A Black Detective, an 1870 Trial and a What If Michael A. Rosss Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case nytimes/2014/10/14/books/michael-a-rosss-great-new-orleans-kidnapping-case.html?ref=arts&_r=0 By JENNIFER SCHUESSLEROCT. 13, 2014 A depiction of a black policeman addressing a crowd during Reconstruction.CreditLaRC/Tulane University Michael A. Ross, the author of a well-regardedstudy of the Supreme Court during the Civil War, thought of himself as a “meat and potatoes” legal historian. But a decade ago in a New Orleans archive, something a bit spicier caught his eye: an 1870 newspaper article describing the “voodoo abduction” of a white toddler by two mysterious black women. “I thought to myself, ‘This can’t possibly be true,’ ” Mr. Ross recalled recently by telephone. The voodoo angle turned out to be hysterical rumor. But as he read on, Mr. Ross, now a professor at the University of Maryland, discovered an all-but-forgotten story of a sensational investigation and trial that gripped New Orleans and the national press for almost seven months. “There were so many other twists and turns that I was hooked,” he said. Those twists, recounted by Mr. Ross in “The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era,”published this week by Oxford University Press, include psychic consultations, a shadowy “House of Secret Obstetrics” and the derring-do of a crack Afro-Creole police detective versed in the latest “French” techniques — seemingly the first black detective in the United States to take part in a case that received national attention, Mr. Ross says. Photo Michael A. Ross, author of “The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case,” at home in Hyattsville, Md. CreditDrew Angerer for The New York Times The story also offers something else that was all but unheard-of in pre-Civil Rights-era trials involving African-Americans accused of crimes against whites: genuine suspense about the outcome. Alfred L. Brophy, a historian at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said in an interview that at virtually any other moment, such a case would almost certainly have ended in a “legalized lynching.” “Ross has unearthed an important story,” Mr. Brophy said. “Historians are going to argue about its broader significance for a long time.” Beyond academia, Mr. Ross said he hoped his whodunit would add complexity to the public understanding of Reconstruction, restoring a sense of contingency to a period that is too often read as leading inexorably to Jim Crow. “It was not inevitable that Reconstruction was going to fail,” Mr. Ross said. “There was a moment of real possibility.” That moment was certainly a fraught one. When Mollie Digby, the 17-month-old daughter of Irish immigrants, was reported to have been kidnapped by two African-American women on June 9, 1870, the case immediately became enmeshed in broader social and political tensions. To the white press, it was more proof that Louisiana was descending into racial chaos under Henry Clay Warmoth, the Illinois-born radical Republican governor. But to the government, it was a chance to prove that a newly integrated and professionalized police force — 28 percent of New Orleans’s officers were African-American — would aggressively investigate crimes allegedly committed by blacks. Continue reading the main story FROM THE ARCHIVE | AUGUST 15, 1870 The Lost Found The events at the heart of The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case gathered national news attention in 1870. Heres one example of how it was reported on in The Times. The New York Times See full article in TimesMachine The police chief put his top black detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, on the case. Jourdain, the son of a white Creole father and free black mother, had already left a historical footprint. In 1864 he was among some 1,000 Afro-Creoles who signed a petition asking Lincoln to extend the vote to the free blacks of Louisiana. In 1867 he testified before a Congressional committee about bloody riots of the previous year, when officers from New Orleans’s police force, then still all-white, helped a mob attack a biracial state convention. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Jourdain, Mr. Ross writes, had studied investigative techniques originating in France, including deductive reasoning and the use of disguises, which he adopted during the Digby investigation. He interacted easily with whites involved in the case, including Thomas Digby, Mollie’s father, who repeatedly welcomed him into the family home, Mr. Ross relates. “We think of the Irish and African-Americans as being at one another’s throats, and yet here the interactions were all quite respectful,” the historian said. After a child who seemed to be Mollie turned up in a covert maternity hospital for unwed mothers, Ellen Follin, an Afro-Creole woman who ran the hospital in her home, was arrested and put on trial with her sister. The anti-Reconstruction papers were filled with inflammatory speculation about the two beautiful and mysterious “child stealers,” who maintained that the baby had been left there by a stranger. But in the courtroom, Mr. Ross writes, due process prevailed through a parade of bizarre revelations and odd characters. To Mr. Ross, the orderly trial — and the peace that was maintained in New Orleans after the racially mixed jury handed down an acquittal — suggest that the post-Civil War experiment in interracial democracy was not necessarily doomed to fail. It is an interpretation shared by some other scholars. “This was all happening at a time in which people really did think they could bring about a new day in race relations,” said Douglas R. Egerton, author of “The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era,” published in January. “They weren’t naïve to think Reconstruction had brought lasting, permanent change.” But not all admirers of Mr. Ross’s book are persuaded by his broader argument. Mr. Brophy said that New Orleans, with its large mixed-race population and long history of ties between white and black Creoles, was different from most of the South. Reconstruction did include real moments of successful political and social integration, “but whether they could have survived the power and ugliness of race hatred, I’m skeptical,” Mr. Brophy said. The integrated institutions that supported the kidnapping trial did not last long in New Orleans. In 1874 the Crescent City White League, a reactionary paramilitary force, briefly overthrew the state government before federal troops moved in and restored it. In 1876 white Democrats gained control of the state government and “redeemed” Louisiana, as they put it; an all-white police force was restored the next year, followed eventually by all-white juries. “It would be almost 100 years before black defendants in the South would be guaranteed the same due process” that the accused kidnappers received, Mr. Ross writes. Jourdain disappeared from history entirely. His death in 1888 received only a brief mention in local newspapers, with no reference to his career on the police force or in the Legislature, where he served from 1874 to 1876. When the trial was remembered, it was distorted in telling ways. After the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, the New Orleans case was revisited in some newspapers, with the acquittal transformed into a conviction and no mention of a black detective. An unpublished Digby family memoir from the 1930s had the investigation led not by an Afro-Creole detective but by a team of white sleuths sometimes disguised in blackface. “By 1930s Reconstruction was so forgotten no one could even believe there had been black police,” Mr. Ross said. In an afterword, he details the help he got from Digby, Jourdain and Follin descendants, some of whom will meet for the first time this week at events for the book in New Orleans. But Mr. Ross does not offer a solution to the mystery of just who did kidnap Mollie, and why. “I wish it could’ve all been wrapped up neatly,” he said. “But what you can say is that this is a case where the justice system worked, because there was doubt.”
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 17:35:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015