“With the legal system in the hands of whites, the distinction between law an lawlessness became so fuzzy as to be meaningless to many African-Americans. B.O. Townsend noticed this as early as 1877. ‘So often were the slaves whipped and humiliated before each other, often for no cause, that punishment came to be looked on as no disgrace. This sentiment, I am sorry to perceive, has survived the fall of slavery.’

The editor of the Saluda Standard saw it, too. ‘It is no unusual thing, indeed it is almost always the case, that when a Negro is accused of a crime the whole race immediately sides with him. And after a Negro has served his time in the penitentiary and returned to his old haunts, he is received on a footing of equality by his former associates and regarded by some of them as a sort of martyr.’

W.E.B. DuBois detected the process from the black perspective. ‘There can be no doubt that crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last 30 years,’ DuBois acknowledged in 1903. But black criminality was not the result of black bestiality and poverty, he insisted. It was the outcome of a history in which whites had made critical errors.

The southern police system had developed in slave times ‘to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew a double system of justice which erred on the white side by undue leniency…and erred on the black side by undue severity, and injustice.’ After the Civil War, whites had tried to use the legal system to reenslave blacks, DuBois added. ‘It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man’s conviction…Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.'” -From, “All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence.” By: Fox Butterfield