April 10, 2013 — Rebecca Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and professor of law at the University of Michigan, specializes in the study of post-emancipation societies in the Atlantic world, and has written extensively regarding struggles about what it means to be a citizen and about who gets to be part of a community of citizens.
Her most recent book, co-authored with Jean M. Hébrard, is “Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation.”
This semester, she is a visiting professor at Yale University. Last month, Remapping Debate had the opportunity to interview Professor Scott in New Haven over the course of about two hours. We publish below and on the pages that follow extended excerpts from that interview.
Section one of the 14th Amendment states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” It then goes on to say that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
I noted to Professor Scott that “it sure sounds like there are privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” What are they?
Professor Scott has written extensively about Louisiana during Reconstruction. She has observed that the prevailing view at that time was that citizenship entailed more than political rights; it entailed what were dubbed “public rights.” This section of the interview picks up on that theme. What was the understanding of “public rights”?
Plessy v. Ferguson was the 1896 Supreme Court decision that most deeply embedded the fallacious “separate but equal” doctrine into U.S. jurisprudence, and that reflected and facilitated the strength of segregationists in American society. This section of the interview begins with a discussion of the curious fact that much of the historical writing on Plessy has remained caught within the conceptual framework that guided the now-discredited Plessy majority.
This last excerpt from the interview is focused on the “boundaries of citizenship.” Early on in this section, Professor Scott makes reference to Édouard Tinchant. It is Tinchant — a participant in the drafting of Lousiana’s Reconstruction-era constitution — whose family history is traced in “Freedom Papers” as a way to illuminate interwined societal struggles over race, rights, and citizenship.