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7336 An American Dilemma
citizen to e*:ercise cheerful co-operation and acquiescence.”® Robert R. Moton, a most
conservative Negro educator and leader, writes in the same vein:
“In the light of these facts [the attitudes and activities against the Negro in the
First World War] it ought not be difficult to understand why the reproach is so often
hurled at the Negro that he does not cooperate with officers of the law in apprehending
criminals and those accused of crime. To the Negro the law where these practices obtain
appears not as an instrument of justice, but as an instrument of persecution; govern-
ment is simply white society organized to keep the Negro down ;
and the officers of the
law are its agents authorized to wreak upon the helpless offender the contempt, the
indignation, and the vengeance that outraged law and order feels when stimulated by
prejudice. There is no such hue and cry over crime when the victim is a Negro and the
perpetrator either white or black as when the victim is white and the suspect is black
or supposed to be black.”**
and:
“The Negro knows, perhaps better than he knows anything else, that his chances of
securing justice in the courts in those sections of the country where discrimination is in
other things legal and commem are so slim that in most instances he has nothing to gain
by resorting to the courts even for litigation with members of his own race; while it is
accepted by most as a foregone conclusion that no court anywhere will render a judg-
ment against a white man in favour of a Negro plaintiff. A Negro defendant may
occasionally get a favourable judgment as against a white plaintiff, but the reverse is a
far more frequent possibility, so much so that a Negro very rarely brings suit against
a white man for any cause in those states where relations between the two races arc
more or less strained. It is figured that to do so will involve a man in fruitless litigation,
with the original loss augmented by the cost of the action. In spite of all the injustices
jmd abuses from which Negroes suffer, one seldom hears of a court action brought by
Negroes against any white person in our Southern states.”**
A recent investigator of a Southern community, Hortense Powdermaker, testifies
concerning the attitudes among the Negroes:
“. , . many of the Negroes have long since concluded that their best course is to keep
clear of legal complications wherever possible. To go to court for any cause would
be to solicit more trouble than the matter at issue might be worth. Since no Negro can
expect to find justice by due process of law, it is better in the long run to suffer one’s
loss—or to adjust it oneself. From this angle, the ‘lawlessness’ sometimes ascribed to the
Negro may be viewed as being rather his private and individual ‘law enforcement’
faute de mieux. The feeling against going to court has in it an element of race-solidarity.
Some Negroes will criticize one of the race who takes legal action against another
Negro. Such criticism is part of a definite counter-current against the still prevalent
tendency to take one’s troubles to a white man.”^
On this point the Southern white liberals—^who, in this region, have to defend the
principle of legality, since conservatism there is married to the tradition of illegality
—
agree without reservation with the Negro leaders. Baker reported this more than thirty
years ago. One of the Southern liberals told him frankly:
“We complain that the Negroes will not help to bring the criminals of their race
“Kelly Miller, Race Adjustment (1908), p. 79.
^’What the Negro Thinks (1929), pp. 154-155.
‘
Moton, of, ciUy pp. 141-142.
“
Ajter Freedom (1939), p. 126.
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