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1344 An American Dilemma
the sternest instructions from the judge, a Negro lawyer would be a real handicap to a
client. The general white populace, including the jurors, would feel that such a Negro
client was uppity—if not actually trying to insult the community.” {Ibid.y p. 91.)
Northern Negro lawyer complains:
, . many of them [Negroes] who have the means prefer white lawyers in the
same manner that a person prefers to buy at a big, well-equipped store. My office is
not so well equipped and manned as to indicate that I could handle very important and
intricate cases . . (Letter, March 20, 1940.)
A white lawyer from the Upper South writes in a letter:
“When the cases involve no such issues [on the race question] but are merely cases,
I have noted that cases between Negro and Negro are handled somewhat differently
than cases between white and white. I mean a spirit of levity, an expectation of some-
thing ‘comical’ appears to exist. The seriousness in the white vs. Negro case is decidedly
lacking. As you know it is a rare case indeed in which a Negro who has murdered
a Negro receives the extreme penalty, either death or life imprisonment here, regardless
of the facts. Only the other day in a local case a Negro who murdered another with
robbery as motive, a charge that would have been as between white and white, or Negro
and white victim, good for the electric chair, was disposed of by a jury with a 15 year
sentence. The punishment as between Negro and Negro, as distinguished from white
vs. white, or Negro vs. white victim, is decidedly different and clearly shows the
racial approach to the question. In short the court-room feeling is that the Negro is
entirely inferior, with punishment for crimes by him against his own kind punished
with less punishment than when the white man is involved.” (Letter of June 19,
1940.)
The author can personally testify to a few cases of a white upper class person
securing leniency for a Negro accused of a crime against another Negro.
Edgar G. Murphy, for example, wrote:
“Petty crimes are often forgiven him, and in countless instances the small offences
for which white men are quickly apprehended are, in the negro, habitually ignored.
The world hears broadly and repeatedly of the cases of injustice, it hears little of those
more frequent instances in which the weaknesses of a child-race are accorded only an
amused indifference or a patient tolerance by their stronger neighbors.” {Problems of
the Present South [1909; first edition, 1904], p. 176.)
A generation ago Baker observed:
“One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all others I have
visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example, was punished much more
severely than a white man arrested for the same offence. The injustice which the weak
everywhere suffer—^North and South—is in the South visited upon the Negro. The
white man sometimes escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars
and costs, but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was
usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that he must go
to the chain-gang.” (Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line [1908], p. 49.)
See also Allison Davis, B. B. Gardner, and M. R. Gardner, Deef South (1941), p. 504.
^®See Chapter lO, Section 4. The Southern legal codes contain a number of laws
making it possible for the employers in rural districts to utilize the legal machinery
for their own economic purposes. Among them the vagrancy laws:
“. . . they afford a legal means for recruiting temporary peons. The device is simple:
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