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The Free White Jury That Will Never Convict |
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Another part of the southern system of black oppression was "the free white jury that will never convict." In most southern states, white citizens who beat, lynched, and murdered blacks could do so with almost complete confidence that state and local police, being committed themselves to the doctrine of white supremacy, would be less than zealous about investigating the crimes and catching the perpetrators. In the few cases where arrests were made and trials were held, lynch mobs and race murderers could be certain that a jury of their white neighbors and friends would find them "Not Guilty" and let them go free. The end result of the Civil Rights Cases, therefore, was to give white individuals in the South almost complete license, including lynching and murder, to personally enforce racial segregation, all of it done without any sense that there would ever be any official punishment.
Beatings, lynchings, and racial murders were not isolated instances in the American South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the early 1890s a black was lynched in the South an average of every three days. By the turn of the century it was well known that even "respectable" white leaders "tolerated" lynching as a way of enforcing racial segregation in the South.
Although the number of lynchings had decreased by the middle of the 20th Century, murders and assassinations remained an ever-present personal technique for frightening southern blacks into submission to white supremacy. On Christmas night in 1951, Harry T. Moore, the Florida secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colorado People (NAACP), was killed along with his wife when a bomb was thrown into their home. Moore had been organizing Florida blacks to register and vote. No one was arrested or tried for the crime. Clarence Mitchell, Jr., the Washington, D.C., representative of the NAACP, put the role of state government in perspective when he charged: "The state of Florida for political reasons does not try to stop that kind of thing." .
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