The Achievements of the Civil Rights Revolution—Hamilton v. Alabama: The Substance of Symbolism
Harvard Law Prof. Randall Kennedy discusses how African Americans were named and named themselves before and after emancipation up to the Civil Rights era. As part of a civil rights lecture series supported by the Robert R. Wilson Fund at Duke University he looks into the 1963 case of Hamilton v. Alabama, in which an African-American woman, Mary Hamilton, was fined and jailed after refusing to answer a prosecutor who addressed her by her first name on the witness stand rather than calling her "Mrs. Hamilton".