Black Lives in Legal Archives: Approaches and Methods to Writing the Histories of Race and Crime from the Early Modern to the Present Day

AHA Session 245
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Mardi Gras Ballroom FG (New Orleans Marriott, 3rd Floor)
Panel:
Katharine Gerbner, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Brenda E. Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Nikki Marie Taylor, Howard University

Session Abstract

Our roundtable brings together five historians to discuss the ethical, methodological, and interpretative challenges of researching the intertwined histories of law, race, slavery, policing, corporal punishment, and incarceration. We examine how, from the early modern period to the present, ideas of criminality and Blackness have cohered to regulate Black bodies in service of state power, rendering Black lives fungible and shaping the corporeal and psychic experiences of Black subjects. We reflect on the possibilities and limits of procedural justice for Black people entangled with the law across diverse contexts including rural Maine in 1695, eighteenth-century Jamaican plantations, and Los Angeles in the aftermath of 1992 demonstrations for Rodney King and Latasha Harlins. We address the archival and evidentiary challenges of this work, drawing on sources such as court dockets, newspapers, Moravian mission papers, coroner’s inquests, oral histories, music, and television.

The proposed roundtable invites participants at the AHA to think critically about the language scholars use to describe African and African American people subjected to systems of justice and to consider how to adopt more humanizing analytical frameworks. As Federica Coppola writes, “criminal law is about people, and language creates perceptions and images.” Yet legal histories have often relied on morally contingent labels tied to alleged acts (e.g., murderer, rapist, burglar) and post-conviction status (criminal, inmate), without properly interrogating the implications of these terms. The consequences for not doing so are significant given historians’ influence in public discourse and policy debates. For example, Randolph Roth, author of American Homicide, was recently cited in a 2023 U.S. District Court case involving the Federal Firearms Licensees of Illinois and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. The roundtable therefore asks how historians might develop more precise, ethical, and historically grounded vocabularies that resist dehumanization and the reproduction of racializing discourses.

This roundtable brings together scholars whose work spans early modern slavery, legal history, and modern racialized violence to reflect on the history of race, criminal law, and the historian’s craft. Participants include Katharine Gerbner (University of Minnesota), author of Archival Irruptions, Arranne Rispoi (UCLA), an advanced PhD candidate studying slavery and the emergence of criminal intent in the British Atlantic; Brenda E. Stevenson (UCLA) distinguished professor and author of The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins; Nikki M. Taylor (Howard University), author of Brooding Over Bloody Revenge. Our roundtable will be chaired by Sally E. Hadden (Western Michigan University), author of Slave Patrols.

The session will open with brief introductory remarks by Sally Hadden, situating the roundtable’s themes and framing key historiographical and methodological stakes. This will be followed by moderated questions among participants (approximately 45 minutes). Guiding questions will include:

  1. How should historians conceptualize and write about "criminality" when the category itself is historically contingent and racially structured?
  2. What are the ethical implications of using legal archives that often reduce Black subjects to acts, charges, and convictions, and how might historians recover fuller human subjectivities?

The session will conclude with audience engagement (approximately 35 minutes), with time for questions and collective discussion.

See more of: AHA Sessions
<< Previous Session | Next Session >>