[Brenda Ferrell Sampsel]

I was trying to get caught up on my reading here at the forum & was checking out the Thacker posts when I noticed Forest’s comment about Thacker v. Hawk. Found an article that discusses the case some, along with another interesting case. Would like to find the original case on line. Has anyone else found these cases yet?

Brenda

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/State01.htm

“From: Jonathan L. Entin , AN OHIO DILEMMA: RACE, EQUAL PROTECTION, AND THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF A STATE BILL OF RIGHTS , 51 Cleveland State Law Review 395 -413 (2004)(148Footnotes)”

“….Voting cases first reached the court in 1842. In Jeffries v. Ankeny, the court held that a man who was one-quarter Indian and three-quarters white was a lawful voter. Chief Justice Lane observed that “many persons of the precise breed of this plaintiff,” including the current clerk of the Ohio Supreme Court, had “exercised political privileges … and worthily discharged the duties of officers.” Although Gray had involved the construction of a statute involving African Americans rather than the interpretation of a constitutional provision and the present case involved American Indians, the court found the reasoning of the earlier case persuasive. If a person who was more white than black could be white, so could a person who was more white than Indian in ancestry. In Thacker v. Hawk, a case decided the same day, the court explicitly rejected the one-drop rule for voting. A man who was partly black and partly white argued that he had been wrongly prevented from voting. He invoked Gray, but the trial court instructed the jury to find against him “if the plaintiff have any negro [sic] blood whatever.” Chief Justice Lane dispatched the issue in a single sentence, saying only that the “charge was wrong, and judgment must be reversed.”

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