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The Drexel Furniture Company was established on November 10, 1903 in Drexel, North Carolina. B

By 1968, after several acquisitions, the company became known as the Drexel Heritage Furnishings, Inc. It is still known as that today.

Here is a photograph form 1906 of the Drexel Furniture Company in  Drexel, North Carolina that employed child laborers.

The company’s first plant burned in 1906.  The plant pictured was built in two weeks after the fire and was identical to the first one. The plant consisted of two buildings. In 1917, the building got electricity.  An addition was added in 1918.

The lecture notes are here and the live chat is here.

The lecture notes are here. The live chat is here.

Equal Protection and Segregation

• Citizenship Clause (768-771).
• Dred Scott v. Sandford (771-794).
• Dred Scott notes (794-800).
• Segregation Cases (1337).
• Railroad Company v. Brown (1337-1339).
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1339-1346).

Dred Sott v. Sandford

This is Chief Justice Roger Brooks Taney, the author of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

This is Dred Scott.

This is a cover sheet by the Supreme Court, summarizing the lower court disposition from Missouri, filed on December 30, 1854.

This is the Court’s judgment in Dred Scott, dated March 7, 1857, and seems to have been signed by Chief Justice Taney.

The Dred Scott decision found unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which designated all new states north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes (except Missouri) to be free states.

This map illustrates the free and slaves states in America.

Plessy v. Ferguson

We actually do not have any confirmed photographs of Homer Plessy (there are some floating on the internet, but we aren’t sure if they are really him). Here is his grave.

This is  Adolph Plessy’s Birth Certificate from Orleans Parish, from 1863.

This is Judge John J. Ferguson.

This is an obituary for Judge Ferguson. It makes no reference of his role in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Here is a newspaper account from the Times Pacayune, June 9, 1892, with the headline, ” snuff-colored descendant of Ham kicks agains the ‘Jim Crow’ law.”

Yesterday afternoon at 4:15 o’clock private detecting C.C. Cain arrested from the East Louisiana [Homer] Adolph Plessy, a light mulatto, and locked him up in the Fifth Precinct station on a charge of violating section 2o of act 111 of the statute of 1890 relative to separate coaches. Detective Cain made an affidavit this morning against Plessey [sic] in the Second Recorder’s Court.

Capt. Cain, speaking of the circumstances of the arrest, stated that he and the conductor had ordered both the man from the white coach into the one set apart for colored people.  The negro refused to leave the coach, saying that he had bought his ticket and was going to ride to Covington.

Capt. Cain here told him he would either have to retire to the other coach or go to jail; to which the negro responded that he would sooner go to jail than leave the car, and he was accordingly arrested.

Previous to the arrest the conductor asked, “Are you are a colored man!”” “Yes,” was the answer. “Then,” said the conductor,” you will have to retire to the colored car.” The man refusing, Capt. Cain was invoked, and entering the car, he said to Plessy, “If you are colored you should go into the car set apart for your race. The law is plain and must be obeyed.”

The set upon which the affidavit is based is known as the “Jim Crow Car” bill, and in substance as follows.

“An act to promote the comfort of passengers on railway trains,” requiring all railway companies carrying passengers on their trains in this State to provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races by providing separate coaches or compartments so as to secure separate accommodations, defining the duties of the offers of such railways, directing them to assign passengers to the coaches or compartments set aside for the use of the race to which such passengers belong, authorizing them to refuse to carry on their trains such passengers as may refuse to occupy the coaches or compartments to which he or she is assigned; to exonerate such railways company from blame or damage that might proceed from such refusal; to prescribe penalties for all violators of this act.”

On the 25th of May last, the Supreme Court rendered an opinion in a suit entitled “State of Louisiana Ex Rel W.C. Abbott v. A.W. Hicks, Judge et al, construed the law as not applying to interstate passengers and applying only to domestic passengers.

Plessy was arraigned before Judge Moulin this morning. He was represented by J.C. Walker, Esq. who waived examination on the part of his client, and the judge committed Plessy to the Criminal District Court under a bond of $500, which was signed and Plessy released.

Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railroad Co. train at Press and Royal streets.

Here is a photograph of the nearby West End station.

This is the order noting that Plessy’s counsel waved examination, and he was held on $500 bond. As the article suggests, Plessy posted bond, and was released.


Here is an affidavit Plessy signed.

Judge Ferguson found that Louisiana could regulate railroad companies if they only operated in state boundaries. Plessy was ordered to pay a $300 fine.

Albion Tourgee´ represented Homer Plessy before the Supreme Court. He asked the Justices to imagine if they were black.

Here is the Supreme Court’s order affirming the decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court, noting the dissent of Justice Harlan.

And in a story almost too good to be true, descendants of Homer Plessy and John Ferguson have started a non-profit known as the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation. Here are Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson. I’ve spoken on the phone to Keith Plessy.

Here is Plessy’s grand-nephew, Keith Plessy, standing at the site where his ancestor was arrested, Press and Royal streets.

The intersection of predictive analytics and policing stands to drastically reshape how the police investigate crimes, and perhaps, anticipate crimes. A new article in the Pennsylvania Law Review, titled “Big Data and Predictive Reasonable Suspicion” addresses just this issue. Here is the abstract:

The Fourth Amendment requires “reasonable suspicion” to seize a suspect. As a general matter, the suspicion derives from information a police officer observes or knows. It is individualized to a particular person at a particular place. Most reasonable suspicion cases involve police confronting unknown suspects engaged in observable suspicious activities. Essentially, the reasonable suspicion doctrine is based on “small data” – discrete facts involving limited information and little knowledge about the suspect.

But what if this small data is replaced by “big data”? What if police can “know” about the suspect through new networked information sources? Or, what if predictive analytics can forecast who will be the likely troublemakers in a community? The rise of big data technology offers a challenge to the traditional paradigm of Fourth Amendment law. Now, with little effort, most unknown suspects can be “known,” as a web of information can identify and provide extensive personal data about a suspect independent of the officer’s observations. New data sources including law enforcement databases, third party information sources (phone records, rental records, GPS data, video surveillance data, etc.), and predictive analytics, combined with biometric or facial recognition software, means that information about that suspect can be known in a few data searches. At some point, the data (independent of the observation) may become sufficiently individualized and predictive to justify the seizure of a suspect. The question this article poses is can a Fourth Amendment stop be predicated on the aggregation of specific, individualized, but otherwise non-criminal factors?

This article traces the consequences in the shift from a “small data” reasonable suspicion doctrine, focused on specific, observable actions of unknown suspects, to the “big data” reality of an interconnected information rich world of known suspects. With more targeted information, police officers on the streets will have a stronger predictive sense about the likelihood that they are observing criminal activity. This evolution, however, only hints at the promise of big data policing. The next phase will be using existing predictive analytics to target suspects without any actual observation of criminal activity, merely relying on the accumulation of various data points. Unknown suspects will become known, not because of who they are but because of the data they left behind. Using pattern matching techniques through networked databases, individuals will be targeted out of the vast flow of informational data. This new reality subverts reasonable suspicion from being a source of protection against unreasonable stops, to a means of justifying those same stops.

My previous posts on predictive policing are here, here, here, and here.

This is actually a real book!

As opposed to the “The Right to Bear Arms” (from Family Guy).