James E. Coleman Jr., pulled back the curtain and displayed the hidden issues of race and crime in the South with students and faculty of N.C. State on Tuesday evening.

 The lecture was titled, “Juries, Race and Customs: All-White Juries and the Legacy of Slavery.” Coleman, the associate dean of Duke University Law, discussed the issue of all-white juries and the legacy of slavery.

Micah Khater, sophomore majoring in history and French, opened up the event introducing Coleman. She organized the event out of the interest that she gained from taking a southern history class her freshman year.

“The public talk is a good way to communicate and simplify the complexity of law and race in the south,” Khater said.

Coleman is also the recipient of the NAACP Pro-Bono Award. He was also involved with the Assistant General Counsel and N.C. Commission of Innocence. 

He spoke to the audience about the importance of knowing history in law and criminal law. He said that it is hard for society to understand the issues of our world because of a lack of knowledge about U.S. history. 

Coleman pointed out that some of the most admired      leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were proven racists.

The governing party was seen to be in the hand of the white race.  The governor was clear about what freedom did not mean by revoking privileges from freed slaves. 

There was a pre-civil war requirement that only jury men can be householders which excluded most of the African-American men. African Americans were excluded from juries up until the 1960s.  

African Americans were not seen as socially or politically equal with the white race. Therefore, the universal exclusion of African American jurors was accepted and endorsed.

African Americans being a part of the jury were considered a violation of the 14th amendment.  As time passed, two or more African-Americans may have been qualified to serve on juries.  

Prosecutors in the south gained sight of African Americans making an entrance into juries, and they often racially skewed the juries by using the peremptory challenge.

The peremptory challenge was the right given to prosecutors to challenge jurors for any reason.   This would often decrease the number of five eligible African-American jury members to one or two.

“Solutions to the problem of discrimination in law are to abolish the preemptory challenge and bring diversity into the jury,” Coleman said.

Coleman shared that the Racial Justice Act is in the process of being repealed, and Pat McCrory has signed for it.  

The North Carolina Racial Justice Act was introduced in 2009 to prevent the death penalty based on racial discrimination.

Winston-Salem has the largest number of people on death row. There also resides an African-American woman who excludes other African-Americans from jurors. Students and faculty groaned with surprise.  

“I think it is important for college students to know about the issue of race and law because they need to be aware and appreciative of their history in order to gain a better understanding.” said Coleman. 

The lecture was the second in a series, “When Innocence Constitutes the Crime: Race, Memory and Identity in the South,” hosted by the University Honors Program and the NCSU Department of History.

 The two programs also hosted a lecture, “The Shadow of Death: Race, Crime and the Execution of Corrine Sykes,” Monday evening.

Blair Kelley, associate history professor, lectured racism and crime and talked about her new project on the 1946 execution of Corrine Sykes, a black woman, in Withers Hall.

Corrine Sykes, the last woman executed in Pennsylvania, robbed and killed Freda Wodlinger, Sykes’ white employer, while on duty as her housemaid. Sykes had the mental capacity of an 8-year-old and was illiterate and worked for a bootlegger, who is said to be the one that told her to steal the jewelry.

Kelley looks into significance of race in the trial and the telling of Sykes’ life. 

“If it was difficult for white Americans to have much sympathy for black victims of crime, it was reflectively easy for them to imagine the worse when African-American were accused perpetrators,” Kelley said. “The case of Corrine Sykes was no different.”

Black housemaids were often wrongfully accused of murder during this time. Men of the family were returning from war and sometimes had psychological issues that were not known of or addressed at the time. These men would kill their wives and get away with because the black domestic workers were blamed instead. 

“Southern history was over-simplified and we were contradicted all of our lives,” Khater said.

Kelley also stressed this during the discussion.

“I am always arguing that there is no such thing as southern race relations and a southern way of understanding race,” Kelley said. “I am arguing that there is an American way.”  

Khater also wanted an understanding that events that happened in the mid-20th century still affect now.

The discussion provided a stepping-stone for Kelley on the direction of her book project.  At the end, she opened up to questions.