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CHAPTER 26
COURTS, SENTENCES AND PRISONS
I. The Southern Courts
William Archer, the sympathetic English traveler, who in 1908 criss-
crossed the Southern states in order to inform himself on the Negro
problem, summed up the part of his study which dealt with courts and
justice in the following words:
This is one of the few points on which there is little conflict of evidence—the
negro, in the main, does not get justice in the courts of the South. The tone of the
courts is exemplified in the pious peroration of the lawyer who exclaimed: “God
forbid that a jury should ever convict a white man for killing a nigger who knocked
his teeth down his throat!” Exceptions there are, no doubt; there are districts in
which the negroes themselves report that they are equitably treated. But the rule is
that in criminal cases a negro’s guilt is lightly assumed, and he is much more heavily
punished than a white man would be for the same oflFence; while in civil cases justice
may be done between black and black, but seldom between white and black.^
and he quotes with endorsement an intelligent and conservative Negro
informant:
“A negro’s case gets no fair hearing; and he is far more severely punished than a
white man for the same offence. . . . There is only one court in which we think we
get justice, and that is the Federal Court.”^
Since Archer wrote, a generation has passed: things Aave changed some-
what but not fundamentally. Writing in 1932, Virginius Dabney could,
without risking contradiction, refer to ^^the frequent failure of Southern
blacks to obtain even elementary justice when they fall into the toils of
the law.^^^
Apart from the basic institutional weakness already referred to,® that
the courts are too directly controlled by a local public opinion where the
Negroes are without a voice, there are some structural characteristics in
the judicial procedure which operate against all poor and uneducated
groups. The great number of courts, with higher or lower rank and with
complicated jurisdictional boundaries between them, are likely to bewilder
^ See Chapter 24, Section 1
.
547
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