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Notes
This tradition was referred to in Chapter 20, Section 2, as a main reason why the vote, or the lack of the vote, is of such paramount importance for the Negro people.
“In many a small town and city [of the South], the mayor and councilmen offer for election with a complete list of police and other public officers.” Arthur Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study (1940), p. 14.
A shift from election to appointment of court and policy officials would also be expected to increase efficiency, reduce corruption, and raise the level of the persons appointed. This would tend to occur if appointments were made under the civil service system and generally even if the higher appointments were made directly by the governor of the state.
Willis D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson,Race Relations (1934), p. 61.
W.E.B. DuBois,The Souls of Black Folk (1903), p. 176.
As early as 1904, Murphy recognized the “morbid and exaggerated solidarity” among Negroes against the white agencies of justice as the “blind moving of the instinct of self-protection.” (Edgar Gardner Murphy,Problems of the Present South (1909; first edition, 1904), p. 174. Weatherford observes how the reaction breaks down “... one of the most powerful deterrents of crime; namely, the loss of status among those who are of the same class as the possible criminal.” (Weatherford and Johnson,op. cit., p. 430) The Negro spokesmen generally do not deny the charges against their people of being inclined to shield criminals of their own race. But they unanimously point to the defects in the working of justice as the explanation: “The Negro feels that he cannot expect justice from Southern courts where white and black are involved. In his mind accusation is equivalent to condemnation.... The very spirit in which, he feels, the law is administered makes it difficult for the colored citizen to exercise cheerful co-operation and acquiescence.” (Kelly Miller,Race Adjustment [1908], p. 79) Robert R. Moton, a most conservative Negro educator and leader, writes in the same vein: In the light of these facts [the attitudes and activities against the Negro in the First World War] it ought not be difficult to understand why the reproach is so often hurled at the Negro that he does not cooperate with officers of the law in apprehending criminals and those accused of crime. To the Negro the law where these practices obtain appears not as an instrument of justice, but as an instrument of persecution; government is simply white society organized to keep the Negro down; and the officers of the law are its agents authorized to wreak upon the helpless offender the contempt, the indignation, and the vengeance that outraged law and order feels when stimulated by prejudice. There is no such hue and cry over crime when the victim is a Negro and the perpetrator either white or black as when the victim is white and the suspect is black or supposed to be black.(What the Negro Thinks (1929), pp. 154-155. and: The Negro knows, perhaps better than he knows any else, that his chances of securing justice in the courts in those sections of the country where discrimination is in other things legal and common are so slim that in most instances he has nothing to gain by resorting to the courts even for litigation with members of his own race; while it is accepted by most as a foregone conclusion that no court anywhere will render a judgment against a white man in favour of a Negro plaintiff. A Negro defendant may occassionally get a favourable judgment as against a white plaintiff, but the reverse is a far more frequent possibility, so much so that a Negro very rarely brings suit against a white man for any cause in those states where relations between the two races are more or less strained. It is figured that to do so will involve a man in fruitless litigation, with the original loss augmented by the cost of the action. In spite of all the injustices and abuses from which Negroes suffer, one seldom hears of a court action brought by Negroes against any white person in our Southern states.” (Moton,op. cit., pp. 141-142.) A recent investigator of a Southern community, Hortense Powdermaker, testifies concerning the attitudes among the Negroes: ... many of the Negroes have long since concluded that their best course is to keep clear of legal complications wherever possible. To go to court for any cause would be to solicit more trouble than the matter at issue might be worth. Since no Negro can expect to find justice by due process of law, it is better in the long run to suffer one’s loss—or to adjust it oneself. From this angle, the ‘lawlessness’ sometimes ascribed to the Negro may be viewed as being rather his private and individual ‘law enforcement’faute de mieux. The feeling against going to court has in it an element of race-solidarity. Some Negroes will criticize one of the race who takelegal action against another Negro. Such criticism is part of a definite countercurrent against the still prevalent tendency to take one’s troubles to a white man.After Freedom (1939), p. 126. On this point, the Southern white liberals—who, in this region, have to defend the principle of legality, since conservatism there is married to the tradition of illegality—agree without reservation with the Negro leaders. Baker reported this more than thirty years ago. One of the Southern liberals told him frankly: “We complain that the Negroes will not help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for this is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give him that, above all things.” (Ray Stannard Baker,Following the Color Line (1908), p. 49. The statement was made by a Mr. Hopkins, leader of the Civil League of Atlanta, composed of the foremost white citizens of that city.) Woofter eloquently expresses the view of Southern liberalism today when he says: In the successful adjustment of the legal relationships of the two races democracy is vitally involved. The right to a fair trial by an impartial jury of peers is one of the bed-rocks upon which freedom rests, and if it cannot be preserved when the courts serve races, then democracy itself rests on quicksand. The problem of legal justice is, therefore, fully as important to the white race as to the Negro race. Any tendency to weaken the feeling that the court system is entirely impartial, unaffected by passion or prejudice, and meticulously just, or any tendency to strengthen the feeling that the court can be biased or made the instrument of a particular class, is a tendency which may wreck society. (T.J. Woofter, Jr.,The Basis of Racial Adjustment (1925), p. 125.
One reason for this is that these persons are usually aware that their practice is inconsistent with their best ideals. Another reason is that such a disproportionately large part of the intellectuals of the region are liberals. (See Chapter 31, Section 5.)
For example, Robert A. Warner describes the situation in New Haven, Connecticut in these terms: Only occasionally are justice betrayed and the colored people robbed of the protection of the law, when the judges of the city court suspect acts of violence in which Negroes are involved are simple assualts. One such case was appealed to Criminal Superior Court successfully. A white man, drunk, was surprised in the act of stealing the car of a reputable Negro couple. When they chased and overtook him, he slashed the woman so severely that a blood transfusion was necessary to save her life. The city court disposed of the case with a cursory $25 fine and costs for breach of the peace, and suspended judgments or penalties for the motor vehicle violations involved. The higher court gave the miscreant a deserved year in jail.”(New Haven Negroes [1940], p. 224.)
See Chapter 27, Section 5.
See Chapter 44, Section 2.
See Chapter 29, Section 4.
The classic case study on this subject is the survey undertaken by The Chicago Commission on Race Relations. (The Negro in Chicago [1922].)
In Detroit a federal housing project, the Sojourner Truth Homes, was the scene of a riot between whites and Negroes. The project was designed for Negro defense workers. On the day set for occupancy, February 28, whites who lived nearby picketed the project. Moving vans containing the furniture of prospective Negro tenants were stopped. When one van tried to pass the line, the white men climbed all over the truck; a stone was thrown, hitting a Negro driver. Then mounted police charged in.Life magazine reports: “Cops charged down on Negro sympathizers of excluded tenants. Police devoted most attention to Negroes, made no effort to open picket lines for vans. Said one inspector: ‘It would be suicide if we used our sticks on any of them [the whites].’”(Life [March 16, 1942], pp. 40-41.)
Henry Hill Collins, Jr.,America’s Own Refugees (1941), p. 156. See also, David W. Anthony, “The Cranbury Terror Case.,”The Crisis (October, 1939), pp. 295-296.
Of 1,247 Negro lawyers, judges, and justices reported in the United States in 1930, only 436 were from the whole South, where over three-fourths of the Negro population were concentrated. (U.S. Bureau of the Census,Negroes in the United States: 1920–1932, pp. 9 and 293.)
E. Franklin Frazier,Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), pp. 34-35 and 169.
In preparing this section, we have relied most heavily on an unpublished manuscript prepared for this study: Guy B. Johnson and Louise K. Kiser, “The Negro and Crime” (1940). A part of this study was incorporated in an article by Guy B. Johnson, “The Negro and Crime,”The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (September, 1941), pp. 93-104.
U.S. Bureau of the Census,Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890, “Crime, Pauperism, and Benevolence,” Vol. I, p. 126.
See Guy B. Johnson and Louise K. Kiser, “The Negro and Crime,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study (1940), pp. 65 and 291 ff.
Ibid., p. 95. A similar criticism of Negro crime statistics is given by one of the nation’s leading students of crime: Conclusions have been reached that the Negro is responsible for a ‘larger proportionate share of crime’; and that ‘the Negro crime rate as measured by all comparative records is greater than that of the white.’... The data hitherto compiled from the sources discussed, permit only one conclusion, namely, that the Negro appears to be arrested, convicted and committed to penal institutions more frequently than the white. Any other conclusion would be based on the assumption that commitments to the total number of offenses actually committed is the same in both groups. This assumption is untenable, for there are specific factors which seriously distort the arrest, conviction and commitment rates for Negroes without affecting these rates for whites in a similar manner. No measurement has as yet been devised for the evaluation of these factors.” (Thorsten Sellin, “The Negro and the Problem of Law and Observance and Administration in the Light of Social Research,” in Charles S. Johnson,The Negro in American Civilization [1930], p. 447.)
“Negro Criminality,”Journal of Social Science (December, 1899), pp. 78-98.
Edwin H. Sutherland, “White-Collar Criminality,”American Sociological Review (February, 1940), pp. 1–12.
Quantitative evidence for this and the following paragraphs may be found not only in Part VI of this book, but also in Johnson and Kiser,op. cit., 65-192.
Johnson and Kiser,op. cit., p. 347. There are other ways in which white criminals divert suspicion from themselves to Negroes; seeibid., pp. 345-348.
After making a special analysis of some statistics on homicides in the South collected for this study by George K. Brown, A.J. Jaffe concludes: “It appears statistically significant that a Negro who murders a white man receives a much suffer penalty than if he murders a Negro. On the other hand, a white man can murder another white man with about the same (or perhaps even more) impunity as one Negro can murder another. Also a white can murder a Negro with relative freedom from punishment.” (Unpublished memorandum prepared for this study [August 19, 1940]). Brown’s data are in Appendix B of Johnson and Kiser,op. cit., Johnson and Kiser also present some data which further corroborate this point; seeibid., pp.358-362 and Appendix D. Independently, Powdermaker has presented some similar data for Mississippi(op cit., pp. 395-396). With respect to parole and probation, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported: “It is quite apparent... that Negroes remain in the institutions to the expiration of their sentence in much greater proportions than do whites.”(Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories: 1939 [1941]m p.. 43.) With respect to length of prison term, it reported: “... among the State prisoners, the Negroes generally served longer periods of time than did the whites.... It is quite apparent that whites served less time than Negroes in the Southern States, for murder, manslaughter, burglary, forgery, rape and other sex offenses. The whites serve a little longer for aggravated assault, and for larceny ... [and] for auto theft.” (Ibid., p. 70). The Detroit survey reported similar findings: The Detroit survey disclosed that of the number of whites convicted of felonies 13.5 per cent were given the alternative of a fine or a prison sentence while only 7.1 per cent of the Negro felons were so favored. Over 12 per cent of the white defendants were placed on probation as compared with 7.2 per cent Negroes. Similar disproportions were revealed in the number of suspended sentences. The Detroit Survey is typical of situations throughout our state jurisdictions.” (Nathaniel Cantor, “Crime and the Negro,”The Journal of Negro History [January, 1931], p. 63.)
E. Franklin Frazier, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,”The Forum (June, 1927), p. 860.
Johnson and Kiser,op. cit., 411–412.
Interview (November 18, 1942).
Johnson and Kiser,op. cit., pp. 258–263.
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Myrdal, G. Inequality of justice. Rev Black Polit Econ 16, 81–98 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02900925
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02900925