The Governor suggests that white men suffer under this system, and there have been recent cases where vagrant Whites were sold on the auction block for a period of months. It might perhaps be argued that the South is always more stern in its judicial punishments than the North, inasmuch as five years on a convict farm in Mississippi is worse than being decently hanged in Massachusetts. The modern and humane methods of reform, of separating the youthful first-term man from the others, of specially treating juvenile crime, are little known in the South. When a twelve-year-old black boy is sent to the chain gang by a white judge, the community suffers. With regard to all those penal institutions one might share the feelings of the good Northern lady, when told that her grandson had been sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years: “What did they do that for? why, he won’t be contented there three weeks!”
This sympathy with the criminal the governors of the Southern states appear to feel, as is shown by some astonishing statistics. When Governor Vardaman went out of office January 1, 1908, he pardoned 8 white men and 18 Negroes, most of them convicted of murder or manslaughter, and 11 of them life men. A Memphis paper has tabulated the state pardons for a period of twelve months, and if the results are accurate, they show 1 in Wisconsin, 22 in Massachusetts, 81 in Georgia, 168 in Alabama, and over 400 in Arkansas. Just how the Negroes get sufficient political influence to secure pardons is one of the serious questions in Southern jurisprudence. For these lavish pardons the Whites are wholly responsible, for from them spring all the governors and pardoning boards.
The same responsibility rests on the Whites for the inefficiency of criminal justice and for the mediæval prison system. The North might fairly plead that its efforts to reform its judicial and punitive system are resisted by the lower elements of society, which have such power through choosing prosecutors and judges and legislators, in framing laws and constitutions, that the better elements cannot have things their own way. Not so in the South, where the Superior Race has absolute control of the making of law and the administering of justice, and the treatment of prisoners. Every judge in the South, except a few little justices of the peace, is a white man. Negroes, although still eligible to jury service, are rarely impaneled, even for the trial of a Negro. Negro testimony is received with due caution; hardly any court will accept the testimony of one black against one white man. For failures in the administration of justice, for unwillingness to try men for homicide, for technicalities in procedure, for hesitancy of juries, the Superior Race is wholly responsible. The system is bad simply because the white people who are in control of the Southern state governments are willing that it should be bad. With all the machinery of legislation, and of the courts in its possession, the white race still resorts to forms of violence which sometimes strike an innocent man, and always brutalize the community, and lead to a contempt for the ordinary forms of justice. The place for the white people to begin a real repression of crime is by punishing their criminals without enslaving them.
CHAPTER XV
LYNCHING
The defects in the administration of justice in the South are complicated by a recognized system of punishment of criminals and supposed criminals by other persons than officers of the law—a system to which the term Lynch Law is often applied. In part it is an effort to supplement the law of the commonwealths; in part it is a protest against the law’s delay; in greater part a defiance of law and authority and impartial justice.
In its mildest form this system of irresponsible jurisprudence takes the form of notices to leave the country, followed by whipping or other violence less than murderous, if the warning be disregarded. Such a method owes all its force to the belief that it proceeds from an organized and therefore a powerful race of people. Next in seriousness come the race riots of which there were many examples during the Reconstruction era; and occasionally they burst into serious race conflicts, of which half a dozen have occurred in the last decade. The responsibility rests in greater measure on that race which has the habit of calculated and concerted action: reckless Negroes can always make trouble by shooting at the Whites; but the laws, the officers of justice, the militia, the courts, are in the hands of the white people. Since they are always able to protect themselves by their better organization, their command of the police, and the conviction in the minds of both races that the white man will always come out victorious, most troubles that start with the Negroes could easily be dealt with, but for a panic terror of negro risings which harks back to slavery times. It is very easy to stampede Southern communities by such rumors. When, in 1908, six armed Negroes were arrested in Muskogee, Okla., telegrams went all over the country to the effect that a race war was on, and two companies of militia were ordered out; but apparently there was not a glimmer of real trouble. Negroes have repeatedly been driven out of small places. For instance, in August, 1907, in Onancock, on the eastern shore of Virginia, there was a dispute over a bill for a dollar and a quarter which ended with the banishment of a number of Negroes. In the year 1898 there was a similar riot in Wilmington, N. C., and several thousand Negroes were either ejected or left afterwards in terror. The trouble here began in excitement over the elections.
By far the most serious of these occurrences was the so-called race riot at Atlanta, September 22, 1906, caused primarily by that intense hostility to the Negroes which is to be found among town youths; and secondarily by some aggravated crimes on the part of Negroes, and the equally aggravated crime of a newspaper, the Atlanta Evening News, which, by exaggerating the truth and adding lies, inflamed the public mind; on the night before the riot it called upon the people of Atlanta to join a league of men who “will endeavor to prevent the crimes, if possible, but failing, will aid in punishing the criminals.”