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Only since the fifties has the situation changed in substantial ways. The civil rights movement raised the national consciousness, or at least enough of it to make a difference. Black defiance and black insistence made an impact, South and North. There was, of course, no stampede toward racial justice. Thousands of blacks were arrested for marching, protesting, sitting in at segregated lunch counters; Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his most famous letter to a group of white ministers from inside the Birmingham jail. Civil rights workers were harassed, and in a few cases, murdered. Their killers invariably went free.

But a second emancipation did come. Segregation fell; Congress passed important civil rights laws—and, what is more, there was public and private muscle to enforce these laws and to ensure the right of black people to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did make a difference. In the South in particular, blacks began to vote in sufficient numbers to put some black officials in office and a few black judges on the bench. Equally important, black voters made it costly for whites to run for office themselves on a race-baiting basis. As a result of the civil rights movement, and civil rights laws, blacks began to enter the courthouse through the front door, so to speak—that is, not just as victims and defendants, but as real players in the game: jurors, lawyers, police officers, and even judges. For the first time in American history, blacks had a say in running the system, a voice, though perhaps not loud enough—and a decent chance at race-blind, or race-neutral, justice.

The entry of blacks into the system, however, was hardly a mass movement. As noted above, black police were a small band, a handful, in northern cities in the 1930s, and there were none at all in the South. By the late sixties, their showing had improved, but not by very much: blacks made up only 11 percent of the police force in St. Louis, 10 percent in Newark, 5 percent in New York, 4 percent or less in Oakland, Boston, and Buffalo, and less than 1 percent in Birmingham, Alabama. Even in Washington, D.C., after a vigorous campaign to recruit black police in a city with a black majority, only about one-fifth of the force was black.73 Even in the nineties, the numbers of black police in the cities fell far short of the numbers population figures would suggest.

Moreover, throughout the twentieth century, both before and after developments in civil rights, blacks have been arrested, convicted, and jailed entirely out of proportion to their share of the population. Southern chain gangs, as we have seen, were, to all intents and purposes, gangs of black semislaves. The chain gangs came and went, and blacks still constitute far more than their share of the prison population; they have done so for decades. Since 1933, the federal government’s Uniform Crime Reports have kept track each year of the race of men and women arrested for serious crime. Blacks were arrested at a higher rate than whites even at the start; in 1940, 17 blacks per 1,000 were arrested, and only 6 whites. Arrest rates for both races have skyrocketed since 1933, but the gap remains, and it gets if anything wider. The figures for blacks are, indeed, staggering. (The white rates are also staggering; they seem small only by comparison.) In 1978, 35 whites out of every 1,000 were arrested; and almost 100 out of every 1,000 blacks—nearly one out of ten.74

Since few women get arrested, and since senior citizens also perform poorly in this department, it is no surprise that the rates of arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment among young black men are astronomical. In 1939, 26 percent of the prison population was black; in 1985, 46 percent.75 In 1990, according to one report, nearly one out of every four men in this group (ages twenty to twenty-nine) was “under the control of the criminal-justice system on any given day”—23 percent of this age cohort were either