The Ultimate Criminal

by Archibald Henry Grimké

Take another and different case, which is common enough in the South also. It is, like the preceding clipping, taken from the Washington Post:

LYNCHED BY MOB OF 1,000.

Little Girl’s Assailant Dragged From Jail as Troops Are Assembling.

Shreveport, La., May 12.—Edward Hamilton, colored, held on the charge of attacking a 10-year old white girl, was taken from the parish jail shortly after noon and lynched.

For three hours a mob of 1,000 men and boys stood in the rain outside the jail doors, hammering away with a heavy railroad iron at the barrier. Steel saws finally were used, and entrance was gained by the mob. Sheriff J. P. Flourney had telegraphed the governor for troops and orders had been sent the Shreveport company of the national guard to report for service. Before the company could be assembled the prisoner had been taken from the jail. A rope was placed about Hamilton’s neck and he was dragged half a block from the jail to a telephone pole opposite the parish courthouse, and strung up. A knife was left sticking in the body.

Here we have Judge Lynch’s Court in full operation in the execution of one suspected Colored criminal and the manufacture at the same time of a thousand white criminals. This Colored man was only suspected of the usual crime. There was no trial of him to find the facts, not even by Judge Lynch himself. Edward Hamilton might have been guilty and then again he might have been innocent. I think that a private inquiry into his case subsequent to his murder, pointed to his probable innocence. But he was an object of suspicion, and that was enough to justify the act of his murderers. If the mob failed to lynch the guilty and lynched instead an innocent man, it was so much the worse for the innocent man, not at all for the mob, however red their hands were with that innocent man’s blood. Why? Because that innocent man was black, and because his murder helps to uphold white supremacy over millions of people whose only offense is that they are black. Into the violent death of a man like Hamilton there might not be instituted any official inquiry at all in many parts of the South any more than if he had been a horse or a dog. But if there happens to be an official inquiry the usual verdict is that “the deceased came to his death by the hands of a person or persons unknown,” and that ends the matter so far as the Negro is concerned. But it does not end the matter so far as the South is concerned, for the Devil will exact his share of the black deed from that section to the uttermost farthing. What has such a mob done? In the murder of one black man, whether innocent or guilty, the South has, as in the case of Hamilton, made hundreds of white criminals, has tainted the blood of whole communities like Shreveport with the virus of lawlessness and crime. In this same Shreveport there were five colored men lynched in ten days and eight in a year, and one white woman testified at an investigation conducted by the attorney general’s office that she rode in an automobile crowded with men eighteen miles to see an old colored man burned at the stake! Like begets like, and crime crime, and there is no help for it. Because what a state sows that it shall surely reap. If it sow sin it shall reap suffering and shame, and if it sow the wind it shall likewise reap the whirlwind. Is not the South sowing into the souls of both races the seeds of sin and violence, and shall it not then reap its full crop of crime and misery, the wild and anarchic harvest of the whirlwind?

Hard indeed is the lot of the Negro whether in the country or the city of the South, and in those of the North too for that matter. For wherever he goes he carries the marks of his race with him, and that is the essence of his offense in America. His lot is practically the same everywhere. He faces either in city or country the white man’s courts and police power and race prejudice and his industrial and residential exclusiveness and jealousies, but above all he faces the white man’s church with its undisguised color-phobia, with its virtual rejection of the brotherhood of man in respect to all races who happen not to be white. They are in the regard of this church unclean and socially beyond the pale of its Christian fellowship. They are salvable to be sure but from afar by missionary efforts, the farther away the better, in China and Japan, in India and Africa. For there this church is in no danger of race contamination in its pews and at its altars and in its homes. The American church is saying with the spirit of the unseeing Peter of old, “Not so Lord, we have never accepted any man who is brown or black or yellow as really our brother, for we are white and Thou hast made us of different clay, of purer blood than all these millions of brown and black and yellow peoples. Thou hast made us white and white we mean to remain, Thy common fatherhood and the brotherhood of all these alien races to the contrary notwithstanding. We try to be humble Lord, but we have never yet succeeded in humbling the proud blood which Thou hast given us to the level of brotherhood with these strange dark peoples.”

That is the spirit which the Negro encounters in the American church; that is the spirit which crushes him down and crowds him back whenever he tries to rise and advance. He and his are denied the White man’s chance to make the best of themselves and to get the most out of themselves. And when many of them fail, as fail they must, they are beaten with many bitter words by this so-called Christian people because of this failure, and when some succeed in spite of the gates of this hell of race hatred and oppression they are beaten with even more bitter words and sometimes with bitter blows, and told to stay where they are put behind the poorest and most worthless of the whites in America’s long procession of progress and civilization. Is it any wonder that crime emerges out of such cruel and unequal conditions? The wonder is that the colored criminal class is not larger and more dangerous to person and property. Take a glance into the alleys of misery, into the ghettos of wrong where human beings beaten by other human beings stronger than they in the battle of life are penned in their destitution and wretchedness to live and die like poisoned rats in a hole, a prey to heat in summer and cold in winter and disease the year round, a prey to vice, a prey to the saloons which the white man thrusts upon them to steal away their last nickel and the remnant of their self respect. One need not be a prophet to foresee that out of all this injustice and inequality God’s avenging angel will come some day with sword, double-edged and deadly with disease and crime, to smite and to blight this land where white people having eyes refuse to see whither all their race injustice is leading, and ears but who are deaf to the prayer of Christ’s little ones crying for a man’s chance to get with others into the sun and to grow the free and beautiful life which God intended them to grow when first they came into the world, and that whether they are black or red or brown or yellow.

In the matter of education, to recur again to the South in particular, the blacks are most outrageously discriminated against in favor of the whites, who have more and better school buildings, more and better paid teachers even where the blacks out-number them, longer school terms and a much higher per capita rate of the public school funds than have the children of the blacks. The problem of the South appears to be not how much education but how little it can possibly give the blacks in comparison with what it gives the whites. In all this educational business the South reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites, because they are to remain a permanently inferior class. That section is not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one. Ignorance is indeed apt to be stolid and submissive under circumstances in which intelligence becomes restless and discontented. Therefore the South has little love or use for an intelligent labor class, but desires above all things an ignorant one, and does what in it lies to hinder educational progress among its colored population. But ignorance is a breeder of crime just as poverty is. They are the parents of much of the crime committed by the Negroes just as they are the parents of much of the crime committed by the whites. Our criminal classes do many things which the law forbids to be done not because they are of one race or color or of another race or color, but mainly because they are poor and ignorant. Who then in these circumstances are the ultimate criminal, those who are unwillingly poor and ignorant, or those who make and keep them so by bad and unequal laws, by bad and unequal treatment?

Such is the story of what the whites did to educate the blacks at the most impressionable period of their freedom in democracy, in orderly government and Christian civilization. And it is the story of that education during the last fifty years. There was never kindness to the blacks and sympathy from the Southern whites as of men to men. The human touch which makes, or which ought to make, all men brothers has been woefully wanting in the whites as a race towards the blacks as a race. There has been kindness and perhaps much kindness from individual white people to individual Colored people, but never from the mass of the whites to the mass of the blacks, but just the contrary. Instead of kindness of the one race to the other there has been increasing ill-will and active injustice as of one enemy to another. If crime there has been in consequence of this deplorable, this terrible fact who is the ultimate criminal? At the bar of history and at the bar of God, I ask, Who is the ultimate criminal?