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© 2013 James Campbell All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁ ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27380–1 hardback ISBN 978–0–230–27381–8 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Printed in China

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Part One Slavery to Freedom 1 The Slaveholders’ Rule 11 Slave societies in the United States 12 Slave resistance 15 The slaveholders’ rule 19 Patrols and policing 27 Fugitives and freedom 33 2 Slavery and the Criminal Law 38 The slave criminal trial 40 Crimes, convictions, and punishments 44 Property, class, and gender in the courtroom 49 Free African Americans 55 3 Reconstruction 60 Emancipation, black codes, and racial violence 61 Republican Reconstruction 66 African American resistance and legal culture 78 Toward Jim Crow 81

Part Two Jim Crow Justice 4 The Southern Penal System 87 The origins of convict leasing 88 Work, life, and death on the lease 93 Abolition and the limits of reform 97 Peonage 103 Penal reform in the twentieth century 106

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5 Lynching and Law 113 Lynching and its advocates 114 The anti-lynching movement 119 Legal lynchings 126 Contesting Jim Crow justice 129 6 Crime, Policing, and Urbanization 138 The top of the world 139 Race, crime, and community 142 Trial and punishment 149 Policing and protest 157

Part Three Civil Rights and Beyond 7 The Black Freedom Struggle 165 Race and criminal justice after the Second World War 167 The civil rights movement and southern policing 174 Armed self-defense 180 Black Power 183 8 The Penal State 194 The two worlds of American crime and punishment 195 Policing and black communities 199 Color-blind justice? 204 Mass incarceration 207 The death penalty 213 Epilogue: Remembrance, Justice, and Reconciliation 219

Notes 224 Index 255

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Introduction

In February 2012, the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, catapulted issues of race, crime, and punishment to the forefront of the American political and news agenda. Returning home from a 7-Eleven store, the African American teenager was followed and shot dead outside a gated community by George Zimmerman, a white, volunteer neighborhood watch captain of Latino descent who claimed he acted in self-defense. The Sanford police agreed. Following a cursory investigation, no arrests were made and the killing was quickly ruled a justifiable homicide. Within weeks, however, protests against the police handling of the case—led by Martin’s family and joined by hundreds of thousands of supporters—swept across the nation. The Sanford police chief was suspended, the investigation reopened, and Zimmerman eventually arrested and charged with second-degree murder. At the time of writing, George Zimmerman is yet to stand trial, but the name of Trayvon Martin is already enshrined in the long history of African American crime and punishment. Indeed, the national and international prominence of the case is partly a consequence of the many ways that it resonates with that history. It evokes past practices of white vigilantes assuming pseudo-police powers over African Americans, law enforcement officers neglecting white-on-black violence, and equal justice resting on mass protest movements rather than the rule of law. Through these connections, the case raises questions about the past and current state of civil rights, race relations, policing, and the criminal law in the United States. This book takes up these questions by exploring the intersection of African American history and criminal justice history over the course of nearly four centuries. It investigates how African Americans have engaged with, influenced, and experienced crime and punishment from the seventeenth century to the present. It asks how black experiences of law enforcement have changed over time, why these changes have occurred, and what significance they have had within

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2 Crime and Punishment in African American History and beyond black communities. It looks at forms of policing, court procedures, and punishments, tracing their evolution in different regions and jurisdictions. It also explores the circumstances in which the legal system has deferred to, or sometimes been supplanted by, extrajudicial authorities such as slaveholders, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynch mobs. While these subjects mostly defy sweeping generaliza- tions, the analysis presented here reveals notable continuities over time in the outcomes and implications of African Americans’ encounters with the criminal justice system. These encounters have often been discriminatory and violent, but their form and consequences have varied across the United States according to local circumstances and have changed considerably over time as the relationship between race and law enforcement has been remade in different eras according to evolving political and economic interests, powerful protest movements, and developing ideas about law, justice, and punishment. In approaching this subject matter, Crime and Punishment in African American History introduces and interrogates six major themes that resonate across the past four centuries:

The black freedom struggle. The African American history of criminal justice is an integral part of the history of the black freedom struggle. Although popular memory of the civil rights movement is dominated by demands for the right to vote and integrated schools, black political activism has always been rooted in campaigns for equal justice and for protection from racial violence and unjust punishment. Nonetheless, civil rights gains have not always translated into improvements in the treatment of African Americans in terms of criminal justice. On the contrary, African American political and social advances have often been met with an intensification of racial repression justified in the name of crime control. In the aftermath of both the American Civil War and the modern civil rights movement, for example, criminal justice mechanisms were used to strip large numbers of African Americans of recently acquired citizenship rights. More pervasively, black political activists from slave rebels to student sit- in demonstrators have regularly been subject to criminal justice sanctions.

Labor. The forms and function of law enforcement against African Americans have consistently been tied to issues of labor control. From slavery, through the peonage and chain gangs of the Jim Crow era, and the mass incarceration that accompanied deindustrialization in the late- twentieth century, the arrest, prosecution, and punishment of black workers has served the interests of landholders, industrialists, and government through provid- ing a subordinate and cheap labor force.

Violence. In the black past, violence has permeated law enforcement and there has rarely been a clear-cut divide between extralegal punishment and the justice

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Introduction 3 system. On the contrary, law and violence have often been closely intertwined. Slave courts readily dispensed with even the pretense of due process in periods of slave uprisings, and in the 1850s slaveholders seized runaways under the barely regulated legal procedures of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the segregation era, black defendants were sentenced to death in courtrooms surrounded by baying mobs, and prisoners worked in convict leasing camps alongside tenants trapped in debt peonage. African Americans are today rarely subject to extralegal policing by white vigilantes, but new forms of militarized law enforcement, parole, and civil injunctions have created a parallel system of crime control in many black communities that operates outside standard judicial procedures.

Resistance. African Americans have continually resisted white-dominated law enforcement and extralegal punishment. Through armed self-defense, political mobilization, and legal challenges, black resistance has challenged and destabilized white supremacy, driving an ongoing process of criminal justice reform that sometimes has mitigated the system’s harshest features, though rarely threatened their foundations and often resulted only in the evolution of new forms of repression. The earliest slave laws developed to contain insurrections and escapes; a multifaceted movement against lynching forced allegations of black criminality to be heard in southern courtrooms; discriminatory trials were liable to challenges in federal courts and international protests; militant black organizations in the 1960s protected civil rights workers from Klan violence, and ongoing grassroots campaigns contest the contemporary war on drugs and prison-industrial complex.

Gender and class. African American crime and punishment has always been related to the construction of boundaries, divisions, and ideas about gender and class. The outcome of rape prosecutions against black defendants has reflected the social status of white female victims as well as the racial iden- tity of their alleged attackers; laws criminalizing mixed-race marriages and sexual relationships were used from the Civil War to the 1960s to police racial boundaries, and the denigration of black womanhood has in many periods led police to neglect vice in urban black neighborhoods. Racially discriminatory law enforcement has also routinely been used to defuse class tensions among whites, though not infrequently poor whites have also been caught up in penal mechanisms targeted primarily at the black population.

Place. The African American history of crime and punishment has been heavily conditioned by local context. From the slave era to the present, the South has been exceptional in the pervasiveness and severity of racial violence, discriminatory criminal justice, and coercive penal practices. This broad southern distinctiveness, however, masks significant variations among and within different states, and it has not developed in isolation, but rather in dialogue with the rest of the nation and with the federal government and judiciary. The African American experience of criminal law in the northern and western

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4 Crime and Punishment in African American History states likewise stems from distinctive local conditions, but also reflects deep entanglements and influences across county, state, and regional borders.

This book is heavily influenced by a new and diverse body of scholarship that has developed on issues of crime and punishment in African American history over the past 30 years. Making use of pre- viously neglected sources, such as local court records and African American newspapers, historians have provided original insights into the “everyday” black experience of law enforcement and extralegal violence. Through detailed, local case studies of subjects including slave law, lynching, convict leasing, police brutality, discriminatory prosecutions, and the death penalty, this work has focused on how law enforcement works in practice and found a history filled with diversity, tensions, divisions, and conflicts underlying and complicating the well-worn narrative of violent white supremacy and racist criminal justice in the American past. It has, moreover, provided an important counterpoint to legal histories that draw mainly on appeals court and legislative records to examine the federal and constitutional dimen- sions of violence and law enforcement in black history, but which sometimes neglect both the influence of nonlegal factors on the administration of criminal justice and the impact of legal outcomes outside of the courtroom. Building on the new understandings of African American crime and punishment opened up by grassroots studies, this book joins many individual stories into a longer narrative in order to present a wide-lens interpretative history. This approach aims to highlight connections, continuities, and change across time and place. It also allows for consideration of how African American crime and punishment relates to broader themes in American history and makes the case more forcefully than a local study possibly can for incorporat- ing issues of race, crime, and punishment as a central component of wider historical debates. It presents, for example, the long history of African American crime and punishment as a powerful counterpoint to the promises of America’s founding documents and the nation’s rhetorical and constitutional commitment to freedom, justice, the rule of law, and equal protection. It reveals an engrained alternative tradition—a genealogy of injustice—in which violence has played as prominent a role as legal process, white supremacy has been as influential as egalitarian principles, and black resistance has played a primary role in the evolution of the criminal justice system. But it warns against essentializing this tradition by demonstrating that it

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Introduction 5 stemmed from different causes and took different forms in different places and at different times. Few previous studies have attempted to analyze together the social and legal histories of African American criminal justice and extralegal law enforcement over the long sweep of the American past. There are, however, a number of historical, legal, and social-science analyses of long-term shifts in issues of race, law, and criminal justice that provide a broad interpretative framework for this book. The most prevalent view—and the view with which most Americans today would likely concur—argues that criminal law has become more equal, less violent, and fairer in its treatment of African Americans over time. Assessing developments in African American criminal justice from slavery to the present, legal historian Randall Kennedy found “dramatic discontinuities” between the eras of slavery, segregation, and the present and identified the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s as a major turning point after which the history of African Americans and law enforcement changed profoundly. Kennedy also criticized late-twentieth century scholarship and political activism that identified with the struggles of black defendants and convicts and called for constraints on the powers of law enforcement. In Kennedy’s view, this work was detrimental to the interests of black America and undermined attempts to deal with more pressing legal concerns, such as the underenforcement of law in black communities ravaged by illegal drugs and high rates of intraracial violence. Adopting a more polemical and less nuanced stance, the conserva- tive black scholar Thomas Sowell maintained that the “battle for civil rights was fought and won” in the past and dismissed continued African American agitation as representing the socially destabilizing “politicization of the law.” From this perspective—which law professor Paul Butler calls “the celebratory tradition”—change in issues of race and criminal justice appears either as a product of, or inseparable from, broader changes in civil rights law that have affected all aspects of American race relations and the black experience.1 Alternative interpretations focus more on continuity than change, draw a clearer distinction between the history of African American crime and punishment and the course of the wider civil rights struggle, and are less sanguine about the evolving black experience of law enforcement. The theme of continuity has recently been evoked by law professor Michelle Alexander who describes the vast scale on which African Americans are imprisoned in the twenty-first century as constituting a “new Jim Crow,” much as historians studying earlier

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6 Crime and Punishment in African American History eras have described convict leasing as “worse than slavery,” and the system of peonage that flourished in the South from Reconstruction to the mid-twentieth century, as “slavery by another name.” Diverse explanations have been put forward for the persistence of racial discrimination in law enforcement. Derrick Bell argued that progress toward racial justice has occurred only when the interests of black and white Americans converge, and throughout American history this has invariably been only a temporary condition. As character- ized by former federal judge and historian Leon Higginbotham, African American legal history has been a “journey” from “total racial oppression” to only “muted shades of freedom” in which legal reforms have struggled to erase the precept of black inferiority that was cultivated through slavery and segregation and continues to influence judicial processes. William Stuntz, by contrast, focuses on new factors that allowed discrimination to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, such as declining local community influence over criminal justice outcomes and a massive expansion in pros- ecutors’ discretionary power that came at the expense of legal due process. In Doris Provine’s assessment, discrimination in American criminal law has “morphed … rather than disappeared,” as jurists and politicians in recent decades have embraced an ideology of color- blind jurisprudence that fails to address the persistence of structural and unconscious racism.2 The way in which the history of African American crime and punishment is written and understood is consequently of profound importance to interpretations of criminal justice in the present. In a recent study, criminologists James Unnever and Shaun Gabbidon argue that “centuries of subordination,” and “criminal justice injustices” have forged a unique African American worldview marked by a profound “cynicism” about modern law enforcement that contributes to high rates of offending. Anthropologist John Hartigan similarly argues that Americans’ views on race, crime, and punishment in the present are “in part, based on the relevance they attribute to the past.” Among those who consider race a key variable in twenty-first-century criminal justice, history is “ever present, with certain actions and attitudes being continually repeated,” while for proponents of the view that the civil rights movement largely eroded the pertinence of race to the enforcement of criminal law, the past is confined to history and crime and punishment in the present considered “an entirely contemporary matter.” The way in which the past is understood also has relevance to efforts to reform criminal justice processes and outcomes in the

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Introduction 7 present, by revealing the circumstances in which change has occurred in the past and the factors that have limited or distorted intended outcomes. The history of African American crime and punishment can readily appear to be a strange, foreign country if reduced to a one- dimensional narrative of extreme and explicit violence, discrimination, and lawlessness, or with a focus limited to legal decision making. This study argues that it should instead be interpreted as a multifaceted and constantly evolving story of conflict and struggle entwined with wide-ranging social, legal, economic, and political forces.3 Crime and Punishment in African American History is a relatively short book that seeks to draw out major themes across a broad time period. Writing it has consequently entailed making difficult deci- sions about content and emphasis. Inevitably, specialists in the field will have little trouble pointing to important issues that are neglected or could have been discussed in greater depth. I have been guided by a number of considerations in reaching the choices I have made. First, I have sought to highlight the diversity of African American criminal justice history over time and space. Second, I have sought to reflect recent developments in the historiography. Third, although the book attempts to tell the story of the “everyday life” of African American crime and punishment, this can often be most effectively done through events that, in themselves, are extraordinary. The book does attempt to paint broad pictures of trends and patterns in law enforcement, but it often does so through illustrative case studies that, apart from their analytical value, also provide the most engag- ing entry point to the subject matter. The book is divided into three sections. Part One examines the era of slavery and the reconstruction of the relationship between race, crime, and punishment that occurred in the late-nineteenth century. These chapters demonstrate the overwhelming extent to which law and violence combined first to uphold the slaveholders’ rule and then to secure white supremacy in the decades after emancipation. At the same time, they also reveal conflicts over the early history of African American crime and punishment, as ideas about race evolved and white elites struggled to secure and adapt the legal and extralegal pillars of their power amidst dramatically shifting social and political contexts. Chapter 1 focuses on slave resistance and crime and the everyday forms of control and punishment that slaveholders used to prevent and regulate these activities. Slaveholders’ power was all but unconstrained by law and it was backed up by the work of overseers, patrols, police officers, and magistrates. It also drew on broad support

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8 Crime and Punishment in African American History from nonslaveholding white Americans, though by the mid-nineteenth century this support was deeply fractured, particularly outside of the southern states. Chapter 2 moves inside the courtroom to explore the trials of slaves and free African Americans charged with the most serious criminal offenses, including murder and rebellion. It traces the varied and evolving judicial processes that enslaved defendants encountered, the diverse factors that influenced trial outcomes, and the blurred division between legal and extralegal justice. Chapter 3 takes the story into the decades after the American Civil War when African Americans, the federal government, and reactionary white southerners fought to shape and administer a new system of criminal justice according to wildly divergent hopes and ideas about the future of black freedom. Part Two focuses on African American crime and punishment in the era of segregation from the 1890s to the 1940s, highlighting the interaction of legal and extralegal practices and forms of black resistance. Chapter 4 examines systems of convict leasing, chain gangs, and peonage as connected forms of labor control and criminal punishment operating within and outside legal boundaries. Chapter 5 traces the equally connected histories of lynching and criminal trials in the South and questions both the significance and limitations of campaigns by civil rights groups and workers’ organizations against mob rule and discriminatory prosecutions and executions. Chapter 6 moves beyond the southern states and uncovers the relationships that existed between law and violence in crime, policing, and punishment in the rapidly expanding black neighborhoods of major cities in the American Northeast and Midwest. Finally, Part Three engages with themes of change and persistence in African American crime and punishment from the civil rights era to the present. In this period, the most explicit and public acts of racial discrimination and violence were largely purged from American law enforcement. As has happened repeatedly since the era of slavery, however, new developments in policing and punishment since the 1960s have ensured that the discriminatory and repressive impact of criminal justice on African American life survives and thrives in Obama’s America as it did in Lincoln’s. An epilogue considers recent efforts to address injustices of the past through prosecuting the white killers of black civil rights activists, memorializing the victims of lynching, and campaigning for reparations for the survivors of racial atrocities. It argues for the importance of remembering these events as elements of ongoing historical processes.

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Index

Abu Ghraib, 213 Arizona, 142, 192 Abzug, Bella, 170 armed self-defense African American middle-class, 122, Reconstruction-era, 80–1 140, 155, 176 in northern cities, 158 African American women lynching and, 120–1, 151 crime and arrest, 45, 53, 143–5, civil right movement and, 180–4 158, 203 Arrington, Richard Jr., 201 imprisonment of, 93, 95, 96, 107, Association of Southern Women 138, 177–8, 205, 208 for the Prevention of Lynching in northern cities, 139 (ASWPL), 126 lynching of, 115, 119 Atlanta, 62, 93, 97, 105, 122, 171, penal reform and, 108 177–8, 200, 217, 222 recourse to courts, 79 Attica prison riot, 191, 192 resistance and, 83, 169–70 attorneys, 50, 58, 127, 153, 172, see also anti-lynching movement, 190, 192 rape Auburn Penitentiary, 89 Akins v. Texas (1945), 135 Alabama Black Liberation Front, Bailey v. Alabama (1911), 105 190 Baltimore, 14, 15, 168, 180, 186 Albany, Ga, 177 Barbour, Haley, 221 Alexander, Michelle, 5, 197 Barrow, Bennett H., 11–12, 37 American Civil Liberties Union, Battle, Samuel, 149 129, 214 Baumes Law, 148 An American Dilemma, 150 Beckwith, Byron de la, 165 Angola prison farm, 101 Bedford Hills State Prison, 138–9 Anti-Defamation League, 223 Bell, Derrick, 6 anti-lynching movement, 115 Bender, Rita Schwerner, 219 armed self-defense and, 120–1 Bethea, Rainey, 113 anti-lynching laws, 119, 123–4, Bill of Rights, 191 126, 152 Birmingham, Al., 92, 132, 176, criminal justice reform and, 179–80, 201 129–30 black codes, 61, 63–4, 66, 103 Ida B. Wells and, 121–2, 123, 157 Black Nationalism, 141. See also Senate apology, 222–3 Black Power See also lynching, NAACP Black Panther Party, 166, 187–91 anti-miscegenation laws, 30, 82–3, Black Power, 183–91 167, 192 Bloody Sunday (1965), 179, 194 anti-slavery movement, 16, 57–8 Bloxham, William, 122

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256 Index

Boston, 33, 36, 111 southern policing and, 174–80 Brazil, 16 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 174–5 Browder v. Gayle (1956), 175 Freedom Rides, 176–7 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), armed self-defense and, 180–3 172–4, 176 student sit-ins, 175–6 Brown v. Mississippi (1936), 131 race riots and, 185–6 Brown, H. Rap, 187 legacy, 199, 208, 220 Brown, Lee P., 200 Civil War, 60, 61–2 Buchanan, James, 16 Clark, Jim, 180 Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, class and criminal justice, 52–5, 137, and Abandoned Lands, 151, 170, 211 see Freedmen’s Bureau Clinton, William J., 210 Bush, George H.W., 198 Cobb, Thomas, 40 Bush, George W., 219 coerced confessions, 135 Butler, Paul, 5 Cold War, 167 Coleman, James P, 173–4 California, 187, 188, 190, 200, Colfax Massacre, 81 202, 209 color-blind justice, 204–07 Cameron, Lucille, 146 Columbia (Tennessee), 171 Campaign for Racial Equality Commission on Interracial (CORE), 176, 181, 183 Cooperation (CIC), 125 capital punishment, see death Communist Party, 106, 160, 221 penalty see also Civil Rights Congress, Carmichael, Stokely, 183 International Labor Defense, Cartwright, Marguerite, 136 Revolutionary Workers’ Celia, a slave, 53–4 League, Young Liberators chain gangs, 101, 103, 111–12 community policing, 200–03 Chambers v. Florida, 135 Connecticut, 57, 142 Charleston, 15 Connor, Eugene “Bull”, 180 Chicago, 136, 140, 146, 150, 172 Countdown to Fairness, 217 Black Panther Party in, 189 convict leasing criminal justice system, 150–1, 153, abolition, 97–9 157, 158 conditions, 93–7 race riots, 142, 158, 186 origins, 88–92 homicides in, 144 criminal justice system, 66–78, policing, 199–200, 202 126–37, 149–57, 165–6, 177–8, prostitution, 145 204–13 church courts, 33, 59, 79 see also death penalty, NAACP, Citizens’ Council, 173 police, slave trials Civil Rights Act (1866), 66 Cuba, 16, 182, 199 Civil Rights Act (1965), 192 Civil Rights Congress, 170–1 Darrow, Clarence, 151, 155 Civil Rights Movement Davis, Jefferson, 25 criminal justice and, 165–6, 177–8 Davis, Troy, 217

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Index 257

Davis, Zephyr, 153 Fair Sentencing Act, 217 Deacons for Defense and Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation 182–3 (FBI) death penalty, 89, 118, 131, 135, 169, police corruption and, 201 195, 206, 213–17 lynching, 174 lynching and, 113–14, 126, 129, 136 civil rights movement and, 171, race and, 215 180–2 racial justice acts, 216 Black Power and, 189–90, 191 rape and, 128, 169 War on Drugs and, 210 Reconstruction-era, 60, 77 Emmett Till Act and, 219 slavery and, 39, 40, 49, 52, 58 peonage, 106 southern states and, 216 Folsom, Jim, 170 Dee, Henry H., 219 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 90 Delaware, 42, 151 Fortune, T. Thomas, 120 Department of Justice Fourteenth Amendment, 176, 192 lynching and, 171 lynching and, 120, 123 peonage and, 104 Reconstruction and, 60, 66, 68 Ku Klux Klan investigations, 82, Supreme Court and, 81–2, 83, 130 181–2 Franklin, Pink, 129–30 Jack Johnson case, 146 Free blacks, 15, 27, 28, 31–2, Detroit, 140, 141 55–6, 58 arrest rates, 159 Freedmen’s Bureau, 61, 65–6, 68–9, Ossian Sweet case, 154–5 70–2, 74 race riots, 184, 185 Freedom Rides, 176–7 police brutality, 201 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 34–6 Douglass, Frederick, 19, 58, 120 Furman v. Georgia (1972), 213–14 drugs laws, 209–10, 217–18 Drugs-Free America Act, 210 Garvey, Marcus, 140, 166 Du Bois, W. E. B., 113, 141, 142–3 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 223 Dukakis, Michael, 198 gender, 3, 170, 206 Dulles, John, 170 slave trials and, 53–5 Dwight, Theodore, 91 lynching and, 118, 126 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, 123 see also African American women, prostitution, rape East Saint Louis, 158 Genovese, Eugene D., 17 Eastern State Penitentiary, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), 191 Philadelphia, 89 Giuliani, Rudolph, 203–04 Eighth Amendment, 206, 213–14 global prison complex, 213 emancipation, 60–2 Goldwater, Barry, 193, 198 Emmett Till Act, 219, 220 Good roads movement, 99–100 Enforcement Acts, 74 Goode, Washington, 57–8 Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), 192 Gregg v. Georgia (1976), 214–15 Evers, Medgar, 165, 180 Guantanamo Bay, 213 Extradition, 110–11 Guinn v. United States (1915), 130

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258 Index

Haiti, 38 King, Rodney, 196–7 Hamer, Fannie L., 165 Kirkwood v. Miller (1858), 49–50 Hamm v. Rock Hill (1964), 178 Knights of Labor, 98 Hammond, James H., 19, 21, 25 Ku Klux Klan, 2, 90, 219, 221 Harlem Riot (1964), 183 civil rights movement and, 176, Harlem, see New York City 180–3 Harper, Chancellor William, 19 Emmett Till case, 173 Hartigan, John, 6 Reconstruction-era, 65, 72–4, 81 Hatcher, Jordan, 51–2 Ku Klux Klan Act (Third Hayes, Rutherford, 81 Enforcement Act), 74, 82 Herndon, Angelo, 160 Ku Klux Klan Trials, 74–5 Higginbotham, A. Leon, 6 Hoffman, Frederick, 143 labor control, 2 Hoover, J. Edgar, 188 see also slavery, convict leasing, Horton, William, 198 lynching, mass incarceration, Houston, 200–01 peonage Houston, Charles, 160 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 149 Lester, Julius, 187, 194 immigration, 29–30, 59, 75, 76, Lewis, John, 177, 219 140 Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 61, 120 indeterminate sentencing, 107 Little Rock Central High School, Indiana, 142, 152 174 International Labor Defense, 132–4 Los Angeles, 187, 195–6 black population, 140 Jackson, George, 190–1 riot (1965), 184–5 Jamaica, 16, 140, 166 Loving v. Virginia (1967), 192 James v. Carper (1857), 27 Lowndes County Freedom Jefferson, Thomas, 38–9. Organization (LCFO), 183, Jena Six, 197–8 187 Johnson, Andrew, 66 Lupper v. Arkansas (1964), 178 Johnson, Jack, 146–7 lynching, 113–37, 171, 174, 197 Johnson, James Weldon, 122, 155 criminal justice and, 47, 113–4, 119, Johnson, Lyndon B., 184, 186 152–4 jurors, African American, 57, 75, 76, culture of, 126 80, 127–8, 130, 131, 134–6, 149, death penalty and, 113–14, 126, 129 206, 216–7 deﬁ nition, 115 juvenile reformatories, 107 in northern states, 151–3 origins, 114–15 Kansas City, 128 public torture lynchings, 116–17 Kennedy, Randall, 5 slavery and, 49–50 Kerner Commission, 195 statistics, 115–16, 136 Killen, Edgar Ray, 219, 221 white supremacy and, 82 King, Martin Luther, 166, 174, 179, see also anti-lynching movement, 186 pro-lynching arguments, rape

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Index 259

Maine, 65 National Association for the Malcolm X, 166, 187 Advancement of Colored Mann Act (White Slave Trafﬁ c Act), People (NAACP) 146–8 Brown v. Board of Education, Mapp v. Ohio (1963), 191 172–3 marriage, 79–80. See also anti- African American jurors and, miscegenation laws 128 Marshall, Thurgood, 135 anti-lynching campaign, 122–4 Martin Luther King, Jr., National criminal procedure cases, 131–3, Historic Site, 222 170 Martin, Trayvon, 1 Pink Franklin case, 129–30 Martinsville Seven, 135–6 prisoners and, 109–11, 138 mass incarceration, 193, 207–13 criminal justice system and, 107, Massachusetts, 34, 57–8, 111, 198 150, 153 McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), 206 death penalty cases, 136, 214 McDufﬁ e, Arthur, 199 drugs laws and, 218 McGee, Willie, 170 civil rights movement, 165, 175–6, McKay, Claude, 158 180 Memphis, 66 armed self-defense and, 182, 188 Miami, 199–200 Ossian Sweet case, 154–5 Michigan, 142 National Criminal Justice Military Reconstruction Acts, 66 Commission, 195 Minnesota, 142, 152 National League for the Protection Miranda v. Arizona (1966), 192 of Colored Women, 145 miscarriages of justice, 127, 215 National Urban League, 148 Mississippi Improvement Native Americans, 20 Association, 175 Native Son, 138, 150 Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, Nebraska, 142 173–4 Negro Fellowship League, 148 Mississippi Truth Project, 221 Negro Seaman’s Acts, 31–2 Mitchell, John, 120 Nelly, a slave, 54 Monica, Janice, 138–9 New Deal, 167 Monroe, James, 38–9 New Jersey, 110, 139, 152–4 Montgomery bus boycott, 174–5 New Orleans, 15, 66 Moore v. Dempsey, 130–1 Black Panther Party in, 188, 189 Moore, Charles E., 219 community policing, 201 Mutual Welfare League, 107 police, 168 Myrdal, Gunnar, 150–1 New York City, 148 crime rates, 208 Nash, Diane, 177 prostitution, 145 Natchez, 27 parole, 149 National Advisory Commission on policing, 183–4, 186 Civil Disorders. See Kerner race riots, 158–9 Commission Black Panther Party in, 189

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260 Index

Newton, Huey, 187, 188 race riots and, 57, 142, 183–4, 186, Norris v. Alabama (1935), 131, 134 199–200 African American ofﬁ cers, 72, 149, O’Ferrall, Charles, 120 168–9, 200–01 Obama, Barack H., 8, 194, 199, 223 civil rights protests and, 157–61, Ohio, 33, 34, 142, 191 174–83 Oklahoma v. Lyons, 135 brutality, 114, 120, 135, 153, 157–61, Oklahoma, 128, 135, 142, 216, 221 171, 173, 187, 196, 203–04 Olmsted, Frederick L., 27 stop and search, 202–03, 223 Oregon, 200 lynching and, 119, 126, 152 Osborne, Thomas, 107 See also Black Panther Party, Owens, Betty Jean, 169 community policing, drugs laws Powell v. Alabama (1932), 131 Page, Thomas N., 118 Powell, James, 183–4 Parchman farm, 87, 101–03, 112, 176 President’s Committee on Civil Parker, Mack Charles, 174 Rights, 171 parole, 3, 130, 138, 158, 206, 216 prison farms, 101–03, 111–12 in northern states, 148–9 prisoners in southern states, 106–09, slavery and, 53 111, 112 disfranchisement, 212 mass incarceration and, 208–09, families of, 211–12 212 parole, 148–9, 211–12 paternalism, 17–18, 25 lynching and, 119, 125 Patterson, Haywood, 111 abuse of, 158–9, 165, 171, 177 Pecot, Carlton, 169 race and incarceration rates, 57, Penal reform, 89–90, 106–11 142, 149, 207 penitentiaries, 89–90 Black Power and, 190–1 Pennington, Richard, 201 see also chain gangs, convict peonage, 87–8, 103–06 leasing, penal reform, prison Philadelphia, 57, 89, 140, 143, 189 farms civil rights activists, 178, 180 probation, 108, 148–9, 158, 208, 212 criminal justice system, 158–9 Prohibition, 145 Fugitive Slave Act, 36 pro-lynching arguments, 118–19 homicides in, 144, 150 pro-slavery argument, 16–17, 40 prostitution, 144–5 prostitution, 144–6, 186, 203 racial violence in, 159, 184 Provine, Doris, 6 Philips County (Arkansas), race riot, 130–1 race riots, 57, 66, 142. See also Phillips, Wendell, 58 locations of riots. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 83, 143 racial ideology, 19–20, 24–5, 77, 143, police 145, 169 Reconstruction-era, 62–3, 65–6, see also color-blind justice, 75–7 pro-slavery argument in slave states, 28–31 Racial Justice Acts, 216

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Index 261 racial violence, 64–6, 71–2, 74 Selma, Al., 179 Raiford prison farm, 109 Simpson, O. J., 196–7 rape sit-ins, 175–6 white supremacy and, 24, 66 segregation, 82 criminal trials, 46, 53–5, 57, 58, in northern states, 141, 145, 159 131–3, 169–70 black resistance to, 82, 166, 175–80, lynching and, 118, 120–3, 151, 153 182 see also death penalty race riots and, 186 Reagan, Ronald, 209, 210 criminal justice and, 167 Reconciliation Act (Oklahoma), 221 in prisons, 108, 112 Reconstruction lynching and, 117 African American legal culture, see also Brown v. Board of 78–81 Education, residential Black militias, 80 segregation, United States end of, 75, 81–2 Supreme Court law enforcement, 66–78 slave patrols, 27–9, 31 military courts, 65–6 slaves racial violence, 65–6, 71–4 church discipline, 59 Republican Congress, 66–68 Creole revolt, 16 segregation, 81–3 Denmark Vesey conspiracy, 42, See also black codes, Freedmen’s 46, 56 Bureau, United States Supreme dissidence, 17 Court Gabriel’s conspiracy, 38–9 residential segregation, 130, 140, hired, 14, 15, 26, 51–3 154–5, 207 jails and, 25 Revolutionary Action Movement, Nat Turner rebellion, 15, 47, 189 48, 56 Revolutionary Workers’ League, 136 population, 12–14 Robinson, Marcus, 216 resistance, 15–19, 28 Rockefeller, Nelson, 209 runaways, 11–12, 18–19, 26, 33–4 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 134 Stono rebellion, 16 Roosevelt, Theodore, 37 see also slave trials, slaveholders, Rosewood, Fl., 221–2 slavery Rufﬁ n, Thomas, 12 slave trials appeals, 44 sale and transportation, 39, 52–3 conviction rates, 44–5, 49 Savannah, 168 evidence, 46 Schreiber, Belle, 146 gender and, 53–5 “Scottsboro boys” case, 131–4, 160 slaveholder property interests Screws, Mack, 171 and, 50–1 Seale, James, 219 summary trials, 38–9, 40–2, Searle, Bobby, 187, 189 46–7 Second World War, 167 trial by jury, 42–3, 47–8 Sellers, Cleveland, 188 white community and, 52–5

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262 Index slaveholders Till, Emmett, 172–3, 194 civil law and, 26 Truman, Harry S., 171 honor and, 24 Truth-telling commissions, 221 legal basis of power, 19–21, 26–7, Tulsa race riot, 221 39 Turner, Nat, 15. See also slave paternalism, 17–18, 25–26 rebellions patrols and, 28–9 property interests, 26, 42–3, 48, Union League, 80 49–53 United Mine Workers of America, violence, 11–12, 20–6 98 see also proslavery arguments, United Negro Improvement slave trials, slavery Association (UNIA), 140, 166 slavery United States Supreme Court colonial, 19–21, 24–5 civil rights and, 82, 83, 120, 168, Deep South, 14–15 175, 176, 190, 191–2 non-slaveholding whites and, 32–3 criminal justice and, 127, 166, 167, northern states, 15–16 172, 178, 195, 205 Upper South, 14–15 death penalty and, 206, 213–14 urban, 29–31 peonage, 106 see also slaves, slave trials, segregation and, 143, 172 slaveholders slavery and, 34, 36, 42 Smith v. Allwright (1944), 168 United States v. Cruickshank (1873) Sostre, Martin, 189 urbanization, 128–9, 138–40, 167 Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Utah, 214 106 Southern Truth and Reconciliation, vagrancy laws, 63, 88, 103, 178 221 Vesey, Denmark, 42. See also slave Sowell, Thomas, 5 rebellions State v. Mann (1828), 12, 26 Violent Crime Control Act, 210 Strauder v. West Virginia (1879), 127 Volstead Act, 145 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Voting Rights Act, 184 Committee (SNCC) Freedom Summer, 180–1 Wacquant, Loïc, 211 sit-ins, 176–8 Waller, Odell, 136–7 Black Power and, 183, 187 War on Terror, 213 Stuntz, William, 6 Washington County (Texas), 75 Sweet, Ossian, 154–5 Washington, Booker T., 115, 130 Washington, George, 14 Tampa, 125 Wells, Ida B. Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad anti-lynching campaigns, 121–2, Company, 98 123 Terrell, Mary Church, 122 early-life, 121 The Philadelphia Negro, 142 police brutality and, 157 Thirteenth Amendment, 105 West Virginia, 127, 134

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White, Walter, 122–3, 157, 158 Wright, Rev. Jeremiah, 199 Wilkins, Roy, 188 Wright, Richard, 138, 150 Williams, Robert, 181–2 Wilson, Jimmy, 170 Young Communist League, 160 Without Sanctuary, 222 Young Liberators, 160 witnesses, enslaved, 27, 32–3, 46–7, Young, Coleman, 201 55, 58 Work, Monroe, 143 Zimmerman, George, 1

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