Well, okay. Well, thank you very much again. And thank again. Its an honor to be the kennedy lecture. And here. Is well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of all of us involved with Andrew Jackson hermitage, its my pleasure to welcome you, to our seventh president home. Im Howard Kittell president and ceo of the Andrew Jackson foundation. Today, there are few americans who are not in some way grappling with our nations history of slavery, how it shaped our countrys formation from the colonial era up to the present and how it impacts our lives today, however, its virtually impossible to come to grips with that topic of slavery in america without understanding the laws that both permitted and shaped the practice. Just as we see elements of ourselves in our ancestors. So our legal, economic and social system are rooted in the laws that surround it too, surrounded slavery. And fostered it. Professor sharfstein is the at worksafe. Mr. Page here. Apologies tonight. We are honored to have dr. Daniel sharfstein as our speaker. He will lead us on an explanation of the laws that were shaped by and fostered by racial inequality in america. Professor sharfstein is the and martha langston, chair of law and professor of history at Vanderbilt University. There, dr. Sharpstein teaches american legal history property and federal indian law is the author of two books, thunder in the mountains. Chief joseph oliver, otis howard and the nez perce war and the invisible line a secret history of race in america. Along with numerous articles and papers. Dr. Sharpstein is a research and writing on the legal history of race, citizenship and equality in the United States has received numerous awards, including the j. Anthony lucas book prize for narrative nonfiction, a National Endowment for the humanities fellowship and a guggenheim fellowship. He received his j. D. From the Yale Law School and his a. B. From harvard college. Once dr. Sharpstein concludes his comments. There will be time for your questions and his answers. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please step up to the mic and speak into. But please dont touch it. Ive been advised by many people and also, please put your cell phones on silence. So now please join with me in giving dr. Sharpstein a warm welcome on this cold night. Thank you so much. Thank you, howard. And thank you all. You know, we hardy few coming out on this cold night. Im delighted to be here at at the hermitage. Its a place that contains multitudes and really in my teaching of federal indian law. And when i teach classes on slavery in nashville, its really this this haunting monument for for me and for my students. I am very grateful to jesse lieb for for everything that she did to make this evening possible. And also to howard cattell. I teach at Vanderbilt Law School and i had the occasion to do some research in the papers of a prominent alum named cecil sims sims, graduated first in the vanderbilt class of 1914. He founded nashvilles most prominent, powerful law firm, bass berry and sims. He advised governors through the middle decades of the 20th century. He was a member of just about every board you could serve on in nashville. He was he was the kind of guy who would receive dozens of fruitcakes from his legion of admirers every every christmas. And he often spoke to third year law students at vanderbilt just before their graduate mission. Hed like to talk about a lawyer should aspire to to be, in his words, architects in public affairs. And when i read that, it immediately rang a bell for me. Its not unlike something that the legendary civil rights lawyer, Charles Hamilton houston, used to tell his students at Howard Law School that they should think of themselves as, in houstons phrase, social engineers working the levers of power and policy and and government and the law design in better worlds. The difference is that cecil sims was no civil rights lawyer among the many other things that he was doing, he spent the better part of two decades designing ways Southern States and School Districts to resist and to desegregate nation. So in the late 1940s, when the Supreme Court struck down segregated public graduate education, sims parlayed his seat on meharry medical board of trustees to propose what became known as the meharry plan by which the Southern States would purchase meharry to turn it into a separate but equal regional Public Medical School and then send all black medical applicants to usc and u. T. And georgia, etc. To meharry. The plan as he drafted it never mentioned a thing about race. He got the southern governors approval, but the plan died in part because of opposition from harris faculty, students and alumni. That experience stuck with simms. So several years later, after brown versus board of education was decided, simms went around the south, telling School Administrators and anyone else who would listen that massive resistance was unnecessary surgery. In his view, brown versus board of education didnt require much beyond colorblindness in official policy, and he knew that colorblind policy would barely change the status quo. Simms was a guiding force, became behind what became known as the nashville plan, which nominally desegregate it in one grade a year, starting with kindergarten in 1956 and extending to 12th grade by 1968. And because parents could easily request transfers for their children, the schools remained almost entirely segregated throughout that decade. Plus also at the same time, simms was a major behind the merger of nashville and davidson county, the creation of Metro Government almost, you know, just a little more than 60 years ago was motivated by all kinds of policy rationales. But one thing it did was it functioned to dilute the black vote in. From 40 to 20 . The campaign and favor of merger flagged the prospect of nashville having a black mayor someday unless the merger went through and the merger put nashvilles black community in the back seat through decades of city and county policymaking. So simms knew that the law could create rules and governing designs that would outlive overtly racist policy inequality can operate at levels that are unseen and, axiomatic, almost natural. But its not natural. Its built. Its infrastructural. So sims designed structures, right . He pushed for a gradual change. She pushed for lots of discretionary transfers, colorblind neutrality, a shift to suburban power. And these structures survive. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which basically spelled the end of overtly jim legislation and sims positions even came to define the middle ground. He was the picture of moderation when compared to cruder modes of passive resistance. No, that the end goals were the same with sims designs. There was no need for racists in order for racism to persist. Sims had many models and antics. Students for this kind of infrastructural lawyering have been asked tonight to talk about law and racial inequality in the United States. And i want to devote my remarks to what we could call legal infrastructures of inequality. I say interesting cultures, plural, because racial inequality is rooted in multiple, complex sources of laws. When i was thinking about what to talk about today, i had a lot of options. We could talk about criminal law, sentencing disparities, laws that give tremendous amounts of discretion to police and prosecutors and judges and wind up being applied unequally. Legal doctrines like qualified immunity that that shield police and prosecutors neutral about fines and court fees that shackle poor defendants in debt and inexorably lead to additional jail time and even more debt. We could talk about other topics entirely. Could talk about access to Civil Justice and the procedural hurdles that that courts have imposed for bringing lawsuits relating to civil rights and, employment discrimination, environmental justice, consumer justice, more requirements about who has standing to sue what kinds of information needs to be included in a complaint. All of these neutral or innocuous, often invisible rules. Yet theyre rules that increase the cost of bringing lawsuits and can put the Civil Justice system out of reach of poor people. We could talk about bankruptcy law, right. And how regulate the relationship between debtors and creditors and how Vulnerable People get trapped in debt and then find it incredibly difficult to navigate a system thats supposed to afford them relief and a fresh start. So many these Vulnerable People are sick people people who have Health Crises and our Racial Health disparity is actually deep in our wealth. Despair. These we could talk about public benefits, law commonly known as poverty law, which over the course of the pandemic revealed to millions of americans is what the chronically poor have had to live with. Right. Welfare, unemployment systems that are incompetent by design. Right. Impossible to apply to, impossible to wring benefits of. We could talk about elections law reduced felon disenfranchisement, all kinds of seemingly neutral rules that since the dawn of the jim crow era have functioned in jim crow era explore to screen out black Voters Registration requirements id laws. The the maintenance meaning the periodic purging of voter rolls rolls redistricting rules restricting early voting state legislatures controlling the appointments of county registrars and local election commissioners so that the statewide wide political majority can can control how cities vote that thats those are plays from a very old playbook and these are all neutral rules but when voting becomes harder poor people are the ones screened out of the electorate. We could talk about corporations law, how the courts override emphasis on maximizing value has affected workers and communities. You could talk about Immigration Law and how we regulate the border. We talk about federal indian law, the split of power among, federal, state and tribal authorities. And its a split thats mostly done through very dry and technical jurisdictional rules. But across the 19th century and into the 20th century, these rules plundering tribal land holding manufactured generations of poverty and among other things, have exacerbated an epidemic. Violence against indigenous women. Fortunately, all of us i dont have all day to discuss the many inequalities produced by law. So in the time that we have together, ill focus on one thing thats at the heart of my teaching property. Property is a big deal here in nashville. Its its big civil rights issue as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable. Some of you may noticed and every neighborhood gentrify at once. Every neighborhood in the whole city. A lot of inequality is bound up in issues of property and the laws that govern it. And in my discussion, i think what ill do is ill start in the present and then ill move a little bit back in time and, then move a little bit back further. And my hope is that we can reveal some structures that are not visible to us. So property law at root is the body of law that determines who owns what. And what it means to own something. Its intimately connected to individual dreams and individual aspirations, but its also about how communities form and are sustained, how get along and what happens when they dont get along. And whether and in what circles stances the government can enact that may affect how people use and value their property. Property rights are a core component of our democracy. Thomas jefferson envisioned republic of small freehold landowners as an the ideal of an independent and responsive polity in so many ways. Property sets groundwork for who belongs and who doesnt, who has a voice and who doesnt. Who gets to prosper . Whose children get to prosper . And who doesnt . Property laws at the root of who gets to live in a neighborhood, tall trees and clean thats cooler. In the summer, right . And who lives in a sweltering, treeless neighborhood surrounded by smoke spewing factories and crisscrossed oil and Gas Pipelines . Our racial gap is in part a reflection of who owns property and who does not. According to a recent Brookings Institution report, black homeownership rates are right around 45 , and white homeownership is above 75 . We dont have to look that far back to explain this, 30 differential. Housing remains profoundly segregated in 2023, which means the the. The baseline for for schools, School Districts is profoundly segregated. Right. Without aggressive Government Intervention and thats become less and less possible thanks to the Supreme Court. Right. Which which has demanded colorblindness in public School Districts. Continuing housing makes it easier for black homeowners to be systematically over assessed property tax. So the scholar Bernadette Atuahene has done revelatory work on overtaxation. Detroit just made all the worse aggressive foreclosure practices by wayne county and appeals process that are all but impossible to navigate. Housing segregation made it really easy for banks and Mortgage Brokers to steer black homeowners to subprime mortgages in the years leading up to 2008. And housing segregation means that when black people sell their homes, realtors systems underestimate their worth something that made National Headlines this past fall when two wonderful Johns Hopkins professors, Nathan Connolly and shani mott got a lowball appraisal on their home that affected their ability to refinance. When Interest Rates were at rock bottom during the pandemic. When connolly and mott took down all of their family photos and a white colleague show another appraiser around the house the value of their house miraculous only went from 472000 to 750000. Housing has made it harder. Achieve the American Dream. And for those who do manage to buy in housing segregation makes the American Dream worth less. And ive i have to mention one more thing over the last hundred years, black rural Land Ownership has declined about 90 , in large part because black landowners have seldom had. And when they die, their land has been split among their heirs in an ownership arrangement known as a tenancy in common legal rules relating to tenancy as in common allow anyone with an ownership interest to petition for a Court Ordered sale of the property. So over the course of generations, Land Ownership may be split. 50 or 100 different ways. And all it takes is for one person, maybe thousands of miles away, to ask to cash out. All it takes is for for a developer to find one of those people, make a deal with them, to cash out and when that happens, the property gets sold. When Property Ownership is unstable in that way, you cant get a home equity loan, fix it up. So the homes in the land from lack of investment in their values are depressed and when a court orders a sale, thats not the same thing as an open market sale. Time to get the highest price. So instead, theyre often very few and low bids that that wind up getting accepted. So these land dont help black owners generate wealth and their sales amount to very little. Its a problem known as heirs property. A Boston University professor, thomas mitchell, has done some powerful exploration of this and its a problem that is prevalent in rural areas. But we certainly see situations in places like north nashville where parents built the house. Now its owned by the kids. One may live in the house, but the and the rest may be relieved that someones there to take care of the upkeep. And thats all. Well, good until real estate values skyrocket like they did for nashville and you reach a threshold where each sibling can come away with a big, fat round number. Its very easy for nonresident siblings to force a sale. So these invisible rules about co tenancies are engines for for land loss and gentrification. So how do we get to this frankly grim present . Who created the ground rules or what created the ground rules . You go a little farther back into the 20th century and we can root segregation in racially restrictive housing and mortgage discrimination. So before the 20th century, housing in southern cities, for example, was not exactly segregated in way that would be recognizable to us. So block by black and white families lived proximity. You look at maps of places like washington, d. C. Or even birmingham, alabama and you might find in any given block, white families living along the street while black families lived along the alleys that that ran through the center of the blocks might not exactly together, but not segregated. New suburbs and. Progressive era social policy created segregated neighborhoods. In the decades spanning the of the 19th and the start of the 20th century and while the Supreme Court struck down a world war one era louisville ordinance that kind of resembled african apartheid, specifying who could live where a builders and developers turned to racially restrictive covenants, private covenants to control who could buy into a neighborhood and after years of skepticism about covenants. Courts in 20th century came to accept them as purely private agreements outside the scope of legal review. So thats a key legal move, a neutral move that