Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [214]
If only because they feared Federal intervention, some courts made scrupulous attempts to guard the rights of accused blacks. But the infrequency with which whites were apprehended, tried, and convicted of crimes against freedmen made a mockery of equal justice and encouraged still more white violence. At nearly every step in the judicial process, the victims of such violence found themselves frustrated, even in swearing out a complaint against a white man.
It is difficult to get an officer to arrest a white man when he has assaulted and beaten a colored man; the magistrates will not give warrants for the arrest of white men without long interrogation. We are bound to know a stranger’s name—if not, no warrant, when he is white; but if he be colored, they will quickly give warrants that the colored man may be put in jail. Oh, how quickly the officers will catch him!
To lodge a complaint against a white person was also to invite harassment and sometimes violence. “The idea of a nigger having the power of bringing a white man before a tribunal!” a Georgian exclaimed. “The Southern people a’n’t going to stand that.” Moreover, as a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Alabama observed, anyone making a complaint had to provide bail to appear as a witness or be kept in jail until the trial. “As no white man will give bail for a negro to appear as a witness against a white man, and as they don’t fancy lying perhaps weeks in jail in order to be heard, they prefer to suffer wrong rather than seek redress.”135
Even when the names of the offenders were known, whites could be expected to abide by a “gentlemen’s agreement” not to cooperate with the authorities in apprehending them, and the police were often less than eager to pursue the matter and in some instances conspired to effect the escape of a white prisoner accused of a serious crime. When murders were committed, neighbors and friends would invariably hide the offenders, and few men possessed the necessary courage to expose the guilty parties lest they share the same fate. Without military protection for himself and the witnesses, no freedman could be expected to help prosecute a white man for assault, murder, or any other crime. That was the conclusion reached by a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Grenada, Mississippi. “As against freedmen the majority of whites are a unit and even honorable men, otherwise, will vouch for persons of, to say the least, doubtful character as ‘high social Gentlemen.’ ”136
If a white man should be apprehended and tried for offenses committed against freedmen, the chances of convicting him were slight so long as whites dominated the juries. And if convicted, the penalties assessed against him were likely to be far less than the gravity of the crime warranted or that would have been imposed upon a black person. The double standard of white justice was nowhere clearer, in fact, than in the disparate punishments meted out to whites and blacks convicted of similar crimes. In Marion County, Florida, for example, James J. Denton, after being convicted of the slaying of a black man, had to pay a fine of $250 and serve one minute in prison; most blacks found guilty of petty theft could expect a more severe sentence. (In nearby Lake City, two blacks convicted of stealing several boxes of goods from a railroad company were fined $500; unable to pay the fine, their services were sold to the highest bidder.) No doubt many whites still needed to learn that killing a black person amounted to murder. But a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Georgia despaired of any early or mass conversion to that principle. “The best men in the State admit that no jury would convict a white man