An Unacknowledged Constitutional Crisis: United States v. Shipp II (1909)

Leslie F. Goldstein

According to my dictionary, one type of “crisis” is “[a]n unstable condition in political . . . affairs in which an abrupt or decisive change is impending.” A rarely acknowledged but nonetheless decisive change in the United States Supreme Court’s treatment of the U.S. Constitution, as that document applied to black Americans, began in 1911. This Essay argues that the constitutional reset, so to speak, was triggered by a group of incidents amounting to critical proportions that occurred between 1900 and 1910. Two crisis-inducing events transpired in that decade: (1) a new style of anti-black race riots developed in the northern United States and spread to the South; and (2) the Supreme Court, for the only time to date, tried a criminal case on original jurisdiction.