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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 24. Inequality of Justice - 3. The Southern Heritage
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Chapter 24. Inequality of Justice 533
With these traditions and with all the tension and instability in its social
fabric, the South entered the long period of the Civil War and the
convulsions which followed. The Negroes—having lost the protection for
life and personal security which their property value had provided them,
and also, in many cases, the personal relationship to their old masters, and
being untrained for the new freedom—^became the subjects of much
greater violence. The whites—impoverished, bitter, fearful, thoroughly
indoctrinated by their own defense ideology, and even more untrained to
deal with their new fellow citizens in terms of legal equality—felt little
check in practicing this violence. The Reconstruction Amendments, how-
ever, gave civil rights to Negroes for the first time. Even after the resto-
ration of white supremacy was accomplished, all state legislation in the
South had to be written upon the fictitious assumption that Negroes enjoyed
full and equal protection under the law. The administration of justice had
to proceed upon the same imaginary principle. In reality, legislation,
courts, and police were, on the contrary, used to keep the Negroes ‘fin
their place.” This intention had to be kept sub rosa^ so as not to come into
conflict with the Constitution. Serious and honest men had to pretend. On
the other hand, the belief in legal inequality could never again be whole-
hearted. The upstanding Southern white men were compelled by their
allegiance to their nation and its Constitution to observe a degree of both
the form and the content of equality in justice.
So this unique phenomenon, unmatched in history, came into being:
a strongly conservative democratic society where conservatism was har-
nessed to the practice of illegality and where the progressives, instead of
the conservatives, had to become cautious defenders of the principle of
legality. The South remained provincial and continued its fight against
the Creed of the nation and the spirit of the age. The feeling grew, how-
ever, that—in this particular respect—it was fighting common sense and
its own better conscience. When slavery once was abolished, and its rein-
stitution written off as undesirable or impractical, and when white men no
longer had an economic interest in the persons of specific Negroes, the
rational motives for keeping up a reserve of devices, outside the legal ones
for keeping Negroes tractable, largely vanished.^^ These other devices
served the positive purpose before the War of keeping the slave working
for his master 5
now they mainly served the empty vanity of the weak
white man and the desire for domination of the strong white man. The
present writer has met few Southern white people—above the lowest level
of education and culture—^who have not declared themselves prepared in
frincifle to abstain from illegality in the sphere of personal security and
private property.
There is no question that the movement to normalize the legal order
of the South is gaining momentum. The dynamic play of social forces
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