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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 25. The Police and Other Public Contacts - 1. Local Petty Officials
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536 An American Dilemma
The reason Is given in terms of social necessity. If the policeman were not
given this extra-legal backing by the courts, his prestige and his ability
to function as the upholder of the caste order would deteriorate. A con-
stant pressure from the Negro people is recognized and is met in this way.
Negroes are arrested and sentenced for all sorts of actual or alleged breaks
of the caste rules, sometimes even for incidents where it is clear that their
only offense was to resist a white person’s unlawful aggression.^ As this
practice is against the formal rules of due process, and as, further, the
social customs sanctioned in this way are themselves often directly con-
trary to the law, there is a strange atmosphere of consistent illegality
around the activity of the officers of the peace and the whole judicial
system in the South. A further result is that the police often assume the
duty not only of arresting, but also of sentencing and punishing the culprit,
and that the judges are grateful for being in this way spared from cases
embarrassing to them as professional lawyers.
Other singularities In the activity of the Southern police system are, on
the one hand, the availability of the police for sanctioning private white
interests against Negroes and, on the other, the indulgence of private
white persons in taking the law Into their own hands. The boundary line
between public functionaries and private citizens is thus blurred. The
relation between master and slave was a relation of public and not only
private law.^ In the rural districts the plantation owners have tenaciously
held to the old pattern of executing actual police power themselves over
their Negro labor.*^ As in slavery a sort of delegated police power over
Negroes is assumed to belong to other white persons than the employer.
All white people in the neighborhood remain in a sort of taken-for-granted
conspiracy to keep all Negroes “in their place,” and they pretend a “right”
to apply personal sanctions of intimidation and violence. The traveler in
the rural districts of the Black Belt even today is startled to find how
natural and regular it appears to many whites—znA to Negroes—that
personal threats and bodily punishments enter into employer-employee
relations,*’’* and, indeed, into most relations between whites and Negroes,
even relatively casual ones.
As during slavery, the local police and the courts are expected to assist
in upholding this caste pressure. On the one hand, the scope of police and
court activity is limited in so far as the sentencing and punishing of
Negroes for breaks against law and order in the plantation districts are
taken care of by employers or white vigilantes. On the other hand, the
peace officers tend to act as the agents of the planters and other white
employers, prepared to appear on call and take charge of the case. To an
extent these customs were transferred even to the cities. There the less
personal and less stable relations between individuals in the two groups
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