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Modern contract law is rife with ideas about race and slavery and cases involving African Americans, but that presence is very hard to see. This Article recovers a hidden history of race in contract law, from its formative era in the 1870s, through the Realist critiques of the early 1900s to the diverse intellectual movements of the 1970s and 80s. Moving beyond recent accounts of 'erasure,' and complementing Critical Race Theorists' insights about law's role in constructing, naturalizing, and justifying racial inequality, the Article offers a historically rich account of when, where, and why legal professionals have highlighted race in contract law. It positions African Americans as legal thinkers and active contributors to the development of legal rules, not just as objects of law. It shows that contracts scholars, judges, and lawyers have frequently relied on what I call ''colored' cases'--cases involving African Americans, hypotheticals and cases deploying racial metaphors and analogies, and hypotheticals and cases using theories about slavery--to develop common-law rules and to think through major doctrinal and theoretical problems in contract. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including a hand-collected sample of 9,113 civil cases heard in county-level trial courts, it offers a nuanced account of what I call 'doctrinal passing': a complex interplay between the imperatives of legal advocacy, the normal flow of 'doctrinal distillation,' and changing ideas about Black people and slavery. Again and again, ''colored' cases' enabled legal professionals to position slavery and race as exceptions within the world of contract relations: useful for theorizing issues they deemed more fundamental, yet peripheral to contract law itself and therefore liable to be stripped of their racial facts, except in the most marginal doctrinal areas. Whitening contract law enabled it to emerge as a distinct, coherent body of law but at a steep cost to its doctrinal and conceptual integrity and to the law school curriculum. The Article concludes with recommendations for modifying the structure and implicit assumptions of the law school curriculum, offers methods for identifying cases involving racial minorities, and offers suggestions about when law teachers and other legal professionals today should consider talking about race in contract law., INTRODUCTION. 1201 I. EVERYDAY USE: AFRICAN AMERICANS' ENGAGEMENT WITH CONTRACT LAW 1211 II. RACE IN LEGAL FORMALISM 1216 A. The Reconstruction Roots of Lochnerism 1216 B. The Materiality of Race. [...]

The article describes issue of divorce among African Americans from 1865 through the early years of the Great Migration and shows ways to move beyond dyads that are familiar to race relations. It is felt that migration and the Great Migration are linked with every day married life and divorce in South America.