{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.015681544028950542, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0048250904704463205, 'mean_word_length': 5.33587786259542, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Race and Law from the Bottom Up in the Nineteenth-Century South: A Review Essay

These four books examine civil cases involving African Americans in the South between the early nineteenth century and 1950. A central theme unites them:What should historians make of courtroom victories by African American civil parties in the nineteenth-century South? African Americans—slave or free—had the deck stacked against them when they entered the courtroom in this period, especially in southern states. Courts were an improbable source of justice for African Americans in a system of white social and political domination, and criminal law was a key instrument of African American oppression. Courts are rightly remembered as sites that legitimated violence against African American individuals and the entire black population. And yet