Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsiblity: White v. Crook
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
Images
Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
The sex discrimination claim is treated as a side issue in histories told from a racial equality perspective, while the race discrimination claim is treated as a side issue in the feminist legal histories.
The race and sex discrimination claims ended up side-by-side for the first time in a case that arose out of the murder of Jonathan Daniels in the Deep South. Tom Coleman, a middle-aged white man and volunteer deputy sheriff shot and killed white civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels in 1965. A born-and-bred white southern civil rights lawyer Charles Morgan knew that an all-white, all-male jury would be almost certain to acquit Coleman.
Morgan saw an opportunity to use the near certainty of an unfair prosecution and stacked jury in the Coleman case to challenge in federal court Alabama’s deeply embedded patterns of jury discrimination through a civil suit.
Morgan traveled to Alabama and filed suit in federal court on behalf of five African-American would-be jurors — Gardenia White, Lillian S. McGill, Jesse W. Favor, Willie May Strickland, and John Hulett, as well as Reverend Morris, and Jonathan Daniels’ mother. He filed the case against Bruce Crook, Alabama’s white jury commissioner, his fellow white jury commissioners, and other Lowndes County officials. Morgan threw the lawsuit together in five days, selecting Gardenia White (a woman of color) as lead plaintiff.
The brief argued that sex was an irrational and arbitrary legislative classification for the purposes of jury service, and that, as such, it violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Partially in response to this phenomenon, Professor Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s to demonstrate the tendency “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” in both law and society
Sources
Chiapetti, Caroline. Winning the Battle but Losing the War: The Birth and Death of Intersecting Notions of Race and Sex Discrimination in White v. Crook, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. July 10th 2017. Accessed July 25th 2020. https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/07/Chiappetti.pdf.