The Legal Status of the Negro.

8vo, 436 pp. Original cloth, publisher's dust jacket. Jacket price-clipped; ownership marks of psychiatrist Henry Guze; very good or better. The first compendium of contemporary law concerning African Americans and a comprehensive record of legal discrimination and repression after 70 years of Jim Crow segregation. Mangum details how blatant racial discrimination was enshrined in laws governing hotels, businesses, fraternities, schools, property rights, railroads, buses, ships, airplanes, prisons, courts and juries - and, perhaps of most contemporary significance, voting rights.One irony the book points out was that statutory laws in North and South were so often at variance that even a fundamental legal definition of a Negro in one state might be in direct conflict with the laws in another. On the other hand, there were similarities in different regions of the country that outlawed interracial marriage, which was prohibited, not only in the South but also throughout the western states. Most remarkable about the pioneering scholarship of the book was that the author, a Caucasian, was severely handicapped, unable even to sign his name, and required assistance to leave his house for any purpose.