by Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
1. The religious, moral and philanthropic forces of the country — all the agencies which tend to uplift and reclaim the degraded and ignorant, are in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon. Not only has very little effort been made by these forces to reclaim the Negro from the ignorance, immorality and shiftlessness with which he is charged, but he has always been and is now rigidly excluded from the enjoyment of those elevating influences toward which he felt voluntarily drawn. In communities where Negro population is largest and these counteracting influences most needed, the doors of churches, schools, concert halls, lecture rooms, Young Men's Christian Associations, and Women's Christian Temperance Unions, have always been and are now closed to the Negro who enters on his own responsibility. Only as a servant or inferior being placed in one corner is he admitted. The white Christian and moral influences have not only done little to prevent the Negro becoming a criminal, but they have deliberately shut him out of everything which tends to make for good citizenship. To have Negro blood in the veins makes one unworthy of consideration, a social outcast, a leper, even in the church. Two Negro Baptist Ministers, Rev. John Frank, the pastor of the largest colored church in Louisville, Ky., and Rev. C. H. Parish, President of Extein Norton University at Cane Spring, Ky., were in the city of Nashville, Tennessee, in May when the Southern Baptist Convention was in session. They visited the meeting and took seats in the body of the church. At the request of the Association, a policeman was called and escorted these men out because they would not take the seats set apart for colored persons in the back part of the Tabernacle. Both these men are scholarly, of good moral character, and members of the Baptist denomination. But they were Negroes, and that eclipsed everything else. This spirit is even more rampant in the more remote, densely populated plantation districts. The Negro is shut out and ignored, left to grow up in ignorance and vice. Only in the gambling dens and saloons does he meet any sort of welcome. What wonder that he falls into crime?
2. The second reason our race furnishes so large a share of the convicts
is that the judges, juries and other officials of the courts are white
men who share these prejudices. They also make the laws. It is wholly
in their power to extend clemency to white criminals and mete severe
punishment to black criminals for the same or lesser crimes. The Negro
criminals are mostly ignorant, poor and friendless. Possessing neither
money to employ lawyers nor influential friends, they are sentenced
in large numbers to long terms of imprisonment for petty crimes. The
People's Advocate, a Negro journal, of Atlanta, Georgia, has the following
observation on the prison showing of that state for 1892. "It is an
astounding fact that 90 per cent of the state's convicts are colored; 194
white males and 2 white females; 1,710 colored males and 44 colored
females. Is it possible that Georgia is so color prejudiced that she won't
convict her white law-breakers. Yes, it is just so, but we hope for a better
day."
George W. Cable, author of The Grandissimes, Dr. Sevier, etc., in a
paper on "The Convict Lease System," read before a Prison Congress
in Kentucky says: "In the Georgia penetentiary in 1880, in a total of
nearly 1200 convicts, only 22 prisoners were serving as low a term as one
year, only 52 others as low as two years, only 76 others as low a term as
three years; while those who were under sentences of ten years and over
numbered 538, although ten years, as the rolls show, is the utmost length
of time that a convict can be expected to remain alive in a Georgia penetentiary.
Six men were under sentence for simple assault and battery —
mere fisticuffing — one of two years, two of five years, one of six years,
one of seven and one of eight. For larceny, three men were serving under
sentence of twenty years, five were sentenced each for fifteen years;
one for fourteen years, six for twelve years; thirty-five for ten years, and
172 from one year up to nine years. In other words, a large majority of
these 1200 convicts had for simple stealing, without breaking in or violence,
been virtually condemned to be worked and misused to death.
One man was under a twenty years' sentence for hog-stealing. Twelve
men were sentenced to the South Carolina penetentiary on no other
finding but a misdemeanor commonly atoned for by a fine of a few
dollars, and which thousands of the state's inhabitants (white) are constantly
committing with impunity — the carrying of concealed weapons.
Fifteen others were sentenced for mere assault and battery. In
Louisiana a man was sentenced to the penetentiary for 12 months for
stealing five dollars worth of gunnysacks! Out of 2378 convicts in the
Texas prison in 1882, only two were under sentence of less than two years
length, and 509 of these were under twenty years of age. Mississippi's
penetentiary roll for the same year showed 70 convicts between the ages
of 12 and 18 years of age serving long terms. Tennessee showed 12 boys
under 18 years of age, under sentences of more than a year; and the North
Carolina penetentiary had 234 convicts under 20 years of age serving
long terms."
Mr. Cable goes on to say in another part of his admirable paper: "In
the Georgia convict force only 15 were whites among 215 who were
under sentences of more than ten years." What is true of Georgia is
true of the convict lease system everywhere. The details of vice, cruelty
and death thus fostered by the states whose treasuries are enriched
thereby, equals anything from Siberia. Men, women and children are
herded together like cattle in the filthiest quarters and chained together
while at work. The Chicago Inter-Ocean recently printed an interview
with a young colored woman who was sentenced six months to the
convict farm in Mississippi for fighting. The costs, etc., lengthened the
time to 18 months. During her imprisonment she gave birth to two
children, but lost the first one from premature confinement, caused by
being tied up by the thumbs and punished for failure to do a full day's
work. She and other women testified that they were forced to criminal
intimacy with the guards and cook to get food to eat.
Some further facts are cited with reference to the system in use in
Tennessee. The testimony of a guard at the Coal Creek prison in Tennessee
shows that prisoners, black and dirty from their work in the mines,
were put into their rooms in the stockades without an opportunity to
change their clothing or sufficient opportunity for cleanliness. Convicts
were whipped, a man standing at the head and another at the feet, while
a third applied the lash with both hands. Men who failed to perform their
task of mining from two to four tons of coal per day were fastened to
planks by the feet, then bent over a barrel and fastened by the hands on
the other side, stripped and beaten with a strap. Out of the fifty convicts
worked in the mines from one to eight were whipped per day in
this manner. There was scarcely a day, according to the testimony of the
witness, James Frazier, in which one or more were not flogged in this
manner for failure to perform their day's task. The work in the mines
was difficult and the air sometimes so bad that the men fell insensible
and had to be hauled out. Their beds he described as "dirty, black and
nasty looking." One of the convicts, testifying as to the kind of food given them, said that the pea soup was made from peas containing weevils and added: "I have got a spoonful of weevils off a cup of soup." In many cases convicts were forced to work in water six inches deep for weeks at a time getting out coal with one-fourth of the air necessary for a healthy man to live in, forced to drink water from stagnant pools when mountain
springs were just outside of the stockades, and the reports of the prison
officials showing large numbers killed in attempting to escape.
The defense of this prison is based wholly upon its economy to the
state. It is argued that it would cost large sums of money to build penitentiaries
in which to confine and work the prisoners as is done in the
Northern States, while the lease system brings the state a revenue and
relieves it of the cost of building and maintaining prisons. The fact that
the convicts labor is in this way brought into direct competition with free
labor does not seem to be taken into account. The contractors, who get
these laborers for 30 or 40 cents per day, can drive out of the market the
man who employs free labor at $1 a day.
This condition of affairs briefly alluded to in detail in Tennessee and
Georgia exists in other Southern States. In North Carolina the same
system exists, except that only able-bodied convicts are farmed out. The
death rates among the convicts is reported as greater than the death rate
of New Orleans in the greatest yellow fever epidemic ever known. In
Alabama a new warden with his natural instincts unblunted by familiarity
with the situation wrote of it: "The system is a better training school
for criminals than any of the dens of iniquity in our large cities. The
system is a disgrace to the state and the reproach of the civilization and
Christian sentiment of the age."
Correspondence to the Washington D.C. Evening Star dated Sept.
27, 1892, on this same subject has the following:
The fact that the system puts a large number of criminals afloat in the
community from the numerous escapes is not its worst feature. The same
report shows that the mortality is fearful in the camps. In one camp it is
stated that the mortality is 10 per cent per month, and in another even
more than that. In these camps men and women are found chained together,
and from twenty to twenty-five children have been born in captivity
in the convicts' camps.
Every Negro so sentenced not only means able-bodied men to swell
the state's number of slaves, but every Negro so convicted is thereby
disfranchised.
It has been shown that numbers of Negro youths are sentenced to
these penetentiaries every year and there mingle with the hardened
criminals of all ages and both sexes. The execution of law does not cease
with the incarceration of those of tender years for petty crimes. In the
state of South Carolina last year Mildred Brown, a little thirteen year
old colored girl was found guilty of murder in the first degree on the
charge of poisoning a little white infant that she nursed. She was sentenced to be hanged. The Governor refused to commute her sentence,
and on October 7th, 1892, at Columbia, South Carolina, she was hanged
on the gallows. This made the second colored female hanged in that
state within one month. Although tried, and in rare cases convicted
for murder and other crimes, no white girl in this country ever met the
same fate. The state of Alabama in the same year hanged a ten year
old Negro boy. He was charged with the murder of a peddler.
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