Essay: BREACHING THE WHITE WALL OF SOUTHERN JUSTICE

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Why don't Negro defendants hire Negro lawyers? One reason is that there are so few in the South. Of some 21,000 lawyers in Mississippi, only five are Negroes. Even relatively enlightened North Carolina has only 125 Negro lawyers in a Negro population of 1,500,000. The Negro lawyer is barred from judgeships, professorships, political appointments, big corporate firms and affluent clients. Even injured Negroes usually prefer white lawyers because they get more money from white juries. As a result, most important rights cases are directed by non-Southern lawyers, who for all their frequent zeal and skill, are often unfamiliar with the procedural obstacles thrown up by segregated justice.

Unable to make bail or hire a good lawyer, the Negro awaits his state court trial in a segregated jail; even the drunk tanks are generally separate, and the turnkeys are uniformly white. When he finally does go to trial, the Negro enters the courthouse that to him has become the symbol of all his afflictions. There may be a Negro janitor about the premises, but everyone else is white, from judges and prosecutors down to clerks. Though many Southern judges dispense justice with admirable evenhandedness, the judge the Negro faces may well be ruled by his own prejudice or, since he holds elective office, by community pressures. One demeaning custom, banned by federal decision but continued in many Southern courtrooms, is to call Negro witnesses either by their first names or merely "boy."

The most notorious part of segregated justice is the allwhite jury system. Since 1875 it has been a federal crime, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000, for a jury commissioner to exclude Negroes systematically from venires in either federal or state courts. Yet, not once in this century has a prosecution been brought under that law. One reason: a jury commissioner almost certainly would be tried before a white jury and acquitted. It is, therefore, with impunity that commissioners draw their venires from lists of registered voters (excluding, until recently at least, most Negroes), from personal-property-tax rolls or from membership rosters of local Junior Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs and similar organizations. Almost all such lists naturally exclude large numbers of poor people, among whom Negroes most often find themselves. Sometimes prospective jurors are required to be of a certain "moral character" or "intelligence" or "uprightness." The highly subjective determination of such qualities is entirely up to the jury commissioners, and illiterate jurors are not unknown in the South.

Jury Problems

In theory, Negroes get a better deal from federal-court jurors, who are picked from a wider area and are less subject to local pressures. Actually, many Southern federal courts use a "key man" system of drawing up venire lists, the key man being a "good citizen" (a middle-class white) who suggests other "good citizens" for jury duty. The nation's 91 federal district courts have been free to pick juries in different ways, thus compounding the subjectivity of state courts. Many federal jury lists simply duplicate state lists.