What I’m Working On: Professor Aderson François, Reconstruction Scholar

“The people that I write about are not the sort of people who sat around trying to understand the meaning of the 14th Amendment,” says François, who directs Georgetown Law’s Civil Rights Clinic and Voting Rights Institute and led the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law before joining the Law Center faculty in 2016. “Yet, they are the ones who had to live with the consequences of it.”

Below, François discusses the importance of recreating the lives of these “ordinary people,” how his clinical work informs his approach to legal research and the ongoing relevance of Reconstruction history today.

Your work highlights people like Sallie Robinson, a plaintiff in Robinson v. Memphis & Charleston Railroad Co., one of the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 in which the United States Supreme Court sought to interpret the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Why focus on individuals in the context of Reconstruction?

One of the challenges that scholars of the Reconstruction era and amendments have always faced is trying to explain the vast distance that exists between what the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments originally seemed designed to do and the way that the Supreme Court’s interpretation ultimately narrowed the meaning of these amendments to an extraordinary degree.

In his book Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois said that Reconstruction was a worthwhile project that, had it been allowed to succeed, would have created a new world. In my writing, what I try to do is to imagine what that new world could have been. I don’t do it by trying to fictionalize it. I do it by going back and reviewing and recreating and retelling the stories of ordinary people who lived during that time, and trying to understand what they thought their lives were going to be like as a result of the end of the war.

Part of the reason why I do this research, and the reason why it’s so interesting is because the stories are interconnected. As I was researching Sallie’s story for “A Lost World: Sallie Robinson, the Civil Rights Cases, and Missing Narratives of Slavery in the Supreme Court’s Reconstruction Jurisprudence” (The Georgetown Law Journal, 2021), I came across the story of David Galloway and Malinda Brandon, an interracial couple from Tennessee who were prosecuted by the state for their marriage and were sent to prison twice. They ended up being the subject of my next paper, “Speak to Your Dead, Write for Your Dead: David Galloway, Malinda Brandon, and a Story of American Reconstruction” (The Georgetown Law Journal, 2022).

What are you working on next?

My next piece is about how, almost 20 years after the Civil War was over, a group of Black men came to be re-enslaved mining guano on Navassa Island, a barren rock in the Caribbean Sea. At the time, guano was an extraordinarily expensive and valuable fertilizer, and a mining company based in Baltimore would recruit Black men to the island by saying, “This is paradise. You can go work there and lay in the sun.” Of course, when they showed up, it was a very different story. One day, they rebelled and killed their white overseers, and were brought back to the U.S. to be tried. Their story will be the next in my series about “14th Amendment people.”

How does your work as a practitioner influence your approach to legal research and writing?

My approach comes in part through my work as a clinician with the Civil Rights Institute, where we represent plaintiffs and litigants in areas including discrimination, constitutional rights and workplace fairness in federal and state courts. When these individuals come to us with a problem, I always tell my students that we shouldn’t be too quick to translate that problem into a legal one. Rather than asking, “What is the relevant statute for this problem?,” you first have to understand the full reality of the person’s life by allowing them to tell their story and taking it in without judgment. When I begin my research and writing, I ask myself, “What is the real story behind these cases? What was this person’s life like?”

As the Georgetown community commemorates Black History Month in February, what lessons can Reconstruction offer us today?

If the Black experience in the U.S. means anything, it is that we have always gone through periods of progress and transformation. Progress has never been linear, and Reconstruction certainly is proof of that. Another lesson is that it is always necessary, as James Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son, to keep in mind two seemingly opposed ideas. The first is that injustice — whether it’s racism, sexism or homophobia — will always exist. The second idea is that it is your job to not only to fight against it, but to do so in a way that keeps your heart and mind free of hatred of other people. You have no choice but to continue pursuing your vision of justice, not because of any guarantee that it’s going to succeed, but because the fight itself makes you who you are. The fight itself shows you the kind of person you want to be.

To learn more about François’s scholarship and research — including an unexpected archival discovery — watch the video below: