College Honors Program

Date of Creation

5-12-2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Elliott Visconsi

Abstract

Enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is the promise that all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States “shall receive equal protection of the laws.” For Black Americans, this promise has been routinely unfulfilled– not only during the “Jim Crow” era, but also continuing after the Civil Rights era into the present. Instead of equal justice under law, Black Americans have been subjected to systematic dehumanization and the erasure of constitutional rights, often leading to a presumption of Black guilt rather than innocence within the criminal justice system and within white public rhetoric. Broken promises of equal justice rely on depersonalization – on individuals seen as evidence of a racist narrative of Black criminality. Within this widely circulating public rhetoric, redemption or reconciliation is not an option for the Black subject of criminal process. The inevitable and tragic outcome is violent punishment, either by the state or the lynch mob. In this thesis, I track the frustrated promise of equal justice for Black Americans primarily by investigating the public rhetoric and language surrounding the Scottsboro Boys trial (1931) and Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. I bring my analysis into the current day by connecting the public rhetoric and representational patterns present during the Jim Crow era to post-Civil Rights examples: the Central Park Five (1989) and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s short story “The Finkelstein 5” (2018). These examples illustrate the ways in which depersonalization through stereotyping, tokenization, and racial caricature conflict with and overcome personal experience and the individuation of storytelling.

Comments

Reader: Madigan Haley

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