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NY Times, Oct. 14 2014
A Black Detective, an 1870 Trial and a What If
Michael A. Ross's 'Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case'
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Michael A. Ross, the author of a well-regarded study of the Supreme
Court during the Civil War, thought of himself as a “meat and potatoes”
legal historian.
But a decade ago in a New Orleans archive, something a bit spicier
caught his eye: an 1870 newspaper article describing the “voodoo
abduction” of a white toddler by two mysterious black women.
“I thought to myself, ‘This can’t possibly be true,’ ” Mr. Ross recalled
recently by telephone.
The voodoo angle turned out to be hysterical rumor. But as he read on,
Mr. Ross, now a professor at the University of Maryland, discovered an
all-but-forgotten story of a sensational investigation and trial that
gripped New Orleans and the national press for almost seven months.
“There were so many other twists and turns that I was hooked,” he said.
Those twists, recounted by Mr. Ross in “The Great New Orleans Kidnapping
Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era,” published this
week by Oxford University Press, include psychic consultations, a
shadowy “House of Secret Obstetrics” and the derring-do of a crack
Afro-Creole police detective versed in the latest “French” techniques —
seemingly the first black detective in the United States to take part in
a case that received national attention, Mr. Ross says.
The story also offers something else that was all but unheard-of in
pre-Civil Rights-era trials involving African-Americans accused of
crimes against whites: genuine suspense about the outcome.
Alfred L. Brophy, a historian at the University of North Carolina School
of Law, said in an interview that at virtually any other moment, such a
case would almost certainly have ended in a “legalized lynching.”
“Ross has unearthed an important story,” Mr. Brophy said. “Historians
are going to argue about its broader significance for a long time.”
Beyond academia, Mr. Ross said he hoped his whodunit would add
complexity to the public understanding of Reconstruction, restoring a
sense of contingency to a period that is too often read as leading
inexorably to Jim Crow.
“It was not inevitable that Reconstruction was going to fail,” Mr. Ross
said. “There was a moment of real possibility.”
That moment was certainly a fraught one. When Mollie Digby, the
17-month-old daughter of Irish immigrants, was reported to have been
kidnapped by two African-American women on June 9, 1870, the case
immediately became enmeshed in broader social and political tensions.
To the white press, it was more proof that Louisiana was descending into
racial chaos under Henry Clay Warmoth, the Illinois-born radical
Republican governor. But to the government, it was a chance to prove
that a newly integrated and professionalized police force — 28 percent
of New Orleans’s officers were African-American — would aggressively
investigate crimes allegedly committed by blacks.
The police chief put his top black detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, on
the case. Jourdain, the son of a white Creole father and free black
mother, had already left a historical footprint. In 1864 he was among
some 1,000 Afro-Creoles who signed a petition asking Lincoln to extend
the vote to the free blacks of Louisiana. In 1867 he testified before a
Congressional committee about bloody riots of the previous year, when
officers from New Orleans’s police force, then still all-white, helped a
mob attack a biracial state convention.
Jourdain, Mr. Ross writes, had studied investigative techniques
originating in France, including deductive reasoning and the use of
disguises, which he adopted during the Digby investigation. He
interacted easily with whites involved in the case, including Thomas
Digby, Mollie’s father, who repeatedly welcomed him into the family
home, Mr. Ross relates. “We think of the Irish and African-Americans as
being at one another’s throats, and yet here the interactions were all
quite respectful,” the historian said.
After a child who seemed to be Mollie turned up in a covert maternity
hospital for unwed mothers, Ellen Follin, an Afro-Creole woman who ran
the hospital in her home, was arrested and put on trial with her sister.
The anti-Reconstruction papers were filled with inflammatory speculation
about the two beautiful and mysterious “child stealers,” who maintained
that the baby had been left there by a stranger. But in the courtroom,
Mr. Ross writes, due process prevailed through a parade of bizarre
revelations and odd characters.
To Mr. Ross, the orderly trial — and the peace that was maintained in
New Orleans after the racially mixed jury handed down an acquittal —
suggest that the post-Civil War experiment in interracial democracy was
not necessarily doomed to fail. It is an interpretation shared by some
other scholars.
“This was all happening at a time in which people really did think they
could bring about a new day in race relations,” said Douglas R. Egerton,
author of “The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of
America’s Most Progressive Era,” published in January. “They weren’t
naïve to think Reconstruction had brought lasting, permanent change.”
But not all admirers of Mr. Ross’s book are persuaded by his broader
argument. Mr. Brophy said that New Orleans, with its large mixed-race
population and long history of ties between white and black Creoles, was
different from most of the South.
Reconstruction did include real moments of successful political and
social integration, “but whether they could have survived the power and
ugliness of race hatred, I’m skeptical,” Mr. Brophy said.
The integrated institutions that supported the kidnapping trial did not
last long in New Orleans. In 1874 the Crescent City White League, a
reactionary paramilitary force, briefly overthrew the state government
before federal troops moved in and restored it. In 1876 white Democrats
gained control of the state government and “redeemed” Louisiana, as they
put it; an all-white police force was restored the next year, followed
eventually by all-white juries.
“It would be almost 100 years before black defendants in the South would
be guaranteed the same due process” that the accused kidnappers
received, Mr. Ross writes.
Jourdain disappeared from history entirely. His death in 1888 received
only a brief mention in local newspapers, with no reference to his
career on the police force or in the Legislature, where he served from
1874 to 1876.
When the trial was remembered, it was distorted in telling ways. After
the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, the New Orleans case was
revisited in some newspapers, with the acquittal transformed into a
conviction and no mention of a black detective. An unpublished Digby
family memoir from the 1930s had the investigation led not by an
Afro-Creole detective but by a team of white sleuths sometimes disguised
in blackface.
“By 1930s Reconstruction was so forgotten no one could even believe
there had been black police,” Mr. Ross said.
In an afterword, he details the help he got from Digby, Jourdain and
Follin descendants, some of whom will meet for the first time this week
at events for the book in New Orleans.
But Mr. Ross does not offer a solution to the mystery of just who did
kidnap Mollie, and why.
“I wish it could’ve all been wrapped up neatly,” he said. “But what you
can say is that this is a case where the justice system worked, because
there was doubt.”
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