Confronting Fraud Through the Courts

Chapter 6 examines the fraud cases that black southerners litigated against whites in the first two decades of the twentieth century, in which they accused whites of deception in property dealings. Such cases formed an unusually large proportion of civil cases involving black and white litigants in the state supreme courts examined during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In case after case, black litigants testified about their diligence in attempting to understand contracts, their own ignorance and vulnerability to deception, and their trust in the defendant. As such testimony appealed to white judges’ and jury members’ ideas of racial superiority and paternalism, as well as the legal claims needed to prove fraud, their cases often proved successful despite the widespread loss of rights and fraud occurring around them.