African Americans have historically used the court system to pursue equal rights. The cases span the history of the United States, beginning well before the Civil Rights Era.
The National Archives Catalog includes cases that famously went to the Supreme Court, such as Scott v. Sandford in 1857 (the Dred Scott case), Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
These landmark cases and other less well-known cases illustrate how the judiciary has long been a central battleground in the fight for civil rights.
There are many other civil rights-related cases within the United States District and Circuit Courts that are held by the National Archives. They may not all have the same fame (or infamy) as some of the more frequently cited cases, but these examples highlight how Black activists have used the court systems to fight against racist laws and policies in the United States.
There is often a through-line between these court records, which exemplifies how progress is not always linear. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
These cases can also show how the well-studied cases fit into a larger picture of that arc.
Dred Scott & Henrietta Wood
The 1857 Dred Scott Decision from the Supreme Court declared that people of African descent were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts.
Not quite 15 years later, in 1871, a formerly enslaved woman named Henrietta Wood filed a civil lawsuit for reparations and won.
Wood was living as a free woman in Cincinnati in 1853 when Zeb Ward, in collusion with Wood’s former enslavers, kidnapped her and brought her to Kentucky.
As the case states, “the plaintiff has been deprived of her time and the value of her labor for the space of Fifteen years and compelled to work for the said defendant… that she has been reduced to slavery and treated as a slave all that time and subjected to great hardships, abuse and oppression, and by reason of said wrongful removal to the state of Mississippi and Texas, and her said duress and imprisonment there, she was prevented from returning to her home in Cincinnati until the month of April in the year eighteen Hundred and Sixty-seven.”
It was a lengthy case, but in April 1878 the jury rendered a verdict in favor of Wood and awarded her $2,500 in damages.
You can see the complete case in the National Archives Catalog: Henrietta Wood vs. Zeb Ward.
You can read more about Dred Scott v. Sandford in DocsTeach.
Brown v. Board & Eva Gazaway
In 1881, seventy-seven years before Oliver Brown sued the Board of Education in Topeka, a father in Springfield, Ohio attempted to use the court to force the integration of Springfield public schools.
John W. Gazaway, who was a Reverend in Springfield, sued Superintendent William White on behalf of his eight year old daughter Eva for her to be allowed to attend the all white Shaffer Street public school, which was much closer to where they lived than any of the schools designated for Black children.
As in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the Gazaway’s suit was a deliberate effort by activists to end segregation. In November 1882 a jury ruled in favor of the Superintendent, and Springfield schools remained segregated.
You can see the case from the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati: Eva V. Gazaway by John W. Gazaway, her next friend vs. William J. White.
This and other cases, such as James H. Vines et al. v. James Cruse et al, exemplify how the successes of the Civil Rights Movement were built on decades of activist work.
And the decision in Brown v. Board of Ed did not mark the end of this work, as shown in cases such as James William Webb, Jr. et al. v. The Board of Education of the City of Chicago and Benjamin Willis, which sought to end segregation in the Chicago Public School system in the 1960s.
These are just a few cases, but many more civil rights cases exist in the National Archives Catalog with even more that have not yet been identified or digitized.
If you are interested in this topic, you can search the Catalog or reach out to reference staff by using the National Archives Contact Us form – select Research and then Court Cases.
Where are the records located?
United States Circuit and District court records are maintained by the regional National Archives facility that handles that state.
Appellate court cases are maintained by the National Archives at Kansas City, MO.
U.S. Supreme Court records are maintained at the National Archives at Washington, DC and the National Archives at College Park, MD.
Further Information
The National Archives does not have a nationwide master list of case files by name, type, or content. Records are arranged sequentially by case file number–not by the type of civil suit. Review this information before trying to order records online.
Depending on the type of federal court and the date of the case, there may be indexes and dockets available to assist in locating a particular court case file. Search for digitized case files in the National Archives Catalog by entering the case’s party name(s) and/or name variations.
If the search is unsuccessful, determine where the case would have been filed (for example the U.S. District Court for the Central Division of California or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit). Using the court location, contact the facility noted in this guide where the records are located for further assistance.
See also History Hub blog Case File Indexes Created by the Federal Courts: Introduction (Part 1 of 3), Case File Indexes Created by the Federal Courts: Index Examples (Part 2 of 3), and Case File Indexes Created by the Federal Courts: Digitized and Digital Indexes (Part 3 of 3) for more information.
Illustrations, from above: The U.S. Supreme Court building; Judgment in the U.S. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, March 6, 1857; and the case file for Eva V. Gazaway by John W. Gazaway, her next friend vs. William J. White.
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