Blogging the Cross Creek Trial

Last week, because I wanted to mock the strange conservative political infatuation with Republican senate candidate Marco Rubio — a run-of-the-mill corporatist if there ever was one — I spent a few minutes on Rubio’s website looking for policy specifics. I did not find many. But I did stumble across one intriguing passage. In criticizing new U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Rubio wrote:

I have more specific concerns about her case history and testimony regarding the Second Amendment at the state level, eminent domain takings and the so-called constitutional right to privacy [emphasis mine] that resulted in the Roe v. Wade decision.

Hmm. I’ve always thought of the Cross Creek Trial and its privacy claims in speech terms. But, of course, as Rubio points out, legal abortion also relies on the concept of privacy as an enforceable right under the U.S. Constitution. I wonder if the clear establishment of the right of privacy in Florida law that emerged from the Cross Creek trial bears at all on the federal abortion ruling that followed almost 30 years later. It sharpens a larger question I need to answer: What, if any, practical implications emerged from the establishment of a Florida state right to privacy? Any lawyers who might happen upon this, please weigh in.

The following two newspaper notes appeared almost next to one another in the same Aug. 9, 1918 edition of the Palatka Times-Herald:

Negro Registrants Given Big Send Off Sunday

Sunday afternoon at 5 o’clock the colored registrants under the last orders entrained for Camp Devens, Mass., to enter upon training for service. About 150 men from all parts of the county reported. An immense crowd, both whites and colored, assembled and gave the departing soldiers to be rousing send off.

Lieut. Walton Heard From.

Letters received from Lieut. W. N. Walton — in France — one written before he was injured and the other sent from the hospital where he is convalescing satisfactorily– give information of interest. He writes that he was wounded by a shell exploding within a few feet of where he was standing. Seven bits of shrapnel struck him, inflicting painful wounds, all of which have healed, however, save one on the right foot. His host of friends trust to soon note his complete restoration to his usual good health.

Lt. Walton was J.V.’s brother, my great, great uncle. You’ll notice that he was deemed worthy of more space than the 150 black men sent off to war by an apparently integrated crowd. In 1917, as Paul Ortiz documents in “Emancipation Betrayed,” blacks in Putnam County outregistered whites in Putnam County 341 to 254. That does not even count the 150-250 blacks (I haven’t been able to settle on precise numbers) who enlisted in 1918, the group noted in the paper above. Bottom line, blacks in Putnam County were twice as patriotic, per capita, as their white counterparts in the World War I era.

Remember that when hear Sarah Palin or Pat Buchanan or whoever else talk about who the real Americans are and were.