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Footnotes 1345
Employers let it be known that they need additional laborers. If such an announcement
brings out a sufficient number of workers, there is no excuse for invoking the vagrasycy
laws; but if a sufficient number is not forthcoming, any person without visible and
obvious means of support is subjected to choosing between accepting the local labor
opportunity or being drawn into court, where he may readily be fined or imprisoned.
If fined, however, he may still be forced to accept local employment, for an employer
may arrange with court officials to pay his fine and let him work it out. Such prisoners
are ready victims of peonage, they are court wards and their employers exercise close
surveillance over their movements, having virtual license to keep them in debt at the
commissary. The worker has little choice, for the prison sentence hangs over his head
should he not work out the fine satisfactorily.
‘‘The inclusiveness of the vagrancy charge may be seen from the Florida statute
which defines persons subject to arrest for vagrancy as ‘rogues, vagabonds, idle or
dissolute persons, common pipers and fiddlers . . . persons who neglect their calling, or
are without reasonably continuous employment or regular income, and who have not
sufficient property to sustain them.’ Under such a law a dozen potential workers can
be picked up at a crap game or just around the corner, for being unoccupied. And
should they not readily submit, they can be picked up for disorderly conduct or resist-
ing arrest.” (Raper, of. pp. 187-188.) In April, 1942, the United States Depart-
ment of Justice began investigating such a case in Georgia.
Raper, of. cit.^ p. 107.
Ibid., pp. 1 37-141.
Ibid., pp. 189-195.
Mangum, of. cit., p. 274.
On February 18, 1936, at Raleigh, North Carolina, a white man was executed
for killing a Negro. This datum was so important because it was recorded in the press
to be the first time that such a thing had ever occurred in the South. (See Raper, of.
cit.y p. 166.)
Kelly Miller, Race Adjustment (1908), p. 80.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reforma-
tories: jgsp, p. 29. In 1938, the proportion was 45.0; in 1937 it was 44.5.
Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Pofulation, Preliminary Release,
Series P-iO, No. l.
Raper, of. cit., pp. 163-168.
Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (1924), Chapter 3j Raper, of.
cit.y pp. 1 7 1-1725 George Washington Cable, The Silent South (1885); Robert E.
Burns, I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang (1932); Jesse F. Steiner and
Roy M. Brown, The North Carolina Chain Gang (1927)5 John L. Spivak, Georgia
Nigger (1932).
^®See Raper, of. cit.. Appendix 10, “Women Criminals in Atlanta, August 1939.”
See: The Encyclofedia of the Social Sciences, “Legal Aid,” Vol. 9, pp. 319-3245
Reginald fleber Smith, Justice and the Poor (1919). The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science (March 1926) are entirely devoted to a
discussion of legal aid societies in the United States. For a discussion of the relative
lack of these societies in the South, see ibid., pp. 20-26.
Reports from several Negro lawyers, even in the Deep South, suggest that the
mere presence of a large, interested, and well-behaved Negro audience in court has
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