The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

In many ways this unhappy state of things is a survival of frontier practices which once were common in the Northwest as well as in the South, but which have nearly disappeared there as civilization has advanced; but in the South there is a special element of lawlessness through the Negroes. One of the few advantages of slavery was that every slaveholder was police officer and judge and jury on his own plantation; petty offenses were punished by the overseer without further ceremony, serious crimes were easily dealt with, and the escape of the criminal was nearly impossible.

Freedom, with its opportunity of moving about, with its greatly enlarged area of disputes among the blacks, and between Whites and Negroes, has combined with the influence of the press in popularizing crime, and perhaps with an innate African savagery, to make the black criminal a terrible scourge in the South. To begin with the less serious offenses, there is no doubt that the Negro has a very imperfect realization of property rights, partly because of the training of slavery. The vague feeling that whatever belonged to the plantation was for the enjoyment of those who lived on the plantation is deliciously expressed by Paul Dunbar:

Folks ain’t got no right to censuah othah folks about dey habits;
Him dat giv’ de squir’ls de bushtails made de bobtails fu’ de rabbits.
Him dat built de gread big mountains hollered out de little valleys,
Him dat made de streets an’ driveways wasn’t ’shamed to make de alleys.
We is all constructed diff’ent, d’ ain’t no two of us de same;
We cain’t he’p ouah likes an’ dislikes, ef we’se bad we ain’t to blame.
If we’se good, we needn’t show off, ’case you bet it ain’t ouah doin’
We gits into su’ttain channels dat we jes’ cain’t he’p pu’suin’.
But we all fits into places dat no othah ones could fill,
An’ we does the things we has to, big er little, good er ill.
John cain’t tek de place o’ Henry, Su an’ Sally ain’t alike;
Bass ain’t nuthin’ like a suckah, chub ain’t nuthin’ like a pike.
When you come to think about it, how it’s all planned out, it’s splendid.
Nuthin’s done er evah happens, ’dout hit’s somefin’ dat’s intended;
Don’t keer whut you does, you has to, an’ hit sholy beats de dickens,—
Viney, go put on de kittle, I got one o’ mastah’s chickens.

Not so genial is the usual relation of Negro with Negro; both in town and city there is an amount of crude and savage violence of which the outside world knows little, and in which women freely engage. Jealousy is a frequent cause of fights and murders; and whisky is so potent an excitant that many competent observers assert that whisky and cocaine are at the bottom of almost all serious negro crimes. Practically every negro man carries a revolver and many of them bear knives or razors; hence, once engaged in a fracas, nobody knows what will happen. A woman describing a trouble in which a man shot her brother was chiefly aggrieved because “Two ladies jumped on me and one lady bit me.” There is constant negro violence against the Whites, and they occasionally engage in pitched battles with white gangs.

Here, as in so many other respects, even well-informed people run to exaggeration. Thus President Winston, of the North Carolina Agricultural College, declares in public that the Negroes are the most criminal element in the population, and are more criminal in freedom than in slavery (both of which propositions are indisputable); that “the negro is increasing in criminality with fearful rapidity”; that “the negroes who can read and write are more criminal than the illiterate”; that they are nearly three times as criminal in the Northeast as in the South; that they are more criminal than the white class, and that “more than seven tenths of the negro criminals are under thirty years of age.” This statement, like almost all the discussions of criminal statistics, ignores the important point that as communities improve, acts formerly not covered by the law become statutory crimes; and hence that the more civilized a state the more likely it is that criminals will be convicted, and the larger will be the apparent proportion of criminals. In Connecticut are enumerated 68 white juvenile delinquents to 100,000 people, in Georgia only four, but the Georgia boys are not seventeen times as good as their brothers in the Northern state. It further overlooks the fact that most criminals of all races are under thirty years of age, for crime is the accompaniment of youth with white men as with Negroes.

To say that the Negroes furnish more than their proportion of criminals is no more than to say that the lowest element in the population has the lowest and most criminal members. The excessive criminality of the Negroes, which is marked in all the states of the Union, is of course a mark of their average inferiority, and a measure of the difficulty of bringing them up to a high standard; and the proportion is often exaggerated. In South Carolina where the Negroes are three fifths of the population they furnish only four fifths of the convicts. As for the assertion that the educated Negroes are specially criminal, the statement is contradicted by the records of the large institutions of negro education, and by the experience of thousands of people. Education does not necessarily make virtue, but it is a safeguard. As a matter of fact, white Southerners in general know little of the lives or motives of thousands of the immense noncriminal class of Negroes, with whom they have no personal relations; but are wide awake to the iniquities of the educated men who fall into crime.

The experience of two centuries shows that the Negroes are not drawn to crimes requiring previous organization and preparation; no slave insurrection has ever been a success within the boundaries of the United States; and blacks are rarely found in gangs of bandits. The incendiarism of which there is now so much complaint is probably the expression of individual vengeance. The Negroes, according to the testimony of those nearest to them, are inveterate gamblers, and many affrays result from consequent quarrels, so that murders may be most frequent where there is the best employment and largest wages and greatest prosperity among the thrifty. Murder, manslaughter, and attempts to kill make up three quarters of the recorded crimes of the blacks in the Mississippi Delta. Murders of Negroes by Negroes are very common and many of the criminals escape altogether.

Negro crime is much fomented by the low drinking-shops in the city and in country, by the lack of home influence on growing boys and girls, by the brutalizing of young people who are sent to prison with hardened criminals, and in general, by close contact with the lowest element of the white race, which leads to crimes on both sides. It is a striking fact that where the Africans are most numerous there is the least complaint of crime. The so-called race riots are usually rows between a few bad Negroes and the officers of the law, or a group of aggrieved Whites. Fights with policemen and sheriffs are frequent, and desperate men not infrequently barricade themselves in houses, and sell their lives as dearly as they can. Quarrels over the settlement of accounts are not uncommon, and the Negro who feels himself cheated sometimes takes his revenge at the end of a gun. As weapons are ordinarily sold without the slightest check, to men of both races and of every age, there is never any lack of the means to kill.

Occasionally a cry is raised that proof has been found of the existence of “Before Day Clubs”—that is, of organizations of Negroes for purposes of violence. The thing is possible and difficult to disprove, but a sequence of crimes through such an organization seems alien to the Negro’s habits, and is at least unlikely. The serious charges that the blacks habitually protect any negro criminal who comes to them will be considered farther on.

The negro crime about which Southern newspapers print most, Southern writers say most, and which more than anything else aggravates race hatred, is violence to white women. The crime is a dreadful one, made worse by the spreading abroad of details, but it has such a fateful relation to the whole Southern problem that something must here be said, less on the thing itself than on some of the common misunderstandings and misstatements which cluster about it.