By the People | For the Children

By the People | For the Children

From Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts by Slate Podcasts

July 25, 2026 · 41 min

About this episode

This episode explores the legal battle surrounding Elizabeth Turner and the fight of Black parents for their children's freedom after the Civil War.

In 1867, an 8-year-old girl named Elizabeth Turner became the epicenter of a legal battle that would help define what freedom really meant after the Civil War. Days after Maryland abolished slavery, her former enslaver had her re-indentured under a sham "apprenticeship" law used to seize Black children. Elizabeth’s mother—and thousands of other parents—refused to accept it.  In this second episode of By the People , legal scholar Lyle Cherneff guides Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern through a Union Army general's archive of letters that documented the plight of Black parents who petitioned, marched, and filed habeas corpus claims to win their children back. These parents read the new constitutional guarantees of freedom for themselves, and demanded they be enforced, long before any Supreme Court told them what those words meant. The resulting case, In re: Turner , helped end the practice of racialized child "apprenticeship" and shaped the meaning of the 13th and 14th amendments. But the parents who fought for it were nearly written out of the story. In this episode, we seek to restore that record, tracing a direct line from their fight to ordinary Americans’ resistance…

People in this episode

Host: Dahlia Lithwick

Guests: Mark Joseph Stern, Lyle Cherneff

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Union Army, Slate

Books & works: In re: Turner

Places: Maryland

More episodes of Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts podcast page.