As Supreme Court Justices, Two Bowdoin Alumni Impact Racial History of the US

Interestingly, observed Wells, this was also the prevailing viewpoint at Bowdoin during the antebellum period, when Fuller was a student. Members of the Bowdoin community may have been largely opposed to slavery, but very few of them were abolitionists.

They were much more likely to favor "colonization" over abolition, supporting a system where slaves would be gradually emancipated and resettled abroad. Some supported the relocation of former slaves to West Africa, where they would spread Christianity-the motivation behind the creation of Liberia.

As for Fuller, he thought abolitionists were as much to blame as Southern slave owners for the outbreak of war. "In Fuller's eyes the Constitution did not permit the federal government to meddle with slavery. Simply put, slavery was a domestic institution subject to state jurisdiction, not federal."

The Plessy v Ferguson decision of 1896 upheld a Louisiana law enacted a few years earlier, known as the "railway car law," mandating "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" for in-state travel on all passenger railways. The landmark decision, said Wells, led to the introduction of a number of laws segregating libraries, parks, public accommodations, and housing. "Fuller's court did little to stop efforts in Southern states to disenfranchise African Americans," he stressed.

"Separate but equal remained the law of the land in the South for the next half-century," said Wells, enshrining an attitude to race relations that reverberated abroad through the early twentieth century, particularly in Nazi Germany, he noted, where America's efforts to legislate racial purity were praised by the Reich leadership.