Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [212]
Yes, yes, we are ignorant. We know it. I am ignorant for one, and they say all niggers is. They say we don’t know what the word constitution means. But if we don’t know enough to know what the Constitution is, we know enough to know what justice is. I can see for myself down at my own court-house. If they makes a white man pay five dollars for doing something today, and makes a nigger pay ten dollars for doing that thing tomorrow, don’t I know that ain’t justice? They’ve got a figure of a woman with a sword hung up thar, sir; Mr. President, I don’t know what you call it—[“Justice,” “Justice,” several delegates shouted]—well, she’s got a handkercher over her eyes, and the sword is in one hand and a pair o’ scales in the other. When a white man and a nigger gets into the scales, don’t I know the nigger is always mighty light? Don’t we all see it? Ain’t it so at your court-house, Mr. President?128
Upon examining the quality of postwar justice, some blacks compared it unfavorably to what they had known as slaves. The comparison revealed far more about the bleakness of the present than the brightness of the past. Although the slave codes had imposed penalties on slave owners who failed to treat their slaves humanely or who killed them maliciously, the protection such provisions afforded black men and women had been minimal, largely because they could neither file a formal complaint nor testify against a white person; moreover, the need to maintain racial unity and control made white witnesses reluctant to testify and white juries even more reluctant to convict.129
While blacks had been slaves, the self-interest, if not the paternal instincts, of the master had often prompted his intervention to protect his property. “Our former masters,” a group of Richmond blacks declared after the war, “did once protect us from the tyrant that now rules in the Mayor’s Court, and those who sit in the Hustings Court and those in the jury box. because we were their property.” This same point was made repeatedly by former slaveholders, as if to warn their now emancipated slaves of the fragile nature of their freedom and to impress upon them their state of dependency. Before emancipation, an Alabama judge observed in 1865, “the wrong done by a third party to a negro, was a wrong done to the owner or master, and the negro was merged in the Master, the black man in the white man—and the controversy was really between the two, although a third person was involved. The white man, recognized as master, felt a pride in the very dependence of the slave—the slave must appear thro’ the master in court, in all contracts. He could not speak, act, or be spoken to or acted with, except by the consent, express or implied, of the owner.” A Georgia newspaper editor made the point even more precisely: “when detected in his frequent delinquencies, Sambo will now have no ‘maussa’ to step in between him and danger.”130
But in some crucial respects emancipation made little difference. Whether dealing with slaves or freedmen, southern courts and jurists seldom wavered from the urgent need to solidify white supremacy, ensure proper discipline in blacks, and punish severely those who violated the racial code. In his charge to a postwar jury, a South Carolina judge managed to combine these imperatives with the old paternalism.
We belong to the master race of mankind—that race which, ruling all the waters of the world, its seas and oceans, without dispute, dominates equally upon the land, and plants its yoke at will upon the neck of all the other tribes and kindreds and races of men. We make, we administer the law. We judge; we have all the responsibility of superior power—of power. How appealingly, then, does every sentiment of magnanimity persuade us to exercise that power justly, forbearingly, mercifully, kindly and charitably, whether on the Bench or in the Jury box, or in the common affairs of life.