CRIME AND ITS PENALTIES
Sitting one night in the writing room of a country hotel in South
Carolina, a young man opposite, with a face as smooth as a baby's and as
pretty as a girl's, volunteered to tell where he had just been, a
discreditable tale. It soon developed that his business was the sale of
goods on instalments, chiefly to Negroes, and that in that little town of
Florence he had no less than five hundred and ninety transactions then
going on; that his profits were about fifty per cent on his sales; that
nineteen twentieths of the transactions would be paid up; but that
sometimes he had a little trouble in making collections.
"For instance, only yesterday," said he, "I went to a nigger woman's house
where they had bought two skirt patterns. When I knocked at the door, a
little girl came, and she says: 'Mammy ain't to home,' says she, but I
walked right in, and there was a bigger girl, who says, 'Mamma has gone
down street,' but I says, 'I know better than that, you ---- nigger!' And
I pushed right into the kitchen, and there she was behind the door, and I
walked right up to her, and I says, 'Do you think I'll allow you to teach
that innocent child to lie, you ---- nigger? I'll show you,' says I; and I
hit her a couple of good ones right in the face. She come back at me with
a kind of an undercut right under the jaw. I knew it wouldn't do any good
to hit her on the head, but I landed a solid one in the middle of her
nose; and I made those women go and get those skirts and give them up
before I left the place."
Once entered on these agreeable reminiscences, he went on in language the
tenor of which is fortified by a memorandum made at the time. "But that
isn't a circumstance to what happened three weeks ago last Tuesday.
There's a nigger in this town that bought a cravenette coat from us for
thirteen dollars and a half. It costs us about nine dollars, but he only
paid instalments of four and a half, and then, for about six months, he
dodged me; but my brother and I saw him on the street, and I jumped out of
the buggy before he could run away, and says I, 'I want you to pay for
that coat.' He had it on. He says, 'I hain't got any money.' Says it
sarcastic-like. Well, of course I wouldn't take any lip from a nigger like
that, and I sailed right in. I hit him between the eyes, and he up with a
shovel and lambasted me with the flat of it right between the
shoulder-blades, but I could have got away with him all right if his wife
hadn't have come up with a piece of board and caught me on the side; my
brother jumped right out of the buggy, and he hit her square and knocked
her down, and we had a regular mix-up. We got the coat, and when we came
away, we left the man lying senseless on the ground." "But don't those
people ever get out warrants against you?" "Warrants against me, I guess
not! I lay in bed five days, and when I got up, my brother and I swore out
warrants against the nigger and his wife. We brought them up in court and
the judge fined them forty-seven dollars, and he says to me, 'All the
fault I find with you is that you didn't kill the double adjective
nigger. He's the worst nigger in town!'"
With all allowances for the lies visibly admixed in this unpleasant tale,
it undoubtedly lifts the cover off a kind of thing that goes on every day
between the superior and the inferior races. On the one side stand the
negro customers, shiftless, extravagant, slinking away from their debts,
yet doubtless afterward puffed with pride to be able to boast that they
had a knock-down fight with a white man and were not shot; the other actor
in this drama of race hatred could not even claim to be a Poor White; he
was the son of a traveling man, had some education, was successful above
the average, and until he began to talk about himself might for a few
minutes have passed as a gentleman; yet to save a loss of less than five
dollars, and to assert his superiority of race, he was perfectly willing
to put himself on the level of the lowest Negro, and to engage in
fisticuffs with a woman.
It is not to be supposed that this thoroughgoing blackguard is a spokesman
for the whole South, or that every local court inflicts a heavy penalty
upon black people for the crime of having been thrashed by a white man.
The story simply illustrates a feeling toward the Negroes which is
widespread and potent among a considerable class of Whites; and it bears
witness also to a disposition to settle difficulties between members of
the two races by the logic of hard fists. It is a lurid example of race
antagonism.
No section of the Union has a monopoly of violence or injustice. Men as
coarse and brutal as the man encountered in South Carolina could probably
be found in every Northern city. Homicides are no novelty in any state in
the Union, and it is as serious for a Northern crowd to put a man to death
because somebody calls him "Scab" as for an equally tigerish Southern mob
to burn a Negro because he has killed a white man. The annals of strikes
are almost as full of ferocity as the annals of lynching, and it would be
hard to find anything worse than the murder, in 1907, of some watchmen in
New York City who were thrown down a building by striking workmen, who
were allowed by the police to leave the building, and were never brought
to justice.
Nevertheless, there is in the North a strong impression that crime is on a
different footing in the South; that assaults, affrays, and homicides are
more frequent; that the South has a larger crime record than seems
reconcilable with its numerous churches, its moral standards, and its
fairly good state and city governments. Light may be thrown on the problem
of race relations by inquiring whether the South is as much shocked by
certain kinds of crime and violence as the North, whether a criminal is as
likely to be tried and convicted, whether the superior race, by its
practice in such matters, is setting before the inferior race a high
standard of conduct.
Statistics indicate that in desperate crimes against the person, and
especially in murder, the South far surpasses other civilized countries,
and other parts of the United States. In London, with a population of
6,500,000, there were in a year 24 homicides; 4 of the criminals committed
suicide, and the 20 others were brought to justice. In New York City, with
about two thirds the population of London, there were 331 homicides with
only 61 indictments and 46 convictions. In the state of South Carolina,
with a population about one third that of New York City, there were 222
homicides in a year, and not a single execution of a white man.
Popular phrases and the press in the South habitually put a gloss upon
many of these crimes by calling them "duels"; but a careful study of
newspaper cuttings shows that the old-fashioned affairs of honor with
seconds and exactly similar weapons, measured distance, and the word to
fire, have almost disappeared. Nearly all the affrays in which the
murdered man is conscious of his danger are simply street fights, in which
each man lodges in the body of the other as many shots as he can before he
himself sinks down wounded. It can hardly be considered an affair of honor
when Mr. John D. Twiggs, of Albany, Ga., walks through the streets with a
shotgun loaded with buckshot, looking for Mr. J. B. Palmer, who has gone
home to arm himself.
Even this uneven kind of warfare is less frequent than the outright
assassination of one white man by another. Where was Southern chivalry
when Gonzales, the editor of the _Columbia State_, was in 1902 killed in
the open street before he could draw his pistol, by Lieutenant-Governor
Tillman of South Carolina, about whom the editor had been telling
unpleasant truths? Where do you find the high-toned Southern gentleman
when a man walks up to a total stranger, seizes him, and with the remark,
"You are the man who wanted to fight me last night," plunges his knife
into the victim's back. The newspapers are full of the shooting of men
through windows, of their disappearance on lonely roads, of the terror
that walketh by night, and the pestilence that waiteth at noonday.
Then there are the numerous murders of friend by friend, on all kinds of
frivolous occasions; a man trespasses on another man's land, goes to
apologize, and is shot; another makes a joke which his friend does not
appreciate, and there is nothing for it but pistols. The feeling that a
man must assert his dignity at the end of a revolver was revealed in New
Orleans in 1908 when Inspector Whittaker, head of the police, with five of
his men, walked into the office of the _New Orleans World_, which had
criticised his enforcement of the liquor laws, struck the editor in the
face and several times shot at him. After he had taken such pains to
vindicate the majesty of the law, it seems a hardship that his superiors
compelled the Inspector to resign. There is hardly a part of the civilized
world where homicide is so common as in the South, and the crime is quite
as frequent in the cities as in the back country. Pitched battles by white
men with policemen and with sheriffs are not uncommon; and sometimes three
or four bodies are picked up after such a fight.
In many ways this unhappy state of things is a survival of frontier
practices which once were common in the Northwest as well as in the South,
but which have nearly disappeared there as civilization has advanced; but
in the South there is a special element of lawlessness through the
Negroes. One of the few advantages of slavery was that every slaveholder
was police officer and judge and jury on his own plantation; petty
offenses were punished by the overseer without further ceremony, serious
crimes were easily dealt with, and the escape of the criminal was nearly
impossible.
Freedom, with its opportunity of moving about, with its greatly enlarged
area of disputes among the blacks, and between Whites and Negroes, has
combined with the influence of the press in popularizing crime, and
perhaps with an innate African savagery, to make the black criminal a
terrible scourge in the South. To begin with the less serious offenses,
there is no doubt that the Negro has a very imperfect realization of
property rights, partly because of the training of slavery. The vague
feeling that whatever belonged to the plantation was for the enjoyment of
those who lived on the plantation is deliciously expressed by Paul Dunbar:
Folks ain't got no right to censuah othah folks about dey habits;
Him dat giv' de squir'ls de bushtails made de bobtails fu' de rabbits.
Him dat built de gread big mountains hollered out de little valleys,
Him dat made de streets an' driveways wasn't 'shamed to make de alleys.
We is all constructed diff'ent, d' ain't no two of us de same;
We cain't he'p ouah likes an' dislikes, ef we'se bad we ain't to blame.
If we'se good, we needn't show off, 'case you bet it ain't ouah doin'
We gits into su'ttain channels dat we jes' cain't he'p pu'suin'.
But we all fits into places dat no othah ones could fill,
An' we does the things we has to, big er little, good er ill.
John cain't tek de place o' Henry, Su an' Sally ain't alike;
Bass ain't nuthin' like a suckah, chub ain't nuthin' like a pike.
When you come to think about it, how it's all planned out, it's splendid.
Nuthin's done er evah happens, 'dout hit's somefin' dat's intended;
Don't keer whut you does, you has to, an' hit sholy beats de dickens,--
Viney, go put on de kittle, I got one o' mastah's chickens.
Not so genial is the usual relation of Negro with Negro; both in town and
city there is an amount of crude and savage violence of which the outside
world knows little, and in which women freely engage. Jealousy is a
frequent cause of fights and murders; and whisky is so potent an excitant
that many competent observers assert that whisky and cocaine are at the
bottom of almost all serious negro crimes. Practically every negro man
carries a revolver and many of them bear knives or razors; hence, once
engaged in a fracas, nobody knows what will happen. A woman describing a
trouble in which a man shot her brother was chiefly aggrieved because "Two
ladies jumped on me and one lady bit me." There is constant negro violence
against the Whites, and they occasionally engage in pitched battles with
white gangs.
Here, as in so many other respects, even well-informed people run to
exaggeration. Thus President Winston, of the North Carolina Agricultural
College, declares in public that the Negroes are the most criminal element
in the population, and are more criminal in freedom than in slavery (both
of which propositions are indisputable); that "the negro is increasing in
criminality with fearful rapidity"; that "the negroes who can read and
write are more criminal than the illiterate"; that they are nearly three
times as criminal in the Northeast as in the South; that they are more
criminal than the white class, and that "more than seven tenths of the
negro criminals are under thirty years of age." This statement, like
almost all the discussions of criminal statistics, ignores the important
point that as communities improve, acts formerly not covered by the law
become statutory crimes; and hence that the more civilized a state the
more likely it is that criminals will be convicted, and the larger will be
the apparent proportion of criminals. In Connecticut are enumerated 68
white juvenile delinquents to 100,000 people, in Georgia only four, but
the Georgia boys are not seventeen times as good as their brothers in the
Northern state. It further overlooks the fact that most criminals of all
races are under thirty years of age, for crime is the accompaniment of
youth with white men as with Negroes.
To say that the Negroes furnish more than their proportion of criminals is
no more than to say that the lowest element in the population has the
lowest and most criminal members. The excessive criminality of the
Negroes, which is marked in all the states of the Union, is of course a
mark of their average inferiority, and a measure of the difficulty of
bringing them up to a high standard; and the proportion is often
exaggerated. In South Carolina where the Negroes are three fifths of the
population they furnish only four fifths of the convicts. As for the
assertion that the educated Negroes are specially criminal, the statement
is contradicted by the records of the large institutions of negro
education, and by the experience of thousands of people. Education does
not necessarily make virtue, but it is a safeguard. As a matter of fact,
white Southerners in general know little of the lives or motives of
thousands of the immense noncriminal class of Negroes, with whom they have
no personal relations; but are wide awake to the iniquities of the
educated men who fall into crime.
The experience of two centuries shows that the Negroes are not drawn to
crimes requiring previous organization and preparation; no slave
insurrection has ever been a success within the boundaries of the United
States; and blacks are rarely found in gangs of bandits. The incendiarism
of which there is now so much complaint is probably the expression of
individual vengeance. The Negroes, according to the testimony of those
nearest to them, are inveterate gamblers, and many affrays result from
consequent quarrels, so that murders may be most frequent where there is
the best employment and largest wages and greatest prosperity among the
thrifty. Murder, manslaughter, and attempts to kill make up three quarters
of the recorded crimes of the blacks in the Mississippi Delta. Murders of
Negroes by Negroes are very common and many of the criminals escape
altogether.
Negro crime is much fomented by the low drinking-shops in the city and in
country, by the lack of home influence on growing boys and girls, by the
brutalizing of young people who are sent to prison with hardened
criminals, and in general, by close contact with the lowest element of the
white race, which leads to crimes on both sides. It is a striking fact
that where the Africans are most numerous there is the least complaint of
crime. The so-called race riots are usually rows between a few bad Negroes
and the officers of the law, or a group of aggrieved Whites. Fights with
policemen and sheriffs are frequent, and desperate men not infrequently
barricade themselves in houses, and sell their lives as dearly as they
can. Quarrels over the settlement of accounts are not uncommon, and the
Negro who feels himself cheated sometimes takes his revenge at the end of
a gun. As weapons are ordinarily sold without the slightest check, to men
of both races and of every age, there is never any lack of the means to
kill.
Occasionally a cry is raised that proof has been found of the existence of
"Before Day Clubs"--that is, of organizations of Negroes for purposes of
violence. The thing is possible and difficult to disprove, but a sequence
of crimes through such an organization seems alien to the Negro's habits,
and is at least unlikely. The serious charges that the blacks habitually
protect any negro criminal who comes to them will be considered farther
on.
The negro crime about which Southern newspapers print most, Southern
writers say most, and which more than anything else aggravates race
hatred, is violence to white women. The crime is a dreadful one, made
worse by the spreading abroad of details, but it has such a fateful
relation to the whole Southern problem that something must here be said,
less on the thing itself than on some of the common misunderstandings and
misstatements which cluster about it.
Statistics are unfortunately too available, inasmuch as for twenty years
the number of such crimes has been nearly balanced by the number of
lynchings for that offense, which have been tabulated from year to year by
the _Chicago Tribune_, and have been thoroughly analyzed by Professor
Cutler in his recent book "Lynch Law." From 1882 to 1903 these statistics
show an average of thirty-two lynchings per year for violence or attempted
violence to white women, though of late they have been reduced to under
twenty. This includes some cases of innocent men, probably balanced by
assailants who escaped. These figures completely dispose of the allegation
that the crime is very frequent. Contrary to common belief in the North,
some such cases are tried before regular courts; and in Missouri the
Governor in 1908 very properly refused to pardon a Negro under a sentence
of death for that crime. Adding in these cases, and the half dozen which
perhaps escaped the newspaper reporter, at the utmost there are not over
fifty authenticated instances of this crime in the whole South in a
twelvemonth. Among something like 3,000,000 adult negro males the ratio of
the crime to those who might commit it is about 1 to 600,000; and out of
6,000,000 white women, not over fifty become victims, or 1 in 120,000. For
this degree of danger to white women ten million human beings are
supposed to be sodden with crime and actuated by malice, and the whole
South from end to end is filled with terror.
The allegation frequently made that these crimes are committed by highly
educated Negroes, graduates of Hampton and Tuskegee, is absolutely without
foundation. Most of them are by men of the lowest type, some undoubtedly
maniacs. Most of these occurrences take place where the Whites and Negroes
are most closely brought into juxtaposition, sometimes where they are both
working in the fields. Hence they are of rare occurrence where the Whites
are fewest and the Negroes most numerous. In many places in the Black
Belt, white people have no fear of leaving their families, because sure
that their negro neighbors would give their lives, if necessary, for the
protection of the white women. The Northern white teachers, who are
accused of arousing in the Negro's mind the belief that he is the equal of
the Whites, have never in a single instance been attacked; and in
communities where the Negroes are literally fifty to one, have not the
slightest fear of going about alone at any necessary hour of day or night.
These statements are not intended to minimize the dreadful effects of a
crime which brings such wretchedness upon the innocent. The two worst
enemies of the white woman in the South are "The Black Brute," whom the
Southern press is never tired of describing in unrepeatable terms, and the
white buzzard journalist who spreads her name and her dreadful story
abroad to become the seed of another like crime. Where is the Southern
chivalry and respect for white women when every such crime is sought out
and flashed abroad, in all the details obtainable, and the victim is
doomed to a second wrong in the lifelong feeling that she is known and
branded throughout the land?
A general and well-grounded complaint is that any fugitive, no matter what
his reason for flight, even though he is guilty of rape, is fed and sent
on his way by his own people, a practice which goes back to slavery days
when there were many strays whose only offense was a love of liberty. "The
worst feature," says an observer, "is that other negroes help to conceal
them and their crimes. They seem to have entered into a racial agreement
that they must help each one of their race to escape the penalties of the
white man's law by resorting to every artifice of untruthfulness and
concealment." Judge Cann, of Georgia, charges that "as a race, negroes
shelter, conceal and protect the criminals of their race; that they
produce riots by attacking officers of the law while in the discharge of
their duty; that they openly show sympathy with the negro criminal; that
they conspire against the enforcement of law; that they have made first a
hero, and then a martyr, of a legally convicted and executed murderer."
Like all such general statements, these allegations go too far. In the
first place, it is not altogether a sentiment of race solidarity. Negroes
have been known to give similar shelter to white vagabonds and criminals.
In the second place, black criminals are frequently apprehended through
blacks, and large numbers are brought into court, tried and convicted,
entirely on negro testimony. Something has been done in the way of negro
Law and Order Associations, which pledge themselves to give up criminals.
Still, it is discomposing to know that when a search was making for a
particularly odious fellow in Monroe, La., who had for a year or two made
himself the nuisance of the neighborhood by looking into windows, his
father and brothers, who must have known his practices, unhesitatingly
signed such a law-and-order pledge. The Brownsville incident of 1907 also,
with the apparent determination of scores of men not to "split" on some
ruffians and murderers among them, produced a painful feeling throughout
the country. In few respects could the Negroes do so much good for
themselves as by helping in the detection of the crime of their own
people.
If Negroes are violent to Whites and among themselves, they follow an
example daily and hourly set them by the members of the Superior Race. In
the first place, the Negro listens habitually to rough and humiliating
language. You get a new view of race relations when a planter in his store
on Saturday night calls up for you one after another three specimen
Negroes. "This man Chocolate," he says, "is a full-blooded nigger, the
real thing." "Chocolate" says nothing, shrugs his shoulders, and looks as
he feels, literally like the devil. The next is introduced as "One of your
mixed ones--How did that come about, hey!" and the mulatto, who has been
the official whipper on the plantation, grins at the superior man's joke.
The third is called up and presented as "The Preacher, very fond of the
sisters." This is a fair sample of what constantly takes place wherever
there is a rough, coarse white man among Negroes.
The office of the whipper is usually performed by the master himself, if
he is one of those numerous employers who believe in that method. As one
such put it: "I follow up a hand and tell him to do what he ought? If he
won't, I just get off and whip him." "Suppose he summons you before a
magistrate?" "I lick him again before the magistrate and send him home."
Other planters have given up whipping and charge a fine against the
Negro's account. Of course such fellows would rather be whipped than
prosecuted, and think that the riders (that is, the overseers), if they
once take it out of them in a thrashing, will harbor no further malice. In
some states, as North Carolina, whipping is unusual; in others it is
frequent.
Another race trouble is the driving out of blacks who make themselves
disliked by the Whites. A Negro passes an examination for post office
clerk, but is warned that if he tries to take the place he will be shot. A
colored editor, whose paper is much less offensive than any of the white
journals in his neighborhood in bad language and incitement to crime, is
thought well treated because he leaves the state alive. A Negro who is too
conspicuous, who builds a house thought to be above his station, who
drives two horses in his buggy, may be warned to leave the place; and if
he refuses to sacrifice his little property, may be shot. A black doctor
may be warned out of the county because there are enough white doctors.
The South is not the only community where people that are obnoxious are
hustled out of town, and Southern Whites sometimes receive the same
unofficial "ticket of leave"; but it makes bad blood when irresponsible
people, often in no way superior in character to the Negroes whom they
assail, uproot their neighbors.
Then comes the long list of homicides of Negroes by Whites. Ever since Ku
Klux times there have been occasional instances of "whitecapping"--that
is, of bodies of disguised men riding through the country, pulling people
out of their houses and whipping them. Such practices are not confined to
the South and are condoned sometimes in the North. Down on Buzzard's Bay
in Massachusetts a few years ago a jury absolutely refused to convict the
perpetrators of a similar outrage on a white man; while in Alabama, in
1898, five Whites were sentenced for twenty years each for killing a Negro
in that sort of way. Still convictions of white men for killing Negroes
are very unusual. Since practically every adult negro man has a gun about
him, the theory of the White is that if you get into a quarrel and the
Negro makes any movement with his hands, you must shoot him forthwith. To
this purport is the testimony of a Mississippi planter who reproved a hand
for severely whipping his child; the black replied that it was his
business and nobody should stop it; the white man said he would stop it;
whereupon the Negro drew, but was met by a bullet in his forehead; and,
explained the planter, "A steel bullet will go through a nigger's skull."
Take another case: An assistant manager on an estate in the Delta of
Mississippi tried to take a pistol away from a new hand and felt himself
safe because the man had his hands in his pockets; but the Negro fired
through the pocket, instantly killed the white man, and decamped. It
afterwards was shown that he had previously killed another white man.
The responsibility is not always on the Negro's side. There are many
disputes over labor contracts, in which the Negro justly believes that the
white man has cheated him, and his attempt to audit is stopped by a
quarrel in which the black is killed. Even boys under twelve years of age
have been known to shoot Negroes over trivial disputes, and a young lady
in Washington recently shot and killed a black boy who was stealing fruit.
The Negroes complain of harsh treatment by the police. For instance, a
good-looking, very black young man is glad to get out of Savannah and
among the white people on the Sea Islands. "They like the colored people
better; even if they do get drunk and are fierce, they treat them better.
In Savannah the other day I saw a man going back to his vessel, and a
policeman asked him where he was going. He answered up rough like,--I
wouldn't do that, I'd go down on my hands and knees to 'em rather than
have any trouble with em,--and the policeman broke his club over his head,
arrested him, and they sent him to the chain gang. I don't want to be
arrested; I never have been arrested in my life." That the police are
often in the wrong is shown by such instances as the recent acquittal of a
Negro by direction of an Alabama judge; he had shot a policeman who was
arresting him without reason, and the judge who heard the case justified
him.
Perhaps, comparing city with city, the North is as disorderly as the
South, but the rural South is a much more desperate region than the
farming lands of the North, as is shown by the statistics of homicide and
similar crimes. In Florida in 1899, with a population of 528,000, there
were about 40 murders and 200 assaults with attempt to murder. In Alabama
in 1895-96 there were about 350 homicides. In one twelvemonth some years
ago there were 6 murders in Vermont, 96 in Massachusetts, 461 in Alabama,
and over 1,000 in Texas. Judge Thomas, of Montgomery, has shown that the
homicides in the United States per million of population are 129 against
10 per million in England; and when the sections are contrasted, New
England has about 47 per million, against 223 per million in the South.
It is not easy to compare the criminal spirit in the North and the South
by the records of the courts or the statistics of convictions; acts which
are penitentiary offenses in one state may be misdemeanors, or no crime at
all, in another. A very recent tabulation, made from statistics of 1905,
shows in the Lower South 16,000 prisoners against 13,000 in a group of
Northwestern states having the same total population; and in the whole
South, 27,000 prisoners against 24,000 in a group aggregating the same
number of people in the North and West. Of the Southern prisoners, about
two thirds are Negroes, the proportion of criminals to the total numbers
of the African race being decidedly less than in the North. The only safe
generalization from those statistics is therefore that the Southern courts
send more people to jail, white and black, than the Northern. Statistics
throw little light on the question of relative crime.
A comparison is, however, possible between the ordinary course of justice
in the South and in the North. The most notorious defect in the South is
the conduct of murder trials, as shown by the evidence of Southern
jurists. Says one, "Unreasoning and promiscuous danger stalks in any
community where life is held cheap by even a few, and where the laws are
enforced by privilege or race. In such a community there is no sufficient
defense against a mob, or even a drunken fool." If one credited all the
editorials in Southern newspapers, he would believe that "a man who kills
a man in this community is in much less danger of legal punishment than
one who steals a suit of clothes"; and experienced lawyers tell you that
they never knew of a white man being convicted for homicide.
These statements are exaggerations, for the records of pardons show that a
certain number of white men have reached the penitentiary for that offense
and leave it by the side door. The reason for the failure of justice in
numerous cases is, first of all, the technicalities of the courts, which
are probably not very different in that particular from those of the
North; and, secondly, the unwillingness of juries to convict. It must be
accepted as an axiom that the average plain man in the South feels that
if A kills B the presumption is that he has some good reason. Counsel for
such cases habitually appeal to the emotions of the jury, and ask what
they would have done under like circumstances. Even conviction may not be
uncomforable; take the case of a young White in Florida, who killed a
policeman, was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment, was then hired
out as a convict by his uncle at fifteen dollars a month, and paraded the
streets at his pleasure.
A general impression in the North is that the Southern courts are very
severe with colored men; and (if he has not already been lynched) it is
true that they are likely to pass heavy sentence on a Negro who has killed
a white man, and juries are often merciless; but there are many cases
where blacks are lightly treated on the express ground that they have had
less opportunity to know what is right and wrong. In Brookhaven, Miss., a
very rough region, in a year three white men have been heavily sentenced
for killing Negroes; while many cases could be cited where a Negro was
acquitted or let off with a light penalty for a like offense.
When it comes to less serious crimes, the Negro enjoys a special
protection whenever he can call in a respectable white man to vouch for
him as in general straightforward; the Court is then likely to impose a
light sentence. Even in serious cases a man is sometimes acquitted or
lightly treated at the request of his master, so that he may return to
work. That is what the planter meant who boasted: "I never sent a nigger
to jail in my life; and I have taken more niggers out of jail than any
planter in Alabama." That is, he never gave information against one of his
own hands, but inflicted such small penalties as he saw fit; and he would
pay the fine for his men who came before the courts, or even secure their
pardon, so as to get them on his plantation. That principle sometimes goes
terribly deep. In the case of a Negro who whipped his child to death, the
natural inquiry was, "What did they do with him?" To which the nonchalant
answer was, "Oh, nothing, he was a good cotton hand."
The great majority of negro convicts are sentenced for petty crimes,
stealing, vagrancy, and the like, and for rather short terms; but the name
for this punishment, "the chain gang," points to a system practically
unknown in the North. There are literal chain gangs, with real shackles
and balls, working in the streets of cities, white and black together; and
large bodies of convicts are worked in the open, stockaded, and perhaps
literally chained at night. Right here comes in one of the worst features
of the Southern convict system. The men on the chain gang are perhaps
employed on city or county work, and if their terms expire too fast, the
authorities will run out of labor; hence, the Negroes believe, perhaps
rightly, that judges and juries are convinced of their guilt just in
proportion to the falling off of the number of men in confinement; and
that if necessary, innocent people will be arrested for that purpose. That
is probably one reason why Negroes feel so little shame at having been in
prison. "Did you know I was in the barracks last night?" is a remark that
you may hear at any railroad station in Georgia.
The whole subject is complicated with vagrant laws. For instance, in
Savannah Negroes not at work, or without reasonable excuse for idleness,
shall be arrested; and in Alabama if arrested as a vagrant the burden of
proof is on the black to show that he is at work. It is a mistake to
suppose that colored tramps are common in the South; but irresponsible
men, loitering about a city and sponging on the working Negroes, are
frequent, and furnish many serious criminals.
On the whole, one would rather not be a negro convict in a Southern state,
or even a white convict, for many state and county prisons are simply
left-over examples of the worst side of slavery. A Northern expert in such
matters in Atlanta a few years ago, in a public address, congratulated the
people on the new jail which he had just visited. At least it looked like
the most improved of modern jails, for it had large airy cells provided
with running water, and the only defect in it was that it was intended for
the state mules and was far better than any provision made there for human
prisoners.
The first trouble with the Southern convict system is that it still
retains the notion, from which other communities began to diverge nearly a
century ago, that the prisoner is the slave of the state, existing only
for the convenience and profit of those whom he serves. In the second
place, it has been difficult to find indoor employment for the men, and
most of them are worked out of doors, a life which with proper precautions
is undoubtedly happier and healthier than that inside. In the third place,
whipping is still an ordinary penalty, and very frequently applied.
Furthermore, a number of states in the Lower South have been in the habit
of letting out convicts, and that is still done in several states, as
Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. They used to be rented to cotton growers,
and a planter could get as few as two convicts or even one, over whom he
had something approaching the power of life and death. This was a virtual
chattel slavery, which long ago ought to have been disallowed by the
Supreme Court of the United States, as contrary to the Thirteenth
Amendment. If still retained on a state or county plantation, the convicts
are in the power of wardens whose interest it is to drive the men
unmercifully. Governor Vardaman in a public message in 1908 thought it
necessary to say that "Some of the most atrocious and conscienceless
crimes that have been perpetrated in this State are chargeable to the
county contractor. I have known the poor convict driven to exhaustion or
whipped to death to gratify the greed or anger of the conscienceless
driver or contractor. The tears and blood of hundreds of these unfortunate
people cry out for this reform."
The Governor suggests that white men suffer under this system, and there
have been recent cases where vagrant Whites were sold on the auction block
for a period of months. It might perhaps be argued that the South is
always more stern in its judicial punishments than the North, inasmuch as
five years on a convict farm in Mississippi is worse than being decently
hanged in Massachusetts. The modern and humane methods of reform, of
separating the youthful first-term man from the others, of specially
treating juvenile crime, are little known in the South. When a
twelve-year-old black boy is sent to the chain gang by a white judge, the
community suffers. With regard to all those penal institutions one might
share the feelings of the good Northern lady, when told that her grandson
had been sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years: "What did they do
that for? why, he won't be contented there three weeks!"
This sympathy with the criminal the governors of the Southern states
appear to feel, as is shown by some astonishing statistics. When Governor
Vardaman went out of office January 1, 1908, he pardoned 8 white men and
18 Negroes, most of them convicted of murder or manslaughter, and 11 of
them life men. A Memphis paper has tabulated the state pardons for a
period of twelve months, and if the results are accurate, they show 1 in
Wisconsin, 22 in Massachusetts, 81 in Georgia, 168 in Alabama, and over
400 in Arkansas. Just how the Negroes get sufficient political influence
to secure pardons is one of the serious questions in Southern
jurisprudence. For these lavish pardons the Whites are wholly responsible,
for from them spring all the governors and pardoning boards.
The same responsibility rests on the Whites for the inefficiency of
criminal justice and for the mediæval prison system. The North might
fairly plead that its efforts to reform its judicial and punitive system
are resisted by the lower elements of society, which have such power
through choosing prosecutors and judges and legislators, in framing laws
and constitutions, that the better elements cannot have things their own
way. Not so in the South, where the Superior Race has absolute control of
the making of law and the administering of justice, and the treatment of
prisoners. Every judge in the South, except a few little justices of the
peace, is a white man. Negroes, although still eligible to jury service,
are rarely impaneled, even for the trial of a Negro. Negro testimony is
received with due caution; hardly any court will accept the testimony of
one black against one white man. For failures in the administration of
justice, for unwillingness to try men for homicide, for technicalities in
procedure, for hesitancy of juries, the Superior Race is wholly
responsible. The system is bad simply because the white people who are in
control of the Southern state governments are willing that it should be
bad. With all the machinery of legislation, and of the courts in its
possession, the white race still resorts to forms of violence which
sometimes strike an innocent man, and always brutalize the community, and
lead to a contempt for the ordinary forms of justice. The place for the
white people to begin a real repression of crime is by punishing their
criminals without enslaving them.