Ignoble Intentions and Noble Dreams: On Relativism and History with a Purpose

Abstract

In 1980, immediately after the Southern Historical Association Convention at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, historian Peyton McCrary and a bevy of voting-rights lawyers gathered together a group of historians to try to engage them as expert witnesses in voting-rights litigation. Earlier in 1980 in the case of Mobile v. Bolden, a plurality of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that to sustain a claim of vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act or the Fifteenth Amendment, members of minority groups had to prove that the relevant law had been passed with a racially discriminatory purpose, not merely that it had a current racially discriminatory effect. Since the ordinance requiring that the Mobile City Commission was to be elected at-large, rather than by single-member districts, had been passed (everyone thought at the time) in 1911, lawyers for the plaintiffs had no choice but to bring in the historians. Because McCrary lived in Mobile and knew the lawyers who had filed the Bolden case, he took over the principal organizing task. Most of the historians present at the Biltmore seemed to respond favorably, and some ended up working in a few cases. Others, probably better advised, went back to their usual research and teaching.

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