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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 24. Inequality of Justice - 2. Relative Equality in the North
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528 An American Dilemma
On the night of August ii, 1939,^ seven Negro migratory workers including one
woman were routed out of their sleep in an isolated one-room shack on a farm near
Cranbury, New Jersey, by a mob of white men with handkerchief masks and guns.
All seven were stripped naked, their hands tied and they were told to start across a
field. The five single men escaped into the bushes, shots fired after them going over
their heads. Jake and Frances Preston, the married couple, were threatened with
mutilation and rape, were beaten with a rubber hose, had white enamel poured over
them and were told to “head South.”
Many believed prominent local citizens had instigated the attack. Local workers
were aroused; migrants threatened to leave. Local farmers feared the loss of their
laborers. The Workers Defense League oflFered a $100 reward for information
leading to the arrest and conviction of the assailants. After two weeks the state
police made ten arrests, one a minor. At first freed on $250 bail the nine self-
confessed adult assailants were later given suspended sentences of three to five years.
But intimidation of Negroes persisted. So civil suits were then instituted and on
May I o, 1 940, the Federal District Court of Newark awarded the Prestons damages
of $2,000 each, and the other five $i,000 each.®
In many Northern cities Negroes relate that they find It difficult to get
the courts to punish violations of the civil rights laws 5
for example,
when Negroes are not permitted in certain restaurants and hotels. In such
cases it is often difficult to obtain proofs which substantiate the charges, but
this does not explain satisfactorily why those laws have as yet so largely
remained paper decrees. In the over-all balance, however, infringements
of Negro rights that are supposed to be prevented by the civil rights laws
are of comparatively little importance.
There are, in many Northern places, Negro judges, Negro court officers
and Negro policemen. Commonly there are Negroes on the jury lists. The
large majority of all Negro lawyers find it to their advantage to practice in
the North.^ They generally plead cases before the courts and are not, like
most of their Southern colleagues, restricted to trying to settle things
outside of court. They occasionally have white people among their clientele.
Negro lawyers in the North do not generally complain of being treated
differently in court from their white colleagues or of meeting prejudice
from the juries.’®
Since, on the whole, Negroes do not meet much more discrimination
from officers of the law than do white persons of the same economic and cul-
tural level, there is in the North no sfecial froblem of getting justice for
Negroes, outside the general one of improving the working of the machin^
ery of the law for the equal ’protection of the rights of poor and uneducated
people. The further reservation should be added that Negroes in Border
cities—for instance, in Washington and St. Louis—meet relatively more
prejudice both from the police and from the courts, and the same thing
holds for a city like Detroit which has a large population of white immi-
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