State v. Sanders and the Jim Crow Jury: New Vistas on the Legal History of Segregation and the Promise of Colloborative Undergraduate Research

John Wertheimer, a legal historian at Davidson College, along with several of his students, will be discussing their year-long research project on the 1915 South Carolina trial of James Sanders, a black man charged with murdering a white man, in which an African-American defense attorney successfully excluded a prospective juror on the grounds of racial bias. Wertheimer and company use Sanders as a point of departure to explore several under-studied dimensions of southern Jim Crow law pertaining to juries, including the question of how courts dealt with avowedly racist prospective jurors. We hope to see a mix of history majors, doctoral students, and faculty -- whether you have particular interests in the history of legal institutions, criminal justice, and race relations, or rather would like to learn about Wertheimer's extensive experience in structuring collaborative undergraduate seminars that produce publishable research.If you plan on attending, please RSVP to Carla Ivey at carla.ivey@duke.edu so that we can send you the collaborative paper that Professor Wertheimer and his students wrote last year, and also plan lunch accordingly.This event is co-sponsored by the Duke History Department, the Duke chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the Duke History Union, and the Triangle Legal History Seminar.