From: Project Gutenberg - Following the Color Line by Ray Stan Baker. "Showing how the color line was drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia."
In 1908, Ray Stan Baker, the noted muckraking journalist, toured the South to assess the condition of blacks some 50 years after the Civil War. Below are some quotes from his book Following the Color Line.
| One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example, was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer--North and South--is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs, but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that he must go to the chain-gang. On of the chief causes of complaint by the Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of unjust arrests. |
Baker quotes the white leader of the Civic League with one of the consequences of the disparate treatment between blacks and whites in court. “We complain that the Negroes will not help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts.”
| One reason for the very large number of arrests—in Georgia particularly—lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55. Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency is to convict as many men as possible—it furnishes steady, cheap labour to the contractors and a profit to the state. |
People want to feel safe and thus can agree that criminals should be arrested and held to account. But people differ in the steps communities should take to minimize the number of criminals and how the police should treat those they charge.