“I Could Not Come in Unless over their Dead Bodies”: Dignitary Offenses

Abstract

Scott gives us an expansive and critically important way of thinking about the ways in which former slaves and formerly free black people like Ransier, Bowers, Holmes, and the men and women of Front Street Church, understood the meaning of freedom and confronted the “all de day and every day” dignitary offenses they faced in the courts, on sidewalks, on public conveyances, in public places of amusement and houses of worship, and in their daily work and family lives. Her account of the response of cosmopolitan activists and lawmakers In New Orleans has tremendous implications for the struggle elsewhere. The concept of “public rights” that activists in Louisiana located in a “claim to respect in the activities of a shared and social ‘common life,’” excited the cause throughout the South.