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1434 An American Dilemma
and 62 j
see, also, pp. 24-28. For similar evidence of the high proportion of minor
offenses among Negro arrests, see Maurine Boie, “An Analysis of Negro Crime Statistics
for Minneapolis for 1923, 1924 and 1925,” Offortunity (June, 1928), p. 173; H. P.
Brinton, “Negroes Who Run Afoul the Law,” Social Forces (October, 1932), pp. 98-
99; B. P. Chamberlain, The Negro and Crime in Virginia (1936), p. 107; Ira DeA.
Reid, Social Conditions of the Negro in the Hill District of Pittsburgh (1930), pp. 59-
60 ; Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, The Negro in Detroit (1926), Section 9,
p. 8; and H. L. Andrews, “Racial Distinctions in the Courts of North Carolina,”
unpublished M.A. thesis, Duke University (1933), p. 50. This footnote and the quota-
tion to which it refers is taken from Johnson and Kiser, of, cit,^ pp. 201-202.
^^The Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem, “The Negro in Harlem: A
Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19,
*935 ” typescript (1936), pp. 97-99.
The study was made by New York City’s Welfare Council. It is summarized in the
Refort of the Sub-Committee on Crime and Delinquency of the City-Wide Citizens^
Committee on Harlem (1942), p. 5.
Johnson and Kiser, of, cit,y p. 216.
“Many colored tenants do not regard the taking of small amounts of stock or cotton
from their landlords as stealing but rather as a just compensation for the money stolen
from them by their landlords in the reckoning of accounts or for the beatings admin-
istered to them by their landlords. Under the systems of economic control and intimi-
dation exercised by the landlord, the colored tenant often justifies his thefts on the
grounds that his only means of securing his fair share of the proceeds from his crop
is by the use of stealth.” (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, of, cit,y pp. 395-396.)
“One of my earliest recollections is that of my mother cooking a chicken late at
night, and awakening her children for the purpose of feeding them. How or where
she got it I do not know. I presume, however, it was procured from our owner’s farm.
Some people may call this theft. If such a thing were to happen now, I should condemn
it as theft myself. But taking place at the time it did, for the reason that it did, no one
could ever make me believe that my mother was guilty of thieving. She was simply a
victim of the system of slavery.” (Booker T. Washington, Uf From Slavery [1901;
first edition, 1900], pp. 4-5.)
“This system has many bad results. It encourages the Negro in crime. He knows
that unless he does something pretty bad, he will not be prosecuted because the landlord
doesn’t want to lose the work of a single hand; he knows that if he is prosecuted the
white man will, if possible, ‘pay him out.’ It disorganises justice and confuses the
ignorant Negro mind as to what is a crime and what is not. A Negro will often do things
that he would not do if he thought he were really to be punished. He comes to the
belief that if the white man wants him arrested, he will be arrested, and if he protects
him, he won’t suffer, no matter what he does. Thousands of Negroes, ignorant, weak,
indolent, to-day work under this system.” (Baker, of, cit,y p. 97.)
Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas
(1942).
Some have claimed that Negroes had less mental disease before Emancipation than
afterward, supposedly because they received better care under slavery and did not have
to worry about the struggle for existence. See: (i) J. W. Babcock, “The Colored
Insane,” Alienist and Neurologist (1895), pp. 423-447; (2) A. H* Witmer, “Insanity
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