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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons - 1. The Southern Courts
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Chapter 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons 549
at a loss, the inclination is to fine Negroes and poor whites to reduce the
burden of cost of the legal system.®
Not only are all the court officials white, but the jury too is usually
composed of whites only, except for cases in the federal courts and in some
of the large cities. Yet to prohibit Negroes from jury lists is clearly uncon-
stitutional. It has long been established that no statutes which barred
Negroes from jury service were constitutional,^® and higher court decisions
have declared invalid convictions made by juries selected from lists which
restricted Negroes. An impetus to using Negroes on juries came in 1935
when, in the widely publicized Scottsboro decision, the Supreme Court
ruled that the trial was unconstitutional because Negroes had been sys-
tematically excluded from jury service. Courts want to have their decisions
stand, and so a movement is under way to have Negroes on the jury list
and call them in occasionally for service. Techniques are, however, being
developed by which it is possible to fulfill legal requirements without
using Negro jurors. In the Lower South the matter is usually disregarded.
Dr. Raper reports, after a survey of the situation as of 1940, as follows:
Inquiries about the use of Negro jurors have been made in the past year [1940]
in numerous courts in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas,
Florida, North and South Carolina. While Negroes are generally used on the federal
grand juries and petit juries throughout most of these states, and in superior court
grand and petit juries in the larger cities, the vast majority of the rural courts in
the Deep South have made no pretense of putting Negroes on jury lists, much less
‘^Sometimes the incomes from fines take care of the cost of the police court and the
police department. In DeKalb County, Georgia, for example, the local paper editorially
boasted that in 1939 the county police department with 15 men on patrol duty, made 1,991
arrests during the yearj only 10 of these were dismissed and only 20 were found not
guilty. The total cost of operating the police department, including the police court, was
approximately $40,000. The total fines collected amounted to $37)732.62, leaving a cost to
the county of only $2,300. But this department collected stolen goods and property valued
at $20,555.45.
. . in this county, as is generally the case, the cost of the courts is borne by fines from
the poorest people in the community. Negroes and poorer whites will be fined $10 to $40 for
possessing a half pint of illegal liquor, while people with status have their liquor as they
please, and everybody knows it. Disorderly conduct, loitering, vagrancy—all help pay for
the court. Looked at purely from the point of view of maintaining race and class demarca-
tions, the court is as effective as portrayed by the local paper.
“The recorder’s courts in nearby Atlanta reported the collection of $236,285 in the first
8 months of 1939. At this rate the collections for the year would exceed $350,000. The cost
of these courts for a year is slightly less than $21,000. The 1939 budget for the police depart-
ment was $1,018,239.91. The fines for the year totalled about one-third of the cost of the
police court and police department,
“A similar ratio obtained in Selma, Alabama, where the police budget was $35,000,
fines $12,800. In Jackson, Mississippi, $61,000 and $40,000; Macon, Georgia, $141,71 ^.>4
and $47,852.85.” (Arthur Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” unpublished manuscript pre-
pared for this study [1940], pp. 160-162.)
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