John Mann v North Carolina

Opening (0:00–0:30)

"Your Honors, the question before this Court is narrow and purely legal: does North Carolina law permit a criminal indictment for battery against a person who has lawfully hired a slave's labor, for conduct occurring during that hiring? The trial court answered yes. We ask this Court to reverse, on four independent legal grounds."

Point 1 — Precedent doesn't support the conviction (0:30–1:15)

"First, precedent. The trial court relied on State v. Hall, 9 N.C. 582 (1823), but Hall addressed a stranger — someone with no legal relationship to the slave at all. My client is not a stranger. He is the lawful hirer, holding a possessory interest transferred to him by contract. Hall is distinguishable, not controlling. No existing North Carolina precedent extends criminal liability to a hirer acting within the scope of that hire."

Point 2 — Property and bailment law govern this case (1:15–2:00)

"Second, this is fundamentally a property-law question. A contract of hire transfers the right to a slave's labor. The right to compel that labor — the right of control — necessarily transfers with it. This is basic bailment doctrine: whoever lawfully possesses property for a term holds the same rights of control as the owner, for that term. The trial court's jury instruction, asking the jury to weigh a 'special property' interest as somehow lesser, has no basis in existing property law. There's no such intermediate category recognized by this Court."

Point 3 — No statute criminalizes this conduct (2:00–2:45)

"Third — and this is the most important point — the General Assembly has never criminalized this conduct. The legislature has comprehensively regulated slavery in this state: passes for movement, licenses for firearms, procedures for capture of runaways, even a summary whipping procedure for magistrates. It has specifically criminalized one thing beyond question: the killing of a slave. That is the only statutory limit on a master's or hirer's authority. Where the legislature regulates extensively and stops at a specific line, that stopping point is deliberate, not an invitation for courts to draw a new one. This Court is not a legislature. It cannot create a new criminal offense that the General Assembly chose not to enact."

Point 4 — The trial court's jury instruction was legal error (2:45–3:30)

"Fourth, the instruction given below asked the jury to determine whether the punishment was 'proportionate' to the offense. That standard doesn't exist anywhere in this state's statutes or case law. It was invented for this trial. Asking twelve jurors to retroactively judge reasonableness, with no defined standard, is void for vagueness as applied here — the defendant had no way to know in advance what 'proportionate' meant, or how a jury would later measure it. A criminal conviction cannot rest on a standard that didn't exist until the moment it was applied against my client."

Closing (3:30–4:00)

"To summarize: no controlling precedent, correct application of settled bailment doctrine, no statute defines this as a crime, and the jury instruction below was legally unsound. This Court should reverse the conviction and vacate the ten-dollar fine. The remedy for any dispute over Mann's conduct toward Lydia, if one exists, lies in a civil action by her owner for damage to her value — not in a criminal indictment unsupported by any existing law. We ask this Court to reverse."

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Delivery tip: Practice this once aloud with a timer — legal argument reads faster than casual speech, so you may find you have 15–20 seconds of slack per section to add a supporting citation (e.g., naming 13 N.C. 263 or the "must stop short of taking life" line) if your professor wants pin cites spoken aloud.

The Freedmen's Bureau

 Imagine it's 1865. The Civil War has just ended, and four million people who were enslaved just days before are suddenly free — but free with nothing. No land, no money, no education, and in many cases, no idea where their own family members are. The Southern economy is in ruins. And the U.S. government has to figure out, almost overnight, how to help millions of people rebuild their lives from scratch. That's exactly the problem Congress was trying to solve when it created the Freedmen's Bureau.

The Freedmen's Bureau — officially called the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — was established by Congress in March of 1865, right as the war was ending. It was the first major federal agency in U.S. history designed to provide social services, and it was led by General Oliver Otis Howard — yes, the same Howard that Howard University is named after.

So what did the Bureau actually do? A lot, honestly. It distributed food, clothing, and medical care to both freed Black Americans and displaced white refugees in the South. It set up hospitals. It helped reunite families that had been separated by slavery. It even officiated marriages, since enslaved couples had never been allowed legal marriage recognition before.

But if you ask historians what its single greatest achievement was, most will say education. The Bureau built thousands of schools across the South, and for the first time, huge numbers of formerly enslaved people — adults and children alike — learned to read and write. Several historically Black colleges and universities that still exist today trace their roots directly back to Bureau support.

The Bureau also tried to tackle something much bigger: land. There was a real push to redistribute confiscated and abandoned Confederate land to freedpeople — the origin of that famous, though often misunderstood, phrase "forty acres and a mule." For a brief moment, it looked like formerly enslaved families might actually gain economic independence through land ownership.

But here's the hard truth — the Bureau was set up to fail in a lot of ways. It was chronically underfunded and understaffed, trying to serve millions of people across an entire region with a tiny staff. President Andrew Johnson was openly hostile to it and actually vetoed a bill to strengthen its powers — Congress had to override his veto just to keep it alive. And most of that redistributed land? It was eventually taken back and returned to former Confederate landowners, crushing the hope of real economic independence for freedpeople.

On top of that, Bureau agents and the schools they built faced brutal violence, especially from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who saw Black education and independence as a direct threat to the old social order.

By 1869, most Bureau operations had wound down, and it closed for good in 1872 — only about seven years after it started.

So how should we remember the Freedmen's Bureau? I'd say it was a bold experiment that came with real, lasting impact — especially in education — but one that was ultimately undercut by underfunding, political hostility, and violent resistance. It shows us both what the federal government could do to support newly freed people, and just how far the country still had to go before that support matched the scale of the need.

That's the story of the Freedmen's Bureau — a short-lived agency that left a legacy far bigger than its seven years in existence.

Final Project reflection

 

Summer Advantage Reflection

Looking back at the past couple of weeks during my time here at Summer Advantage, I'm very happy I made the choice to attend. I went to a very large high school where 1-on-1 support and even basic study resources were unavailable, or at best inadequate if even offered at all. The academic support here at High Point is one of the main reasons I chose to attend this smaller school. The student-to-staff ratio and the full team of success coaches and the professional development department were very impressive to me, especially coming from a school where I never had access to anything like that.

The skills I gained at Summer Advantage went beyond just studying for major tests. I also picked up small habits I never had before, like breaking assignments down into steps instead of waiting until the last minute, keeping a planner updated daily, and actually reviewing notes the same day instead of cramming right before an exam. These sound simple, but they were things nobody ever really taught me in high school.

Here at High Point, I enrolled in the Foundations for Academic Success class as well as Talking About Freedom. This was a very wise choice on my part, since Talking About Freedom is very applicable to my major, and using the skills from Foundations for Academic Success, I was able to stay on top of my work in both classes at the same time.

Going into the fall semester, I plan to actually use what I learned instead of letting it fade once the structure of Summer Advantage is gone. That means keeping up with a weekly planner, starting assignments earlier instead of waiting until they're due, and reaching out to my success coach before I start struggling instead of after. I also want to keep using the study strategies from Foundations for Academic Success, like reviewing material in smaller chunks throughout the week rather than saving everything for one long study session.

Overall, Summer Advantage gave me tools I never had access to before, and I feel a lot more prepared walking into the fall semester because of it.

Brown V board of education

 May it please the Court.

I represent the Board of Education of Topeka, and I want to be direct about what is — and is not — before you today. This case is not about whether segregation feels fair. It is about whether it is lawful. And on that question, this Court has spoken clearly, consistently, and repeatedly for fifty-eight years.

In 1896, this Court decided Plessy versus Ferguson. It held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees legal equality — equal standing before the law — not enforced social mixing. Justice Brown wrote that laws separating the races do not, by themselves, brand either race as inferior. If a stigma is felt, he wrote, it exists only because one side chooses to read it that way — not because the statute commands it. That is not my opinion, Your Honors. That is fifty-eight years of controlling precedent.

And Plessy did not stand alone. Three years later, in Cumming versus Richmond County Board of Education, this Court refused to interfere with a local school board's decisions about which schools to fund and operate — holding that the administration of public education is a matter for local authorities, not federal courts. In 1908, in Berea College versus Kentucky, this Court went further still, upholding a state's power to require separation even in private institutions. And in 1927, in Gong Lum versus Rice, this Court applied that same rule to a Chinese-American schoolgirl in Mississippi, writing that the question of school assignment "has been many times decided" to rest within state authority.

Four cases. Six decades. Every one of them reaching the same conclusion: separate facilities, equally provided, satisfy the Constitution. That is not a fringe theory, counsel — that is settled law.

Now, my colleagues will ask you to look past that precedent, to studies of children and dolls, to sociology and psychology, to how segregation makes a child feel. Your Honors, I ask you — since when does this Court decide constitutional questions by social science rather than by the text these thirty-eight states ratified? The Fourteenth Amendment's framers themselves maintained segregated schools in the District of Columbia. If the amendment's own authors did not understand it to prohibit separate schooling, what warrant does this Court have, ninety years later, to discover that meaning now?

This is not a question of whether segregation is wise policy. Reasonable people, even members of this Court, may disagree about that. But wisdom is not this Court's business. That question belongs to the elected legislatures of Kansas, of South Carolina, of Virginia — bodies accountable to voters, not to nine appointed judges. If the people of this country have concluded that the era of separate schooling should end, the Constitution gives them a clear path: the amendment process, or their state legislatures. It does not give that power to this Court.

What the plaintiffs ask you to do today is not to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment — it is to rewrite it. To discard six decades of settled precedent, precedent this Court itself built case by case, on the strength of a psychologist's inkblots and dolls rather than the words the framers wrote.

We ask this Court to do what courts are built to do: apply the law as it stands, respect its own precedent, and leave to the legislatures the policy judgments the Constitution reserves for them.

Plessy was right in 1896. Nothing has changed the text of the Fourteenth Amendment since. And nothing before this Court today justifies casting aside fifty-eight years of settled law.

Thank you.

Gone With The Wind

 I knew the basics of this movie, cause I've seen it when I was a kid. But watching it again in college, with some background info on the time period, really changed my view.

It was way more interesting than I remembered. What stuck with me was how the women in the story are the only ones who make sense. Whether they're on one side or another, they're all saying the same thing: the war needs to end. Then the fighting starts, and everything starts to fall apart.

Scarlett isn't suddenly all tough and in charge, she has to be. There's no food, no money, and all the men are gone. She has to pick cotton by hand and even marry for money instead of love.

And run a business in a world that says women aren't supposed to. She doesn't do these things because she wants her freedom, she has to. Poverty and debt and a broken society leave her no other choice. She's doing things that a "good" Southern belle wouldn't do. That makes me wonder if this is really a story about women getting free, or if it's about being forced into a new life.

Lots of times in history, like during both WWs, women took over jobs and did work we thought was for men. But when the men came back, many of those women lost their jobs. I think this movie is more complicated than just "women should be free". It even seems a bit mad at Scarlett for where she ends up, which is alone because she drove away the people who cared about her.

Interestingly, the article about the Civil War I read also talked about how the war let enslaved families see each other for the first time in years.

That's a big part of what really happened. But the movie doesn't show that.

The two black house slaves, Mammy and Prissy, are just there to help Scarlett. They don't have their own lives. It made me think of a comment from my high school AP History class. We only spent like two days on the whole of Reconstruction. Our teacher said Hollywood likes the old South more than actual historians do. At the time, I didn't get what he meant. Now I do.

Eight values of freedom

 Talking about the right to free speech can be complicated. Many of us tend to think of it as a single, simple idea, you either have it or you don't. But experts on the law and the people who founded our country originally broke this down into a number of separate ideas. Each one explains why our society fights to protect this right. Looking at these different reasons has made it clear to me that when we argue about free speech, we're not always on about the same thing. One of the oldest ideas is based on the idea that there should be a "marketplace of ideas". That's where John Milton said that if you let people print whatever they want without getting permission first, then the true ideas will eventually come out on top after fighting with the false ones.https://americanaffairsjournal.org

 A few hundred years later, another person, Alexander Meiklejohn, said that for a democracy to work, the people who are running for office and those who are supporting them have to be able to say what they think. Otherwise, the people won't be able to make good choices at the ballot box. Another man, Spinoza, suggested a similar but slightly more realistic reason. He said that if we allow people to express their anger and frustration, it will actually make our society more stable than if they were to fester in secret. 

Also, this lets the government notice any groups that might be planning something and could potentially cause trouble. Some of the other main reasons for protecting free speech have more to do with the individual than with the good of the whole. One of these is that it's a key part of who we are and how we develop our sense of self. When we express ourselves, we find others who are like us and that helps us feel more like a complete person. 

A second one is that a free press and media helps us expose when those in power are doing something wrong. We saw this during the Watergate scandal, for example.https://www.britannica.com/event/Watergate-Scandal And a third is that by allowing and listening to things we don't agree with, we actually become a more accepting and open-minded society. We learn why these views are not okay and so we don't just avoid them. Finally by giving people the right to express themselves, we encourage new and different forms of art and other creative pursuits. And lastly, free speech is also about ensuring that the government doesn't act like a tyrant. 

Our system isn't supposed to be run by the majority, the First Amendment exists to make sure that anyone who disagrees with the government has a right to say so and is even obligated to do so in order to be a good citizen. So these 8 different reasons show that there are many good reasons to support the idea of free speech.

Reconstruction documentary reflection

 

Watching Reconstruction: America After the Civil War changed how I think about the years following the Civil War. I always knew Reconstruction happened, but I never grasped just how radical it actually was.

When Lee surrendered in 1865, it didn't just end the war. It ended slavery and opened the door to something the country had never attempted before.

Congress stepped in and took control of Reconstruction, and the results were staggering. At the end of the war, roughly 90 percent of Black men in the South were still enslaved. Just two years later, 80 percent of them had voted. Formerly enslaved men who couldn't read or write were casting ballots and helping decide the direction of the country. 

That's not a small footnote in history. That's a revitalization of American democracy itself.

One detail that stuck with me was learning that every Southern state actually voted for Ulysses S. Grant. The documentary explains this wasn't a fluke. Around 500,000 newly freed Black men voted in that election, and over the following years, sixteen Black men were elected to Congress, including two senators. For former Confederates, it was described as nothing short of a nightmare https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/publications

But progress didn't hold.

The documentary points to the Panic of 1873 as a turning point, and honestly, this was the part that interested me most. Support for Reconstruction weakened, and Democrats slowly clawed back power across Congress and the South.

Then came the disputed election of 1876. The documentary notes that both leading candidates that year had already pledged to end Reconstruction, sealing its fate before votes were even counted.

What followed was devastating. Jim Crow laws spread. Sharecropping, convict leasing, and lynching became tools of control. Southern propaganda rewrote the war's history.

Still, Black Americans pushed back through migration, journalism, and leaders like Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington.

Gates calls Reconstruction "unfinished." After watching this, I understand why.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. ends the documentary by calling Reconstruction "unfinished." After watching this, I understand exactly what he means. Its impact still echoes through American life today.https://csis.upenn.edu/independent-learning

Ai Disclosure: In this assignment I was assisted by AI to summarize my notes taken on the documentary into sentences. All information provided to Claude was written by me and it even gave first person accounts. After Claude had generated my summary I edited its work adding links and fixing basic errors.

Anti-Slavery speech: Speaking as the Grimke sisters

Script for Grimke sisters speech 

Good evening. My name is Sarah Moore Grimké, of Charleston, South Carolina — though I no longer call it home, and I no longer stay silent about why.

Let me ask this room something before I go further. How many of you have grown up around something you knew was wrong, but everyone around you called normal?

I was born in 1792 into a family that owned enslaved people. My father was one of Charleston's most respected judges. Growing up in that house, I watched what slavery did, every single day, to the people forced to serve us. No one in my family ever suggested the arrangement was open to question. I had to come to that conclusion entirely on my own.

In 1819, I traveled to Philadelphia with my dying father, and there I encountered Quakers who spoke plainly about slavery as a moral catastrophe — the first people I had ever heard say it aloud. I left Charleston permanently in 1821. My younger sister Angelina, who I had helped raise, reached the same conclusion and joined me there in 1829. Most abolitionists in the North had never lived a single day inside a slaveholding household. I had lived nearly thirty years inside one. That is what I carried north with me — not theory, but memory.

Now — what would you do, once you believed something that strongly, and you'd just left the only home you'd known?

I wrote. In 1836, I published An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, appealing directly to the ministers of my home region to renounce slavery as a sin against scripture and against man. That same year, my sister published her own appeal — to the Christian women of the South — urging them to read, to pray, and to act against the system that sustained their households. When copies reached Charleston, the postmaster burned them in the street rather than let our own neighbors read them.

Writing was not enough. In 1836, we joined the American Anti-Slavery Society as its first female agents, trained to speak publicly for the cause. We began in parlors, addressing small groups of women — but the demand for what we knew, as Southerners who had lived inside slavery, grew too large to contain. By 1837, we were speaking to audiences of thousands across New England, testifying to what we had witnessed with our own eyes: not slavery as an abstraction, but as a daily, deliberate cruelty.

Ask yourselves — why did our testimony matter more than a Northern abolitionist's speech? Because we could not be accused of imagining it. We had grown up inside it. No pamphlet, no secondhand account, could be dismissed as easily as our own witness could not.

In 1839, together with Angelina and her husband Theodore Weld, I helped compile American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses — a documentation of slavery's brutality built entirely from the American South's own newspapers, so that no one could claim we had exaggerated a single line. It became one of the most widely read anti-slavery texts of its time, and Harriet Beecher Stowe read it before writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, later drawing on it heavily for her 1853 companion volume, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. A pamphlet built from slaveholders' own words, in slaveholders' own newspapers, went on to shape one of the most widely read novels in the world. That is what testimony can do, when enough of it accumulates that it can no longer be waved away.

I lived to be nearly eighty years old, and I spent almost every one of those years after Philadelphia working toward a single goal: the end of slavery in this country. I did not live to see it fully undone, in every sense — no one who fought this fight in my generation did. We did not have the comfort of knowing, while we were in it, that our side would win.

So I'll leave you with the question I started with. When you are standing in a house built on something cruel and ordinary — what will it take for you to say so out loud?

Thank you.

Bible Slavery Challenge

 The Bible and Slavery

In the New Testament slavery is not directly condemned however this cannot be used to justify it, Countless stories and books in the Bible speak on equality among all. 

One of the main Judeo-Christian values taken from the Bible is the golden rule, Which essentially states to "treat others how you wish to be treated. To be in support of slavery, and even to justify It in the past is a direct violation of Christs golden rule. Another scripture that comes into play is the Exodus story, When God's intervention against the enslavement of the Israeli people in Egypt was A direct act against slavery stated in the Bible. https://www.str.org/w/is-the-bible-pro-slavery

In conclusion although the Bible does not directly condemn Slavery, I believe the statements about equality among all people and acts of God directly against slavery, The golden rule, and countless stories are evidence enough that the Bible condemns the enslavement of other Human beings.

Taking a look at other arguments

Me and my partner were tasked with arguing both sides of this point in order to get A strong middle ground of the point presented. The Bible does contain many references to slavery which is a common practice In the course of human history Slavery was a typical fetcher of Civilization practiced and it existed in most societies throughout history. https://www.internationalstandardbible.com/S/slave-slavery.html Biblical text outline sources and the legal status of slaves and economic roles of slavery the Bible agrees to the treatment of slaves especially in the old testament their are also references to slavery in the New Testament and the Jewish cultures there are some practices rehashing from slavery It was necessary for those who owned slaves then especially in the large numbers to be wealthy because the masters had to pay taxes for the jewish and non jewish slaves because they were considered part of the family unit also Debt slaves were one of the most tow categories of slaves in jewish society these individuals sold themselves into slavery in order to pay off debts they might accrue.https://www.jstor.org/stable/2561014

Supreme Court Reflection

                

Overview of the Supreme Court

Intro to the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court is the most powerful in the world, 

their main purpose being interpreting the constitution around issues in the United

States. The Supreme Court Justices are the most qualified Judges in the United 

States appointed by the President. Only the most relevant and comprehensive    

cases make it Across the desk of the Justices.

How cases are processed

The supreme court receives thousands of cases A year 

Yet only 100 are accepted.  Petitions are Brought to the         

attention of the Justices In their weekly meeting which 

typically occurs on a Friday, As said on the website.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/procedures.aspx

 For A case to reach the Supreme Court it typically passed

  through district court, and then Appellate court, then 

  select cases reach the writ of certiorari, which is the order

     given from the Supreme Court to hear a case.

 Final thoughts and Key facts                                                   

in order For A justice to be appointed they must be 

process for appointing A new judge is extraneous but

necessary in order for the highest issues in the country

to be decided by the most qualified people.