A former Supreme Court justice developed a close association with a powerful Black leader who grew up enslaved in his home. Their unlikely alliance would help to keep a flicker of hope alive during the long, tortuous decades of segregation
It was a gentle warning from a person with a shared history and a common set of references: “I beg to repeat to you the words of an old Colored man that formerly belonged to your father—they were do-do-take-care.”The letter was written by Robert Harlan, the leading Black politician in Ohio, to John Marshall Harlan, the white future Supreme Court justice, on April 14, 1877.
Whether that was true or not, Robert, who was 16 years older, knew that John’s late father had dreamed of John going to the Supreme Court since giving the newborn baby the name of his own legal hero, Chief Justice John Marshall. In Robert’s eyes, focused on the Black community and its Northern allies, no good could come of this commission. John was sacrificing his career to Hayes’ convenience. Radical Republicans would never confirm a Supreme Court justice who could be blamed for surrendering to a mob of ex-Confederates. In political terms, John was wading into a swamp, and Robert knew it.
Having set out to write a book about John Marshall Harlan—a deeply inspiring figure who is unknown to most Americans—I had the strange experience of watching that story converge with another, equally inspiring one. There’s a swashbuckling, ready-for-the-movies hero in the book, and it’s not John Marshall Harlan.
Robert really believed in John—in his wisdom and fitness for the Supreme Court—when other people had reasons to doubt him. And despite the strange imbalances in their backgrounds and the pressures of a society eager to demean African Americans, John accepted Robert’s friendship and help in a spirit of equality.
In all the accounts, Robert describes himself as having been raised by James, with scant mention of James’ wife, Eliza, who bore him nine children. John was the sixth, and fifth son. Like the others of James and Eliza’s sons, John was committed to a regimen of study designed to make him a lawyer like his father. James wanted to educate Robert, too, but in an oft-told story the schools wouldn’t take him because of his race, so he went through life declaring that he had “half a day’s schooling.
Robert spent about a decade, including the Civil War years, in Europe, where he was treated like a celebrity in the horseracing world and seemed to encounter little prejudice on account of his race. Returning to Cincinnati, he assumed a leadership role in the Black community, whose rights finally seemed to be protected by the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution.
In John’s case, Robert’s gift was political help—and he was ideally positioned to help John gain credibility with Republicans who doubted his conversion to their party after the Civil War. In the first dozen years after the surrender of the Confederacy, African-Americans were an important Republican constituency, and Northern Republicans were wary of Southern efforts to push Black people back into positions of subjugation.
Robert did, and rushed to the capital from his own home in Cincinnati to quell the damage. The victim, Orindatus S. B. Wall, was a Civil War veteran and fellow member of the African-American elite. Wall’s brother-in-law was John Mercer Langston, the founding dean of Howard Law School. Robert was friends with both of them, along with Amanda Wall, who believed her husband had been shot “because he was a colored man and held an office,” as Robert frankly reported to John.
This delicate negotiation marked a period of close collaboration between John and Robert, who, five years later, would jointly organize support for Bristow’s unsuccessful presidential run. Then, at the 1876 Republican convention in Robert’s hometown of Cincinnati, John played a key role in shifting Bristow’s backers to Hayes, the former Ohio governor who had worked with Robert in creating the first all-Black battalion in the state National Guard.
Supreme Court of the United States. From left to right: Justice Peckham, Justice Brewer, Justice Shiras, Justice Harlan, Chief Justice Fuller, Justice White, Justice Gray, Justice McKenna, Justice Brown. | Library of Congress Later generations of Harlans on both sides also felt themselves to be related. But when a law professor in 2001 asked them to take a DNA test, it came back negative, suggesting a blood link was unlikely. The test wouldn’t account for any breaks in the DNA links on either side over as many as five generations. But Eve Dillingham, John’s great-granddaughter, expressed disappointment.
Since John Marshall Harlan came from a slave-owning background, his position as a great defender of African Americans has been cast as an irony, a mystery, an enigma. Certainly, it had many roots, including the lessons in watching his home state torn apart by the Civil War, which he blamed on the cancer of inequality. But his dissenting opinions weren’t just assertions of principle; they were replete with references to the actual wrongs done to Black people.
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