SEPARATE COURTS
South Carolina appears to be the only State which has ever provided a separate court for the trial of cases in which Negroes have interests at issue. That was called the District Court, provided for by a statute[[648]] approved December 19, 1865, which statute was repealed September 21, 1866; so the law was in force less than a year. The seventh section of the act of forty-nine sections is: “The District Court shall have exclusive jurisdiction, subject to appeal, of all civil cases where one or both of the parties are persons of color, and of all criminal cases wherein the accused is a person of color, and also of all cases of misdemeanor affecting the person or property of a person of color, and of all cases of bastardy, and of all cases of vagrancy, not tried before a Magistrate....” The Magistrate was given jurisdiction over small disputes, controversies and complaints that arose in his neighborhood between persons of color, or between persons of color and white persons, and of petty misdemeanors committed by or toward persons of color, between master and servant, between master and apprentice, and between employer and laborer, and civil suits involving not over twenty dollars in which a person of color was a party. An indictment of a white person for the homicide of a person of color had to be tried in the regular superior court; and so had all other indictments in which a white person was accused of a capital felony affecting the person or property of a person of color. In these forty-nine sections the jurisdiction of this special court for persons of color is worked out in detail; but inasmuch as the law was in force less than a year and was one of the ephemeral “Black Laws” already considered, there is no need to go into it further. Suffice it to say that in the South at present, as in other sections, the people of all races and colors have their rights adjudicated by the same court.