Jim Crow Guide: The Way it Was

by Stetson Kennedy 1959

 

Chapter XI - Look Out For The Law

 

Wet large in rock over the Supreme Court of the United States, and many another court throughout the land, you can see the inscription, "Equal justice Under Law".

However, if you happen to be a person of color you may experience extreme difficulty in obtaining it. As some folks say, before the bar of justice as elsewhere, "Some are more equal than others".

America did not get that way overnight. As the old Negro woman said to the white judge who cautioned her that colored folks could not expect equal justice all in a minute: "God knows it's been a long minute 1"

The legal disability of the Negro in America has roots which go deep into the history of the country. As a chattel slave, there was little or nothing the Negro was permitted to say in court. Prior to emancipation, "free persons of color" also had their legal rights severely delimited by the Black Codes.

In laying claim to the legal rights which the victory of Lincoln's armies brought them, the Negro freedmen encountered bitter opposition at every turn. The Klan gave special attention to the liquidation of A Negroes who dared enter the sphere of law enforcement, even at the lowest level of justice of the peace or bailiff. When the Klan terror had run its course, Negroes were effectively precluded from serving as judges, jurymen, or law officers anywhere in the South; and there were also strict limits, terroristically speaking, to the Negro's ability to institute civil or criminal action against a white person, or to testify against one with impunity in court.

The law operated stringently against the Negro, but seldom for him.

"Is there a law for kinkyheads?" a Florida Negro Freedman Bitt asked the white man who had just defrauded him of his farm.

"Yes, there is," the white man said.

"Then I will go and find it, if I have to go all the way to Tallahassee," the Negro replied. In those ox-cart days, Tallahassee was a long way of In reality, then as now, it did little good for Negroes to appeal to state supreme courts in the Southern state capitals. And the cost of traveling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington has always been so high as to be prohibitive for most people.

"Do you agree that the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect?" the original Klan asked its initiates - and this has continued to sum up the legal status of the Negro in the South until this very day.

"It's always open season on Negroes," Southern white folks say, by which they mean they are free to kill Negroes with impunity.

The Southern Negro, under constraint not to protest too openly is obliged to put it in song:
''When a white man kills a Negro, They hardly carries it to court; When a Negro kills a white man, They hangs him like a goat!''

Another hazard incumbent upon being naturally born dark in such a "White man's country" is that of being caught in a police dragnet. Very often when a crime is committed in the U.S.A., dark-skinned persons tend to predominate among those rounded up by the police as "suspect". Sometimes such round-ups are not hinged upon any crime, but are designed to drive reluctant workers into the arms of planters and other employers at sub-standard wages.

The dragnet is such a common occurrence wherever colored peoples congregate that there is scarcely any need to describe the phenomenon here. Suffice it to recall what transpired when terrorists dynamited Mr. and Mrs. Harry Moore, Negroes, to death as they slept on Christmas Eve, 1951, in their home at Mims, Florida.

"We have found some tracks near the scene," police reported some days later.

"Tracks?" snorted a spokesman of the NAACP "There are tracks all over Florida! If a white couple had been dynamited to death, the police would have had a hundred Negroes in jail the next day any hundred!"

Of course, nowhere among the maze of laws aimed at Negroes in the U.S.A. can you find one which comes right out and says, "You are a second-class citizen". America's race laws are not to be compared with those of Nazi Germany, for example; for the Nurnburg Code it frankly relegated the Jews of Germany to second-class citizenship, and explicitly enumerated the rights they were denied. Among these were the rights to vote and hold office. They were barred from the civil service, from holding officer ship in the armed forces, and from law, medicine, publishing, and farming. After July, 1943, they were barred from places of public entertainment, were denied telephones, radios, newspapers. They were allowed to shop but one day per week, and were forbidden to purchase white bread, eggs, or butter. Nor could they marry "Aryans".

The list of taboos imposed upon American Negroes is not more brief, but these taboos are almost never spelled out in laws, even the interdictions against "intermarriage" being posed impartially in the name of maintaining "the integrity of both races. Thus far, the American ideal of equality has materialized. Indeed, it has gone farther, so that legislation designed to deprive Negroes, Indians, women, trade unionists, or other groups of their rights is commonly introduced under the heading of "protective legislation".

You may encounter printed matter published by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups, calling for "clear and frank recognition that racial discrimination is American national policy but official national policy continues to be to render at least lip-service to the principle of equality, and, occasionally, under prodding by democratic elements, to take a few hesitant steps to translate the principle into reality.

In short, you will find much more equality on paper than in reality in the U.S.A. The basis of second-class citizenship is not only legislative but even more administrative. You may be the equal of any man under the law, but not in society, on the street, or before the bar of justice.

Most of the prevailing institutions of white supremacy had their origin in hastily-enacted state and local legislation following the overthrow of Reconstruction which followed the Civil War. In time some of this legislation was, after costly court battles, voided as discriminatory-but in its wake came new laws, more discreet, but none the less effective.

"We have gone to great pains to draft legislation which concedes the equality of the Negro on its face, but which is susceptible to denying it in practice; and we shall continue to do so!" a U.S. Senator from A Georgia has said in a moment of rare candor.

The die was cast for a color cast society in America when the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling on the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, held that the South's new race segregation laws could be enforced, provided only that they render lip service to the U.S. Constitution by stipulating as now, it did little good for Negroes to appeal to state supreme courts in the Southern state capitals. And the cost of traveling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington has always been so high as to be prohibitive for most people.

"Do you agree that the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect?" the original Klan asked its initiates-and this has continued to sum up the legal status of the Negro in the South until this very day.

"It's always open season on Negroes," Southern white folks say, by which they mean they are free to kill Negroes with impunity.

 


Continue on to Chapter 12