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Title: The Ultimate Criminal
The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17
Author: Archibald H. Grimke
Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31299]
Language: English
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OCCASIONAL PAPERS, NO. 17.
THE AMERICAN NEGRO ACADEMY.
THE ULTIMATE CRIMINAL
ANNUAL ADDRESS
ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKE
PRICE : : 15 CTS.
WASHINGTON, D. C.:
PUBLISHED BY THE ACADEMY
1915
THE ULTIMATE CRIMINAL.
It is the fashion nowadays for every one with a stone in his hand to take
a shy at the poor Negro on account of his sins of commission and omission.
It is enough that some member of the race is caught _flagrante delicto_ or
merely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pillory
and the rest of the colored people into our national rogues' gallery,
where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints and
sinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot of
fools and hypocrites. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that
Negroes commit crimes. Not at all, for I know full well that they
do--altogether too many for their own good. But what I object to among
other things is that America, because of the crimes of individual Negroes
or because of the suspected crimes of individual Negroes, draws an omnibus
indictment against the moral character of the whole race, which is
monstrously unjust and wicked.
Who cares to inquire into the origin of Negro crime, or into the causes
which have contributed mightily to produce the Negro criminal? The book of
the Genesis of this man's crimes awaits to be written by an impartial and
sympathetic seeker after truth. The causes which have operated for fifty
years to produce Negro criminals will some day, I trust, be traced without
fear or bias to their source. I do not pretend to possess any scientific
qualification for such a task, but I do intend in these imperfect remarks
to try to indicate in outline merely the dismal stream of these causes
during the last half century, hoping thereby to cast a little light on a
dark and difficult subject: namely, how out of hostile and unequal social,
industrial and political conditions Negro crime emerged and why Negro
criminals abound.
To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances--that
they are the products of their social heredity and environment--is to
state a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It is
therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in
the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery.
For it furnished for two and a half centuries both his social heredity and
his environment, and so shaped his growth and character along moral,
religious and industrial lines. Chattel slaves had no rights, the most
rudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect. They did
not, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership of
self and of the products of their labor. They were the legal property of
others and so were the products of their labor. They did not own the
cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or the
tools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank or
the bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did the
cattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds and
bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or
to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the
masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves
were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of
wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit
of happiness. Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and
moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over
the souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bred
apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and
fear--the black brood of man's inhumanity to man.
At the close of the war which destroyed slavery the two races emerged
together into the midst of vast changes. The old social structure had been
disrupted in the civil convulsion, and the old political order likewise.
The slave half of the national house had tumbled about former masters and
slaves. The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than
they had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, they possessed themselves and
the hard hands which God had given them for their support. But being
landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old
master class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor
class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of
the old master class. The outlook for the new freedmen under these
circumstances was not propitious. All the same these people, poor and
ignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy as
children in the delight of their newfound freedom. The sound of their
childlike joy was heard in the land amid the grim desolations of war and
the sullen faces of their old masters. Care free and fear free, in spite
of unfriendly conditions and a threatening outlook, they gave themselves
up to such joy as God has rarely given in the history of the world to four
millions of people. Now no race can pass through such a spiritual
experience without being the better for it. For great happiness like great
suffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier. Before the overwhelming
fact that they could no longer be bought and sold--that they could no
longer be separated from their loved ones, these simple black folk fell in
transports of gratitude before God, their mighty deliverer, their
everlasting Father. Love was in their mouths and love was in their hearts.
Cheerful they were by nature and hopeful, and gifted withal with an
extraordinary amount of the milk of human kindness. Service was natural
and easy for them, and the cherishing of friends and foes in their need;
but resentfulness and revenge moved them hardly at all during their long
years of bondage. Comparatively few crimes against persons or property had
been recorded against them before emancipation. The few slave
insurrections or attempted slave insurrections were exceptions to the
general tenor of their peaceable disposition and conduct, to the uniform
and singular absence of ill-will, of a spirit of revenge in them as a
race.
This gentle trait was strikingly illustrated during the war of the
rebellion. They had opportunity enough and provocation enough, God knows,
to attack the property and the lives of the defenseless families of their
hard task-masters during those four dreadful years of sectional strife.
But in their beautiful simplicity and kindness of heart and fidelity to
the sacred and amazing trust reposed in them--the most sacred and amazing
ever reposed in a slave race by a master race in the history of the
world--they let their terrible opportunity for revenge pass them by and
seized instead the noble one to feed and cherish the helpless women and
children of masters who were fighting to rivet the chains of slavery on
them and on their children forever. This behavior of the slaves is the
supreme example which American Christianity has yet given of the vital
presence of the spirit of its divine founder in its midst. No other act in
its whole history approaches it in simple grandeur of forgiveness and
service. And it came literally out of the humble lives of a much oppressed
and long suffering race.
This simple and kindly black folk issued then out of their two and a half
centuries of bondage without malice toward the whites, without any of the
violent emotions which lead to the commission of great crimes. The only
violent emotion which stirred their child-like minds, which filled almost
to bursting their kindly hearts was deep thankfulness to God and to Mr.
Lincoln for their deliverance--an emotion which no pen can describe and no
tongue can put into words. Out of such kindly hearts, out of such deep and
holy emotions crime does not come and it would not have come had there
been no injection into the race soul of the Negro of new and bitter
experiences of wrong at the hands of the whites. But this is exactly what
actually took place. On the simple and kindly hearts of the new freedmen
the old master class might have graven large the law of peace and
goodwill. All that this child-like race needed at this initial stage of
their education and forming character were wise and sympathetic guidance
and treatment on the part of the whites in order to convert all their deep
and holy emotions into moral and civic values, into social and industrial
service to the South and to the nation at one and the same time. Did the
blacks get this wise and sympathetic guidance and treatment at the hands
of the whites? To answer this question is to open up the whole subject of
the causation of Negro crime during the last fifty years. And this I will
try to do as concisely and clearly as possible.
The first act of the South after the war was most unfriendly to the
blacks. For it was state legislation which remanded them to a new species
of bondage. Southern slaves they had been but by the new labor legislation
they were transformed into Southern serfs, chained to the soil by
cunningly devised laws to regulate their labor and movement. Force and
violence toward the blacks were relied upon to put through this
legislative and administrative program. This program was the cause of
Northern interference in the Southern situation at this juncture. But when
Congress intervened by its reconstruction measures to defeat the
reactionary program of the South, there swept over that section a
crime-storm of devastating fury. The old master class organized their
purpose in respect to the Negro, and their hatred of everything Northern
into a secret society known as the "Ku Klux Klan," which was nothing else
than a gigantic conspiracy for the commission of crime. Lawlessness and
violence filled the land, and terror stalked abroad by day and night. The
"Ku Klux Klan" burned and murdered by day, and it burned and murdered by
night. The Southern states had actually relapsed into barbarism. During
that period a new generation was conceived and born to the South by both
races--a generation that was literally conceived in lawlessness and born
into crime-producing conditions. Lawlessness was its inheritance and the
red splotch of violence its birthmark.
The period covered by this crime-storm was a bad way to begin the
education of the Negroes in respect for law, in self control and in
civilization. For they found no law strong enough to protect them in their
lives or property or freedom from the murderous attacks of that terrible
secret organization. Education in self-control, and in respect for
constituted authority became impossible where the dominating feeling of
the Negroes was one of terror. And as for civilization it was beaten down
by the red hand of violence. The blacks during these years were crushed
between two irreconcilable forces, two antagonistic governments which were
locked in a death grapple for possession of that section. The one
government was open and regular, while the other was secret and lawless.
The first was supported by a few native and Northern whites and by the
great body of the blacks, and the second was upheld by the great body of
the native whites under the trained and ruthless leadership of the old
master class, who would have no government, no social order which was not
set up by themselves.
During those dark years the blacks were much more sinned against than
sinning. They were sinned against by their white leaders, who in the main
used them to advance their personal and party interest, and who employed
the positions they thus gained to steal the people's money, to enrich
themselves at the expense of the states. There were colored leaders who
followed closely in the footsteps of the white leaders in perverting
public trusts to corrupt ends, but the chief malefactors, the biggest
scoundrels were members of the white race. In these circumstances the
blacks were the helpless victims of the misrule of their own leaders and
of the organized lawlessness of the Southern whites. In their need they
asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic and
wise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions. They prayed
for peace and for that happiness which goes with freedom, and there swept
over them for six dreadful years a crime-storm which filled their nights
and days, the season of their planting and the season of their reaping
with terror and destruction, and they just out of the house of bondage.
They were able in these circumstances to get from the whites no lesson in
obedience to law, in reverence for constituted authority, for as we have
seen those selfsame whites were everywhere breaking the law and beating
down and destroying constituted authority. Nor did they get any training
in personal and civic righteousness from their own leaders of either race.
For those leaders initiated them promptly by the power of example into the
great and flourishing American art and industry of graft.
This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-bag
governments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence of
the Southern whites were a great deal worse. For while some good can be
placed to the credit of those governments nothing but bad can possibly be
set down to the account of Southern lawlessness and violence. To the
carpet-bag governments belongs the introduction into the South for the
first time of the democratic principles of equality, and of the right of
each child in the state, regardless of race or color, to an education at
the hands of the state. These are two vital things which the South needed
then and which it needs to-day but which the old master class opposed then
and which their successors oppose to-day. That is what the whites did to
educate the blacks during the most impressionable period of their new
freedom in orderly government and in civilization. That was the way their
education in citizenship and character building began and that was the way
it proceeded until the year 1876.
In that year the two irreconcilable governments grappled in a final
struggle at the polls for mastery and possession of that section. When the
smoke of battle cleared over South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, the
Southern forces of re-action were in complete possession of those states,
and the solid South had become an accomplished fact. Nothing stood now
between the blacks and their ancient enemy. They were again at the mercy
of the old master class, who returned promptly to the execution of their
interrupted program of inequality and injustice. As the whites could not
now reestablish constitutionally their old slave system, or directly their
new serf system they proceeded to do the next best thing, that is to
construct a caste system based on race and color. Such a system, once
firmly established, would fix the status of the blacks as a permanently
inferior caste, and to that extent would render nugatory the three great
amendments to the constitution. For members of an inferior caste would by
the force of circumstances, law, or no law, be deprived of certain rights
civil and political enjoyed by members of the superior caste. Citizenship
of the one caste would not mean the same thing as citizenship of the
other. The lower caste could not possibly possess the same
rights--constitution or no constitution--which the upper caste possessed.
Inequality became thus the chief corner stone of the new Southern edifice.
Under this society there grew up two moral standards and two legal
standards for the government of the races. For example what under such a
system is bad for a black man to do to a member of the white race might
not be regarded as bad at all if done by a white man to a member of the
black race. The cruel and iniquitous sex relations of the races in the
South has grown out of this caste system. Under it we have the double
moral standard and the double legal standard operating throughout that
section with a vengeance. A white man cannot with impunity seduce another
white man's daughter or wife in the South. But were he to seduce a colored
man's daughter or wife the case would be wholly different. No bastardy
process lies in favor of the colored girl as lies in favor of her white
sister under like circumstances, and no maintenance could she possibly
obtain for her child from the white man who wronged her. Intermarriage
between the races has been made illegal by every Southern state and by
some Northern states also. Such a law makes colored women the safe quarry
of white men, and nowhere in the South do law or public opinion impose
upon them any deterrent punishment, moral or legal, for their crime, but
quite the opposite. For such men do not lose standing in Southern society
or the church or the state in consequence of their sin. In all this sexual
inequality and iniquity the South has eyes but sees not and ears but hears
not what is taking place everywhere in its midst.
On the other hand what happens to the black man who ventures to look upon
a white woman with love or carnal desire, or who is even suspected of
doing so? Ask Judge Lynch, ask the blind and murderous sex fury of white
men, the red male rage of Southern mobs. Nevertheless black men cannot be
made to see the difference between the lust of black men and the lust of
white men, or to acknowledge the justice of such a distinction. Hold the
blacks responsible by all means for the crimes they commit, but hold the
whites responsible also for creating social and legal conditions which
lead directly to the growth of crime among both races. Race and color not
efficiency and character are the basis of the Southern caste system, and
such a system produces unavoidably ill-will, oppressions, and resentments
between the races which lead directly or indirectly to the commission of
crime. For all those who are black, regardless of what nature and
education intend them to be are born into a fixed state of social and
political inferiority, and all those who are white, regardless of what
nature and education intend them to be are born into a fixed state of
social and political superiority, and for no other or better reason than
that those of the first class are black, and those of the second class are
white. Civilization finds it well nigh impossible to advance under such
iron bound conditions and against such a fatal obstruction to progress,
while civic righteousness must certainly share the same fate. Such social
injustice is as sure to provoke crime as stagnant water is to produce
disease. Yet, in spite of this iniquitous caste system the leaven of
democracy, of equality has found lodgment in the black man's mind, and he
craves the chance to become all that the white man has become and to do
all that the white man does by virtue of his American freedom and
citizenship. Nothing less than this is going to satisfy the blacks, the
Southern caste system and appearances in spots among the blacks
themselves, to the contrary notwithstanding.
But there is yet another aspect of the same subject, which tends to
produce the same result. I refer to the Southern policy of civil and
political repression and oppression of its colored population in order to
keep them within their caste of inferiority and subordination to the
whites. Discontent under such oppressive conditions is sure to arise among
the colored people, and this because of their growth and of the existence
of the hard and fast lines within which this growth must go on. For this
kind of discontent the South has no vent such as free institutions
provide. Its caste system sits upon this safety valve of democracy. Much
of the crime committed by oppressed peoples is in the nature of fullness
of life seeking greater freedom, of pent up energies seeking an outlet,
and much of the crime committed by oppressors is in the nature of
attempts, perilous always, to sit upon this safety valve of popular
governments, which is intended to relieve dangerous pressure within the
steam-chest of human expansion and progress. But the South is determined
to keep the Negro down however great may be his effort to rise. He is to
be kept down by brute force if he cannot be kept down in any other way,
below the social and industrial and political level of the lowest and most
worthless of the whites, because he is black and because they are white.
This is the meaning of the Southern movement for segregating the races, of
its jim-crow car laws and waiting-rooms. This is the meaning of the
Negro's exclusion from dining-cars and from restaurants along the line of
Southern railroads. He pays the same fare as the white passenger but he is
given inferior accommodations and in many instances these accommodations
are monstrously unequal and inferior. He is black and therefore the same
law which protects the white passenger against bad accommodations does not
apply to him. He is at the mercy of railroads, which may treat him as
badly as they choose, and there is none to say them nay. Why? Because all
these iniquitous distinctions and discriminations serve to teach colored
men and women, however intelligent and wealthy and respectable, that their
intelligence and wealth and respectability do not entitle them to equal
treatment with the most vicious and worthless of the whites. At the moral
retchings and manly revolt of the victim against this unequal treatment
the South either sneers or else grows angry, because it affects to see in
them the Negro's ambition for social equality, his secret desire to leave
his class and to enter that of the whites and to marry white women. And so
down on the safety valve which free institutions provide, and regardless
of the steam pressure within, the South has planted its brutal might with
reckless and insolent disregard of consequences.
Everywhere the treatment of the Negro is the same, and everywhere the
purpose of the South is plain. What with its contract labor laws and
emigration laws and vagrancy laws and convict-lease and plantation-lease
and credit systems the South is working mightily, night and day, to reduce
the Negro laborer to wage slavery, to fix him in an industrial position
where he shall have no rights which the white employer class is bound to
respect. Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward or
protection against the rapacity of Southern employers. What it gets as its
share bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share. The
employer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence. I am
speaking of course broadly, for there are many Negroes who get more than a
bare subsistence out of the products of their labor, and that in spite of
bad and unequal laws and conditions. But the great mass of Negro
agricultural labor is exploited and plundered by the white employer class,
and kept poor, because being poor they are esteemed less capable of giving
the South trouble. It is the only labor class in the South that is
deprived of the right to vote, and so is rendered powerless to influence
legislation and administration and the courts in its favor. If the poverty
of Negro labor renders it as a class less capable of giving the employer
class trouble this poverty is at the same time a crime breeder and a huge
crime breeder into the bargain.
Take this case which has just been decided favorably for the colored
laborer by the United States Supreme Court, as a fair example of what
Southern law and administration are doing to reduce the Negro to a
condition of helpless industrial slavery:
An Alabama case, involving charges of peonage in connection with the
operation of a convict labor law, now is before the Supreme Court,
where its disposition may have an important bearing on similar
statutes in other Southern States. The government contends that the
Alabama statute permits peonage in violation of the Federal
Constitution.
The test case is that of a colored man named E. W. Fields, who was
convicted in Monroe County of larceny. Upon his failure to pay his
fine, J. A. Reynolds, a plantation owner, became surety for him, and,
as permitted by the Alabama law, contracted to work out his
indebtedness during nine months at the rate of $6 a month and keep.
The government charges that Reynolds later had Fields arrested for
failing to complete the contract. As a result of the arrest, Fields,
in court, entered into contract to work fourteen months for G. W.
Broughton, another plantation owner.
Both Reynolds and Broughton were indicted by the Federal government,
but the Federal district court for southern Alabama held that peonage
had not been committed.
I want to ask your attention in passing to a few points about this case.
First the Negro laborer is convicted on a charge of larceny. This charge
might have been trumped up by some white person who wanted the Negro's
service. I do not know. I would not take the word of a Southern Court on
this point. At any rate the Negro laborer is convicted and a fine is
imposed upon him, which he is unable to pay. Now comes the opportunity of
the white employer, who happens to be conveniently in Court, to come to
the rescue of the poor Negro. He pays the fine and the Negro contracts to
pay him back by giving him nine months of his labor. The Negro thereupon
enters upon the performance of this contract, but fails for some reason,
not stated, to finish it. How long he worked does not appear either, but
this much does. He is haled into Court a second time and a second time a
fine is imposed upon him. And again an employer, who is opportunely
present at the second trial, pays the fine. The Negro now binds himself to
the service of this second man for fourteen months, which, to use a slang
expression, is surely "going some." At this stage of the game, however,
the United States Government stepped into the case, otherwise a third
charge might have been preferred in due time, and again the term of
involuntary service lengthened, and so on ad infinitum until death
released the victim. This is a well-known Southern method for multiplying
Negro criminals to meet the demands of Southern employers of cheap labor.
It is a danger to which every colored man is exposed in the South, because
Southern Courts are as a rule administered in the interest of the employer
class wherever the Negro is concerned. There have been a few notable
instances of Southern Judges who have refused to lend their Courts to this
iniquitous business, like Judge Emory Speer, of Georgia, and the late
Judge Jones, of Alabama, but such examples are like angels' visits--few
and far between in that land of race repression and oppression.
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?
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
Printer's inconsistencies in the use of "childlike" and "child-like" have
been retained.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Ultimate Criminal, by Archibald H. Grimke
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