Strauder v. West Virginia

Strauder v. West Virginia established that excluding Black people from jury service on the basis of race was unconstitutional, but the rule did not by itself produce integrated juries. Its history in the book is a history of the distance between a constitutional guarantee and the local practices that could keep Black people from serving—an especially consequential distance for Black defendants facing capital charges.

The constitutional rule

The Supreme Court of the United States had ruled as far back as the 1880s that excluding Black people from jury service was unconstitutional. The decision supplied a formal constitutional limit on racial exclusion from juries, but its presence in law did not ensure that juries reflected the people who lived in the communities where trials took place.

That distinction matters in the account’s broader history of racial hierarchy. After federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, voting rights were taken from African Americans and racially restrictive laws helped reestablish white supremacy. The legal system’s exclusion of Black people from civic and political life was not confined to jury service; the rule against racial exclusion operated against a wider history of laws and institutions that maintained racial subordination.

How exclusion persisted

For decades, jury selection continued to produce all-white juries despite the constitutional prohibition. In the Deep South, jury rolls were drawn from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act, court clerks and judges still used tactics to keep those rolls mostly white. Local jury commissions could invoke statutory standards requiring jurors to be intelligent and upright to exclude African Americans and women.

Other laws made the limits on participation explicit. In 1945, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a Texas statute that restricted the number of Black jurors to exactly one per case. The example shows how the promise of a jury could be reduced to a token presence while leaving the jury’s composition under white control.

In the 1970s, the Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional. That change could bring Black people to the courthouse for possible selection, but it did not guarantee that they would serve. The constitutional boundary described in the account was narrower: race and gender could not be the basis for excluding a juror, but the Constitution did not require that racial minorities or women actually sit on juries.

Peremptory strikes and Batson

Even when Black people appeared among potential jurors, prosecutors could use peremptory strikes—discretionary removals from a jury panel—to exclude them. In the mid-1960s, the Court held that using such strikes in a racially discriminatory manner was unconstitutional. Yet it also set an evidentiary standard so difficult to meet that, over the next twenty years, no one successfully challenged peremptory strikes. The practice of removing all or almost all Black potential jurors therefore continued virtually unchanged.

In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made it possible to challenge prosecutors more directly about racially discriminatory peremptory strikes. The decision offered Black defendants new hope, while also prompting prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. In this sequence, the constitutional rule did not end discrimination; it changed the terms on which exclusion could be contested, while leaving the practical outcome vulnerable to strategies that were harder to prove discriminatory.

Capital trials and the rule’s limits

The continuing gap was stark in counties with large Black populations. In Monroe County, Alabama, which was 40 percent Black, serious felony cases could still end with prosecutors excluding every African American from jury service. Defendants such as Walter McMillian could find themselves facing all-white juries even in counties that were 40 or 50 percent Black, particularly in death-penalty cases. Walter learned about the history and risks of jury selection while on death row and worried about the kind of jury he would receive.

The rule’s significance lies both in what it prohibited and in what it could not secure on its own. It rejected explicit racial exclusion from jury service as unconstitutional, yet the book’s account shows how jury rolls, selection standards, and discretionary strikes repeatedly narrowed that promise. For a Black defendant facing a capital prosecution, the question was not only whether the law formally barred discrimination, but whether the selection process would permit a jury capable of representing the community.