“THE SUPREME COURT PRECIPITATED THE AFFAIR”: A LYNCHING IN MARYLAND, JURY DISCRIMINATION, AND THE SUPREME COURT

Abstract

In 1885, the lynching of fifteen-year-old Howard Cooper a few miles outside Baltimore, Maryland, happened during a “Supreme Court moment.” The young man, indicted by an all-white grand jury, hoped to appeal his case to the Court, and it had the potential to advance jury discrimination safeguards and equal protection in a direction favorable to Black defendants, even as the national mood shifted in another direction. The United States Supreme Court decided five cases in 1880 and 1883 wherein Black defendants, with some success, contested state laws based on equal protection grounds, arguing that the laws either outright excluded Black men from serving on juries or were applied in a discriminatory manner with the same impact. Had the Court accepted Cooper’s case, it might have expanded upon the protections against jury discrimination articulated in Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), Ex parte Virginia (1880), Virginia v. Rives (1880), Neal v. Delaware, and Bush v. Kentucky (1883). The white mob lynched Howard Cooper while the local Black community raised funds for a Supreme Court appeal based on his indictment by an all-white grand jury accusing Cooper of raping a white woman. The distinctive aspects of the Maryland law in place in 1885 regarding jury qualification and selection were ripe for Supreme Court review. Howard Cooper’s attorneys cited the court’s rulings from 1880 and 1883 in a failed effort to dismiss his grand jury indictment before the Maryland Court of Appeals. They planned to use these favorable opinions in seeking a writ of appeal from the Supreme Court, and the Court likely would have taken the case. The local community, in fact, the entire United States, was well aware of the Court’s positive turn regarding Black defendants' challenges to all-white juries. Unfortunately for Howard Cooper, this awareness resulted in his death. This dissertation tells a story of jury discrimination, the denial of equal protection, and the potential for one case to broaden the equal protection afforded Black defendants at a critical time in history. The lynching of a fifteen-year-old Maryland child cut short the possibility of changing the composition of juries for Black defendants, if not permanently, at least for a time. The Supreme Court did not hear another challenge to the discriminatory exclusion of Black men from juries until 1896 and 1898, when a new Mississippi constitution and laws enacted to prevent Black men from voting also barred them from jury service. Although facially race-neutral, the laws were clearly “applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and unequal hand.” The Supreme Court approved Mississippi’s tactic for removing Black voters from the rolls, paving the way for the Jim Crow era.