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Negro criminality

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The Review of Black Political Economy

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Notes

  1. Eleventh Census, “Crime, Pauperism, and Benevolence,” i: 125 and ii: 3.

  2. Hampton Negro Conference, No. 2, p. 11.

  3. Compare preceding citation from the Eleventh Census with the Tenth Census, xxi: p. 479.

  4. The serious difficulties in the way of comparing the criminal tendencies of different classes by inferences drawn from the statistics of prisoners are ably stated by R.P. Falkner, “Crime and the Census” (in Annals American Academy, January 1897). I do not believe that his objections vitiate my inferences in the guarded way in which they have been stated. While the statistics of prisoners in one way which he pointed out exaggerate the criminal tendencies of Negroes, yet a comparison between the prisoners and persons of all ages tends to understate the true criminality of a race, a disproportionate number of which are children, and so under the criminal age. These two obstacles to accuracy in quantitative statements of the amount of increase in crime thus tend to neutralize each other.

  5. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” p. 14 (in American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers, No. 2).

  6. Eleventh Census, “Crime, Pauperism, and Benevolence,” i: 163.

  7. Idem, i: 167.

  8. Eleventh Census, Abstract 122-125.

  9. Department of Agriculture, Report, 1876, p. 136.

  10. Department of Agriculture, Year Book, 1898, p. 683.

  11. Eleventh Census, Abstract, p. 40; and Population, i: 412, ff.

  12. Department of Agriculture, Year Book, 1898, p. 42, f.

  13. Eleventh Census, Abstract, 126-128.

  14. State Agricultural Society, Proceedings, Twelfth Session, p. 117 (in Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture, Biennial Report, 1898).

  15. Eleventh Census, Abstract, pp. 131–133.

  16. Southwest Louisiana on the Line of the Southern Pacific Company, pp. 45, f.

  17. State Agricultural Society, Proceedings, Twelfth Session, p. 39 (in Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture, Biennial Report, 1898).

  18. Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin 38, “Dietary Studies with Reference to the Food of the Negro in Alabama,” p. 18.

  19. Idem, p. 68.

  20. Reported in A.M.E. Zion Church Quarterly for April 1894.

  21. Southern Workman and Hampton School Record, September 1897, p. 179.

  22. Idem, p. 168.

  23. Idem, p. 167.

  24. As these pages are going to press, the preliminary report of the Third Hampton Conference brings confirmatory evidence on this point. The Committee on Business and Labor reported on the condition of Negro skilled labor in certain large cities. Of Richmond, Va., they say: “Perhaps two thousand are employed in the iron works. This branch of business was at one time controlled almost entirely by colored men, but now they are employed chiefly as common laborers, with only here and there a master mechanic.” The general trend of the report is summed up as follows: “The trade unions along the border line of slavery have generally pursued a policy of exclusiveness on account of color and refused to include the colored craftsmen in their scheme of organization.... In the North colored men, when competent, are generally received into local unions and treated fairly. In the South they work side by side, when not organized. When organization takes place, the colored workman as a rule is excluded.” Southern Workman, September 1899, pp. 333, f. Meagre evidence from other sources does not confirm the above statement so far as it applies to the attitude of Northern trade unions.

  25. The Negroes of Farmville, Va., p. 37 (in Department of Labor Bulletin, January 1898).

  26. W.J. Northern, the Negro at the South, p. 7.

  27. My information has been gleaned from a file of the Atlanta Daily Constitution, the only Atlanta daily paper of which the current issues are accessible in the Library of Congress, and from correspondents both white and colored, in the North and in the South.

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This article was originally published in the Journal of Social Science, No. 37, 1899 by the American Social Science Association.

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Willcox, W.F. Negro criminality. Rev Black Polit Econ 16, 33–45 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02900921

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