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    Race on trial : black defendants in Ontario's criminal courts, 1858-1958 / Barrington Walker.

    • Title:Race on trial : black defendants in Ontario's criminal courts, 1858-1958 / Barrington Walker.
    •    
    • Author/Creator:Walker, Barrington, 1970-
    • Published/Created:Toronto ; Buffalo : Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, ©2010.
    • Holdings

       
    • Library of Congress Subjects:Discrimination in criminal justice administration--Ontario--History.
      Black people--Legal status, laws, etc.--Ontario--History.
      Black people--Ontario--Social conditions.
      Race discrimination--Ontario--History.
    • Description:xii, 256 pages : ill ; 24 cm.
    • Series:Canadian social history series.
      Osgood Society for Canadian Legal History.
    • Summary:Using capital case files and the assize records for Kent and Essex counties, areas that had significant black populations because they were termini for the Underground Railroad, Barrington Walker investigates the limits of freedom for Ontario's African Canadians. Through court transcripts, depositions, jail records, Judge's Bench Books, newspapers, and government correspondence, Walker identifies trends in charges and convictions in the Black population. This exploration of the complex and often contradictory web of racial attitudes and the values of white legal elites not only exposes how blackness was articulated in Canadian law but also offers a rare glimpse of black life as experienced in Canada's past."--Publisher's Description
      "Although slavery in Canada was abolished in 1834, discrimination remained. Race on Trial contrasts formal legal equality with pervasive patterns of social, legal, and attitudinal inequality in Ontario by documenting the history of black Ontarians who appeared before the criminal courts from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries."--Jacket
    • Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages [231]-244) and index.
    • ISBN:9780802099099 (cloth : acid-free paper)
      0802099092 (cloth : acid-free paper)
    • Contents:Blackness and the law in slavery and freedom
      Nationhood, mercy and the gallows
      Black patriarchy
      Tales of a 'peculiarly horrible description' : archetypal rape narratives
      Rape, sex, and the power of dominant rape narratives.
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