“It continues to frustrate me that so many people want to give Ruffin a pass: He was ‘a man of his times,’ powerless against the law…. I believe we need to own [his choice] in order to confront hard questions about how a single person in power can so abuse that power.” — Sally Greene
For thinking about power of those who held slaves in antebellum America, we last looked at the 1829 case of State v. Mann. There, Justice Thomas Ruffin used his post at the top of the state’s high court to authorize the unbridled abuse of enslaved people, including that inflicted on a woman we know as Lydia, who was shot in the back while fleeing her enslaver. Ruffin’s court allowed Mann to go free and unpunished.
Writer Barry Yeoman, for The Assembly, recently recounted the latest chapter in the story of Lydia and State v. Mann on the occasion of North Carolina’s unveiling of a historical marker. It not only recalls the case, it makes plain how the state’s high court and its chief justice used their power to uphold the worst abuses of the slave holding regime, leaving people like Lydia without legal recourse.
Baltimore’s Hard History practitioners will recognize how the twists-and-turns of researcher Sally Greene’s journey relied on a critical community that defied conventional boundaries. She started with discussions within her church community, and then turned to research that netted an unexpected and decisive find, and then set out to write new scholarship. Her 2009 article “State v. Mann Exhumed” in the North Carolina Law Review is a model for how a keen sense of the existing scholarship, dogged archival work, and a willingness to rethinking old wisdom can transform.
Greene’s findings changed minds and fueled a rethinking of Ruffin’s legacy. She joined others in an advocate’s stance, driving a decision first to remove Ruffin’s statue from the state Court of Appeals Building and then to replace his large portrait with a smaller likeness. Greene’s training was in law and literature, not history, a reminder that behind the scenes, the work of hard histories can demand that we develop new skills and enter into new communities of expertise.
Her ideas were on paper, but Greene’s work of reckoning with State v. Mann was not complete: While Ruffin’s story had been rewritten, Lydia’s story was waiting to be fully brought into the light of day. Enter the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee, where deliberations approved a new marker, unveiled in September 2023:
STATE v. MANN
N.C. Supreme Court, 1830, reinforced power of slaveholding regime by overturning conviction of Mann (lived nearby) for shooting Lydia, enslaved.
Sally Greene, even as Barry Yeoman’s story featured her journey, is the first to credit the many people whose experience, ideas, and commitments brought about a reckoning with State v. Mann, foremost among them the descendants of enslaved people who today are North Carolina’s citizens, activists, and public leaders. Critical were figures such as the Honorable Cheri Beasley, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court (2019-2020,) James E. Williams, Jr., Chair of the North Carolina Commission on Racial & Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System, and the Poet Laureate of North Carolina, Jaki Shelton Green, whose poem closed the marker unveiling ceremony:
Oh Lydia, if they could have they would have strangled you inside the belly of your mama, but angels were watching in the nettle briars, the thorn roses, the black soil beneath your feet, angels were watching when you became commodity, angels were watching as you prayed to a God that demanded resistance.
Thank you to Sally Greene for sharing this story with us at Hard Histories. Next time closer to home, how researchers at Johns Hopkins are tackling the story of those enslaved by Mr. Hopkins.
— MSJ