Congratulations to Adam Walker, winner of the Norman Holmes Pearson Prize and the Percival W. Clement Prize. Each year, the American Studies department awards the Holmes Pearson for the best senior project in American Studies and the Clement Prize for the best senior thesis in support of the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the first ten amendments.
Adam’s essay examines how U.S. legal institutions in the Panama Canal Zone functioned as mechanisms of imperial governance in the mid-twentieth century. Centering the 1946 prosecution of Lester Leon Greaves, the son of West Indian migrants accused of raping a white American woman and sentenced by an all-white U.S. court to fifty years of hard labor, the project argues that Canal Zone courts translated racial hierarchy into legal outcome while sustaining the economic and administrative priorities of American empire. Situating the Greaves case within the broader history of Afro-Caribbean migration and the Black Atlantic, the thesis demonstrates how the Canal Zone’s judiciary operated through extraterritorial jurisdiction, procedural flexibility, and racialized assumptions about criminality and belonging. While scholarship on the Canal Zone has often focused on the construction era and the migration of West Indian laborers, this project shifts attention to the decades after 1914, when legal institutions continued to regulate Afro-Caribbean communities living under U.S. authority. Drawing on court records, executive orders, newspapers, and legal archives, the thesis traces how the Canal Zone’s courts evolved from executive rule into a federalized judicial system designed to discipline labor, regulate mobility, and stabilize the racialized workforce essential to canal operations. Ultimately, the project argues that the U.S. authority in the Canal Zone depended not only on territorial control but on legal institutions capable of enforcing racial order and managing imperial political economy across the Atlantic world.