An enslaver’s personal kinship with a black half brother shaped his pro-civil-rights jurisprudence.

Evidence

You may be wondering, as I did, how did Justice Harlan come to view the rights granted to the newly freed differently from his Supreme Court brethren? Was it that he was raised in an abolitionist family? No, just the opposite—he was born into a family of enslavers. John Marshall Harlan was born on June 1, 1833, into a wealthy slaveholding family in Kentucky, and he himself was an enslaver. Although he had fought for the Union in the Civil War, he opposed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1877. What set him apart, I believe, is that he saw the humanity in black Americans because he reportedly had a black half brother. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 392

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Harlan biography is contested — some historians dispute that Robert was actually James’s son and question the causal weight placed on this kinship. Worth checking Lorraine’s sources before using in an argument.