Berkeley Legal History Workshop Welcomes Myisha Eatmon

Dr. Eatmon is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University, where she teaches African American and Legal History. She is the 2024-2025 Alumnae Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she is finishing her first manuscript, Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture(s), White Violence, and Tort Law During Jim Crow. Her book project is under contract with Cambridge University Press and will be a part of the Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society series.

Abstract

“‘From Jim Crow to Civil Rights’” is the final chapter of Dr. Eatmon’s manuscript, Litigating in Black and White. This chapter argues that there was a transformation in Black litigation strategies and Black legal culture in the 1940s and 1950s. What began as an individual effort to seek legal redress for white-on-Black violence slowly transitioned into an effort to secure “civil rights” in the face of white vigilante and police violence in the post-World War II era. The NAACP and Black newspapers were instrumental to the resistance to police brutality and the changing litigation strategies accompanying the resistance.