The small politician's trump-card, played early and late, and in all
seasons, that the Negro is a black shadow over the Southland because
of his excessive criminality, serves well the politician's purpose,--it
wins his game; but only because the game is played and won on a board
where fictions, not facts, are dominant. Nothing is easier than to offer
so-called proofs of the contention that the Negro's tendency to crime is
something peculiar to his race; there are the jail and penitentiary and
gallows statistics, for instance. But surely it should not be difficult
for these so-called proofs to present themselves in their true light to
any one who takes the trouble to consider two weighty and conspicuous
facts: this, first, that the Negroes occupy everywhere in this country
the lowest social and industrial plane, the plane which everywhere else
supplies the jail, the penitentiary, the gallows, with the greatest
number of their victims; and secondly this, that in the section of the
country where these penal statistics are gathered, all the machinery of
justice is in the hands of white men.
No Negro is a sheriff, or judge, or justice of the peace, or grand or
petit juryman, or member of a pardoning board. Charged with crime, again
and again, the black man must go to jail; he is unable to give bond; he
is defended, not by the ablest, but by the poorest lawyers, often by an
unwilling appointee of the court; he lacks the benefit of that personal
appeal to judge and jury, so often enjoyed by other defendants, which
would make them WANT to believe him innocent until proven guilty; he
faces, on the contrary, a judge and jury who hold him in some measure of
contempt as a man, regardless of his guilt or innocence. He is without
means, except occasionally, to fight his case through appeals to higher
courts, and errors sleep in many a record that on review would upset the
verdict. In the light of such considerations, it would seem impossible
that criminal statistics should not bear hard upon the Negro race, even
supposing it to be a fact that that race of all races in the world is
the LEAST criminal.
Let it be admitted without question that in most Southern communities
the crimes and misdemeanors of the Negroes exceed those committed by an
equal number of white people, and we have admitted nothing that at all
explains or accounts for the race problem. For is it not equally true
that in every other community the doers of society's rough work, the
recipients of its meagrest rewards, are chargeable, relatively, with the
greatest number of crimes and misdemeanors? Is it not true, as well in
Massachusetts and Connecticut as in Louisiana and Mississippi, that the
vast majority of those occupying prison cells are members of the social
lowest class? that the vast majority condemned, after trial, to hard
labor with their hands were accustomed to such labor before their
judicial condemnation? Nothing is more preposterous than the idea that
the race problem means more Negroes hanged, more Negroes imprisoned,
more Negroes in mines and chain-gangs, than white people! If the Negro
did not furnish the great bulk of the grist for the grinding of our
penal machinery in the Southern states, he would constitute the racial
miracle of this and all ages!
My own conviction is, and I speak with the experience of forty years'
residence in Southern states, that the Negro is not more given to crimes
and misdemeanors than the laboring population of any other section of
the country. But be this as it may, it is abundantly certain that no
race of people anywhere are more easily controlled than the Negroes by
the guardians of law and order; and there are none anywhere so easily
punished for disobedience to the statutes and mandates of their economic
superiors. Courts and juries may be sometimes subject to just criticism
for undue leniency toward white defendants; but that courts and juries
are ever subject to just criticism for undue leniency in dealing with
black defendants is the sheerest nonsense.
The frequent charge that the Negro's worst crimes partake of a brutality
that is peculiarly racial, is not supported by facts. I need not enlarge
upon this statement further than to say that the Negro's worst crimes,
with all their shocking accompaniments, are, not seldom, but often,
duplicated by white men. Let any one who doubts the statement observe
for one week the criminal statistics of any cosmopolitan newspaper, and
he will have his doubt removed.
Assuredly we do not hit upon the essence of the race problem in the
Negro's propensity to crime!