Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Footnotes - Chapter 26 - Chapter 27
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
T34^ An American Dilemma
a beneficial influence upon the impartiality of the legal procedures. It also stimulates
the Negro lawyer. One of them, from a small city in the Lower South, writes:
“I have found that a courtroom of Negro spectators gives the Negro lawyer a feeling
of support. He has potential clients, and certainly he will override any fears which
may reside in his heart and soul to win more clients. So, he becomes more effective at
the bar. Then too, the Negro spectators convey an interest which is compelling to the
judge, in deciding cases which are afifected with a public interest.” (Letter, April 14,
1940.)
Chapter 27. Violerne and Intimidation
^ The patterns of extra-legal violence and intimidation have been felt by poor
whites, to a certain extent, as well as by Negroes—in spite of the fact that, in recent
years, poor whites have come to’ employ violence against Negroes more than do upper
class whites. Even during slavery white aggression turned against other white people
who did not conform or who were obnoxious for one reason or another. The class
angle became more important when, in the later decades of the nineteenth century,
small white farmers were pressed down into tenancy, or, as industry developed, became
a white proletarian class of industrial workers. Southern white sharecroppers and textile
workers could certainly not be dealt with as Negro labor, but part of the sanctions
against the lower caste were transferred and applied to the lower class. Nearly one-half
of the fatalities in labor struggles for each year between 1934 and 1940 occurred in
the South which had scarcely one-fourth of the nation^s population and less than one-
fourth of its industrial workers. Nearly one-half of the Southern labor fatalities have
been Negroes, though they constitute only one-fifth of the Southern industrial popula-
tion. (Arthur Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” unpublished manuscript prepared for
this study [1940] j
and Fifteenth Census of the United States: /pjo, Population^
Vol. IV, Table 18 and State Table ii.)
^The custom of dueling when one’s “honor” was challenged was quite common
among the upper classes of the South in the nineteenth century. This was part of the
Southern pattern of taking the law into individual hands, but it is one type of extra-
legal violence which has been completely done away with. Dueling never had any
significance for Negroes or poor whites.
® Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” pp. 278-295.
^ To the average Northerner, who has little contact with poor white Southerners
but some contact with Southern Negroes, the carrying of knives and other weapons is
a “Negro custom.” Actually, of course, it is a Southern custom.
“Most men, Negro and White, carry guns, and many of them also have knives. The
most common type, familiarly called a ‘crab-apple switch,’ is a rather long pocket
knife with a sharp four-inch blade.” (Hortensc Powdermaker, After Freedom [1939],
pp. 169-170,)
^Amendment II of the United States Constitution reads in part “the right of the
people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
^ Excellent studies of lynching include: The National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States: 188g-1918
(1919)1 Frank Shay, Judge Lynch (1938); Walter White, Rope and Faggot (1929);
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
