the way of the story. The nation can be identified with certain legal ideas, with the idea of a rule of law itself. The messiness of life stories does not disrupt this construction of national self-identity. The Jimmy Wilson case illustrates this. The case captured attention at home and abroad, feeding a global debate about the nature of American democracy. This helps us to see the way narratives of justice and the rule of law aid conceptions of American identity.4 It is not simply the law but the nation that is constructed when we form legal narratives. When the image of American justice is fractured, resolutions of miscarriages of justice often serve to repair a breach in American identity, making America whole again. What happens to the person at the center of the story is, at best, secondary. In fact, for America to be whole, Jimmy Wilson needed to disappear. In this way, forgetting Jimmy Wilson did not simply leave a void in our understanding, as Noonan might suggest but, instead, aided the formation of a particular national narrative. In this case, for the story to turn out right, the nation is restored, and the person is forgotten. Death for a Dollar Ninety-Five The case of “Death for a Dollar Ninety-Five” began in Marion, about 80 miles northwest from Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital. Montgomery “remained one of the most rigidly segregated cities of the South,” in the 1950s, historian Patricia Sullivan has written. The urban South had been energized by World War II, and the city’s population had increased by nearly 50 percent during the 1940s. Though many new migrants were white, Montgomery remained 37 percent African American in 1951, but “only 3.7 percent of eligible black voters were registered.”5 Alabama was also home to the city of Tuskegee, the site of the legendary Tuskegee Institute and the location of a notorious 1960 voting rights case, when the city redrew its boundaries...