James personally escorted Robert to the schoolhouse where his sons were studying.

What was unusual was that James raised Robert as a member of his family. In the antebellum South, the presence of a light-skinned black child in a white household would not have been unusual. When Robert was eight years old, Mary brought Robert to Kentucky to be raised by John’s father, James. Robert’s mother, Mary, was a slave on a plantation in Virginia owned by John’s extended family. Peter Canellos’s new book, The Great Dissenter, dramatizes the ways in which Robert Harlan played a crucial role in making John Harlan the sole defender of black civil rights on the post-Reconstruction-era Supreme Court. In fact, he consistently stood against his colleagues on the court and wrote powerful dissents from a series of unjust and racially discriminatory decisions. Hayes appointed Harlan to the Supreme Court in 1877, anti-slavery Republicans mistrusted him, calling him “the sycophantic friend and supplicant tool” of white supremacists. Justice Harlan defied these expectations. Harlan freed the people he held in bondage only after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which he had opposed. Justice Harlan was born into a slaveholding family in Kentucky in 1833.

Robert’s refined cultural interests and his ability to succeed in every venture presented to him shaped John’s perceptions of what black Americans could achieve in freedom. Robert Harlan was raised in the same household as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, and he is likely to have been the Justice’s half-brother. need masters to rule and feed them.” Among the men cited as thriving in a free society was Mr. On May 15, 1856, the abolitionist newspaper Independent Democrat published an article with the facetious title, “Can’t Take Care of Themselves.” The author listed formerly enslaved black men who “prove the falsehood of the charge often made by Slavocrats that Negroes.

Justice john marshall harlan