Originally published: Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1940. viii, 436 pp. This was the first comprehensive treatise on the legal status of the African-American as interpreted by United States courts in cases involving civil rights and citizenship. Some of the topics examined in this work are land ownership, involuntary servitude, segregation, failure to provide accommodations in charitable and penal institutions, interracial marriage, illegitimate offspring and adoption, as well as consideration of such factors as mob domination at trials of African-Americans, race discrimination in jury selection, racial prejudice of jurors, the voting franchise during reconstruction and its aftermath and attempts to keep African-Americans away from the polls. While lacking a table of cases per se, the treatise is well-annotated with citations to relevant cases, and includes a bibliography and index.

Charles S. Mangum, Jr. 1902-1980] was a Research Fellow at the University of North Carolina. His other notable work is The Legal Status of the Tenant Farmer in the Southeast (1952).

"An enormous compendium of cases, it is a product of sound and painstaking scholarship, brilliant in design, thorough in execution, and deft in style."
-Jerome H. Springarn, Columbia Law Review (1940) 40:1118.

"It is the first comprehensive collection of legal materials in its field." Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection of New York University (1953) 334.