Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy

Pippa Holloway’s Living in Infamy is a thoroughly researched and concisely written account of the history of felon-voter disenfranchisement in America. Holloway succinctly weaves together the origins of and motivations for the practice of banishing convicted felons from the voting booth. The author’s argument turns on the definition and use of “infamy,” suggesting that wealthy, white political leaders in the South used the label to categorize and marginalize African-Americans in particular and all convicted felons generally. At the outset (Chapter 1), Holloway chronicles the efforts of the white ruling class to maintain political and social power in the post-Civil War South. She introduces the reader to the symbiotic concepts of “infamy” and “Black Codes,” which regulated the behavior of former slaves and operated to affirm their legally infamous status. “Black Codes,” Holloway explains, “perpetuated the legal infamy Blacks experienced in the slave era, denying the former slaves the rights of citizenship that were already denied to infamous criminals and barring them from testifying in court against whites, jury service, and suffrage” (31).

Argument (complex analysis) · Citizenship · Economic Justice · Jury · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Suffrage · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Race, History, and American Society