As in the case of illegitimacy, Negro crime rates have not tended to decline significantly with the Negro’s rising level of income and opportunity. About 34 per cent of the convicts committed to jail in 1910 were colored; the figure is about 30 per cent for 1960. Historically, Negro crime rates have been higher in the more-or-less-integrated North than in the more-or-less-segregated South. In Philadelphia, where the shockingly brutal murder of a Korean student in 1958 prompted some candid and critical investigations, it was found that Negro teen-agers, representing 30 per cent of the population, were guilty of 75 per cent of juvenile crime. In one nineteen-day period given special study, Negroes were found responsible for forty-five of fifty-three “headings,” in which victims were savagely beaten with clubs and iron pipes; they also were charged with thirty-two of thirty-eight murders and 340 of 437 cases of aggravated assault. Eighty per cent of the inmates of Philadelphia prisons at that time were Negroes. The figures are entirely comparable in New York, where one city magistrate, after hearing an unusually shocking case of Negro violence, asked a rhetorical question that hangs quivering in the air: “What kind of animals do we have in this town?”

But the problem of disproportionate criminality among Negroes is not peculiar to Harlem or South Chicago or Philadelphia, nor is it an especially new problem. Between 1930 and 1959, when Negroes represented about 10 per cent of the population, Negroes made up 54 per cent of those executed for crimes. And in a typical year, substantially similar figures are reported across the nation. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 1960 provide these figures on arrests for major crimes in 2446 cities having a population of 73,473,000:

Per cent
Offense ChargedTotalWhiteNegroNegro
Murder and nonnegligent
homicide		4,1201,5362,51160.9
Robbery25,50110,99414,15555.5
Aggravated assault127,72870,12254,73742.9
Burglary102,53666,13033,53634.7
Larceny-theft199,063129,15865,06332.7
Forcible rape5,3262,4592,77852.2
Prostitution and
commercialized vice		23,03111,04611,59450.3
Other sex offenses40,70227,81311,90129.2
Narcotic drug laws16,3708,5067,57046.2
Weapons; carrying,
possessing, etc.		32,12414,72917,00552.9

When it is kept in mind that the cities included in the FBI reports constitute a fair random sample, North and South, small towns and large, the sobering nature of these figures becomes apparent.

What can explain this dismaying tendency of the Negro toward disproportionate criminality? The same rationalizations (with a few ludicrous variations) are trotted out that are produced to discredit the figures on illegitimacy. Gunnar Myrdal devoted twelve pages of An American Dilemma to scoffs, sneers, apologies, explanations, highflown fabrications, and wildly speculative generalities, all intended to whitewash the Negro record.

First, says Myrdal, the statistics are no good. Figures on crime are generally inadequate, and statistics on Negro crime are even more so. Such data generally suffer from incomplete and inaccurate reporting, variations among States in definitions and classifications; and in the case of the Negro, the figures are distorted by special weaknesses owing to the caste situation and to certain characteristics of the Negro population. “It happens that Negroes are seldom in a position to commit ... white collar crimes [such as tax evasion, conspiracy to violate antitrust laws, fraud and racketeering]; they commit the crimes which much more frequently result in apprehension and punishment.” This is a chief source of error when attempting to compare statistics on Negro and white crime.

Myrdal then paints a picture of the South no Southerner would recognize. For a jaw-dropping example of the strange fabrications that have made Myrdal’s work notorious, consider the following:

In the South, inequality of justice seems to be the most important factor in making the statistics on Negro crime and white crime not comparable: ... [I]n any crime which remotely affects a white man, Negroes are more likely to be arrested than are whites, more likely to be indicted after arrest, more likely to be convicted in court and punished. Negroes will be arrested on the slightest suspicion, or on no suspicion at all, merely to provide witnesses or to work during a labor shortage in violation of anti-peonage laws. The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro’s lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. In the Southern court, a Negro will seldom be treated seriously, and his testimony against a white man will be ignored, if he is permitted to express it at all. When sentenced he is usually given a heavier punishment and probation or suspended sentence is seldom allowed him....

Myrdal goes on to remark that when white lawyers, installment collectors, insurance agents, plantation owners, and others cheat the Negroes of the South, they are “never” regarded as criminals. But stealing by Negroes from whites is almost always punished as a crime.

These things occur in the North, Myrdal asserts, although in a much smaller degree. In the North, the trouble is that the Negro has brought certain cultural practices with him from the South. Also, the Negro is poor. He cannot bribe policemen to let him off; he has no influential connections; he does not know the important people who can help him out of trouble.