Middleton, Stephen 1954-

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MIDDLETON, Stephen 1954-

PERSONAL:

Born January 16, 1954, in Cross, SC; son of Louis (a laborer) and Eva Matilda (a homemaker; maiden name, Washington) Middleton; married Earline E. Price (a manager), August 25, 1979; children: Stephen II, Eric Douglas, Jessica Lorraine. Education: Morris College, B.A. (with honors), 1976; Ohio State University, M.A., 1977; Miami University (Oxford, OH), Ph.D., 1987. Religion: Protestant.

ADDRESSES:

Home—6221 Leesburg Lane, Raleigh, NC 27613. Office—Department of History, North Carolina State University, Box 8108, Raleigh, NC 27695-8108.

CAREER:

Avco Dayton Job Corps, Dayton, OH, instructor, 1979-81; Wilberforce University, Wilberforce, OH, assistant professor of history, 1981-85; University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, assistant professor of Afro-American studies, 1985-89; North Carolina State University, Raleigh, assistant professor, beginning 1989, became associate professor of history. Sinclair Community College, adjunct lecturer, 1980-81; New York University, Goleb fellow in legal history, 1999-2000.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grants from Ohio Humanities Council, 1989, and National Endowment for the Humanities, 1990-91; Otto A. Rothert Award, Filson Club Historical Quarterly, 1993; Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson fellow, American Antiquarian Society, 1994-95.

WRITINGS:

Ohio and the Antislavery Activity of Salmon Portland Chase, 1830-1849, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1990.

The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993.

Work represented in anthologies, including Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837-1861, edited by Victor B. Howard, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 1990. Contributor of articles and reviews to history journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Stephen Middleton once told CA: "I matured in rural South Carolina—in a community called Cross—during the 1960s. Born in 1954, the year in which the United States Supreme Court overturned legal segregation, I was raised by parents who had been nurtured in a nation divided by race. I attended segregated schools, was treated by physicians who had segregated waiting rooms, and listened to stories by my family and relatives who had been intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan. During those years, young African-American men rarely completed high school. I witnessed an alarming trend as my relatives and two brothers dropped out of school. I too considered leaving school but, for reasons that are not clear, I continued. By my senior year, Cross High School desegregated, but whites fled to white-only academies in nearby towns. Segregation, therefore, shaped my outlook and world view. I entered college in 1972, determined to study law after graduation. I had decided to work for civil rights reform. A historian, however, made his craft so fascinating that I changed my major to history.

"My career as a researcher and writer combines elements from my formative years. I remain interested in legal studies, civil rights reform, and history. My primary field, United States constitutional history, enables me to blend these interests. While I am not an advocate of the bar, my writings and lectures are designed to inform readers and listeners of a shameful American past. A study of American law shows clearly that the proactive policy of the states and nation made slavery and racial discrimination possible. The extent to which the law helped to foster racial hatred and achieve the subordination of a racial group is shocking. The legal system in this nation guided its social development. It created a political culture which attached pigmentation to racial groups; it deprived one racial group of educational opportunity to keep its members in a degraded caste; and it circumscribed communication between the races. Hence, the legal policy of the nation gripped society by its social conscience and placed a flaming sword between the people it calls black and the people it calls white.

"My writings tell about this phenomenon by looking at northern communities. Ironically, the region that outlawed slavery perfected the policy of segregation. Ohio, for example, had never practiced slavery, yet it proscribed the conduct of African Americans as rigidly as any slave state. Legislative policies called the 'black laws' made such a society possible. These statutes denied black people jury service, testimony against a white, integrated public education (although blacks helped to fund the schools), and suffrage. Ohio lawmakers intended to make the state a province for whites only. Such a policy unleashed whites to terrorize blacks. In 1829, a mob of whites assailed black neighborhoods in Cincinnati and compelled their residents to leave the state. The whites justified their assault on the grounds that black residents had not conformed to the state's immigration law, which required that black immigrants register in the office of the county clerk, pay a five-hundred-dollar bond, and obtain the signatures of at least two freeholders. It was a prohibitive law, designed to discourage black refugees from the South from entering Ohio.

"Although the foregoing scenarios can be found in my writings, I am not a purveyor of racial hatred. The story must be told; yet, Ohio and the rest of the North responded, albeit grudgingly, to reformers who condemned their policies. The South changed, too, following a bloody war and a crusade launched by reformers trained in the law. There is a moral lesson in United States history for all Americans: truth crushed to earth, to paraphrase the poet, will rise again. The horror of our past should, I hope, compel us to pursue an enlightened future. This hope explains why I write what I write."