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ultimately had these effects as they closed some issues, opened others, and highlighted the issues
that the legal system itself found to be problematic and liminal.
The attorneys, too, were bound by their institutional roles but nonetheless worked
creatively within these roles in ways that sometimes had effects they could not have anticipated.
The states’ attorneys were charged with the simple duty to uphold the law, and to ensure that trial
prosecutors’ convictions were sustained upon appeal. Nonetheless, their defenses of the
convictions varied from vigorous, careful, and high-profile preparation as in the constitutional
cases to lower stakes arguments to uphold convictions about which they themselves might not
have been completely enthusiastic. Their arguments ultimately bolstered white supremacy, but
their immediate goals of maintaining convictions obtained in trials were for the most part not so
lofty. Some likely took into account the structural significance of the ban on miscegenation,
while others appeared simply to be looking for practical guidance from the appellate courts so
that the prosecutors at trial could immunize later prosecutions from challenges.
Some may wonder what kind of attorney would defend a client accused of engaging in
interracial sex in Alabama during the Jim Crow era. The question is hard to answer, but the little
data available on attorneys like Elbert Haltom Jr., who pushed forward the constitutional appeals
of the 1950s, suggests that they were not viewed as unusual or radical characters in their
communities. While interracial sex was culturally understood by white elites in particular as
odious, defense attorneys helping these defendants likely also defended accused bootleggers,
prostitutes, con artists, and the occasional murderer. Still, the passion and commitment of some
of the attorneys like Edward Grove, defender of Sarah Wilson in the 1920s, leaps from the pages
of the trial transcripts and appellate documents. These white men were often deeply engaged
with their clients, not simply fulfilling the state’s ethical (if not yet legal) obligation to provide
them with representation for a fair trial. By and large, the arguments that defense attorneys made
on the behalf of their appellate clients approached Grove’s creative and committed standard far
more often than the notoriously awful standard set by the Alabama attorneys appointed to defend
the Scottsboro rape defendants.
Together, these individual attorneys and judges, focusing on the individual appeals of
defendants in particular sets of circumstances, worked together to forge a shifting narrative that
was open for consumption by state actors and others outside of the legal system. Often
exercising creative agency within the bounds of the particular case, these actors nonetheless
Convention