I have written very briefly about Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern America” here. For those interested in understanding the historical evolution of the idea of ‘black criminality’ in America, I recommend the book. Muhammad suggests that crime statistics were used to reinforce and “condemn” the idea of black criminality especially after the publication of the 1890 census. The idea of ‘black criminality’ was then used to limit black people’s rights and to exclude us from opportunities for social, economic, and political advancement. [As an aside, the most interesting part of the book for me is Muhammad’s contention that black reformers like DuBois and Wells-Barnett inadvertently “contributed to the racialization of crime prevention by linking racial progress to crime fighting” (p. 193). This is a point that I plan to return to in a future post.]

As I’ve been continuing my reading about lynching in the U.S., I came across a book published in 1913 titled “Judge Lynch’s court in America: the number of negro convicts in prison in America” by Rev. Elijah Clarence Branch. Rev. Branch cataloged various injustices against black people and republished several newspaper articles and editorials to document these incidents.

The following editorial caught my attention as it conflates alleged ‘black criminality’ with a need to establish a separate “negro reservation” in the U.S. It’s a wonderful illustration of the way that anti-blackness manifested in the early 20th century and supports claims made by Muhammad. The editorial relies on crime statistics to buttress its exclusionary policy prescription for the “Negro problem.” I think that the echoes of these ideas remain with us today. In some ways, the U.S. has suceeded in creating a “negro reservation;” it’s called the American Prison System.

From the Houston Chronicle, March 3, 1903 (Source: Judge Lynch’s court in America: the number of negro convicts in prison in America p. 24-26 – reproduced as it appears in the book)

“A NEGRO RESERVATION.
“One of the most interesting and important articles on the Negro was contributed by Colonel Robert Bingham of North Carolina to the European edition of Harper’s Monthly for July, 1900. The writer comments on the ostracism and out- lawry of a white criminal by white people and the encouragement and protection of a Negro criminal by Negroes. Many Negro associations have denounced Negro crime, but the New Orleans Times-Democrat in endorsing Colonel Bingham’s view, points as proof of it to ‘recent incidents in urban centers in the South, and especially in New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis and Richmond.’

“In the course of Colonel Bingham’s article he quotes from two competent authorities on the condition of the Negro race, Prof. Walter H. Wilcox of Cornell University and Dr. George T. Winston, formerly president of the University of Texas and now president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of North Carolina. The conclusions of these two authorities are endorsed by Prof. J. R. Stratton in the North American Review for 1900. Prof. Stratton points out that, according to the census of 1890, the minimum illiteracy of the Negro is found in New England, where it is 21 7-10 percent, and the maximum in the Southern ‘black belt,’ yet the Negro is four and one-half times more criminal in New England, hundred for hundred of the population, than he is in the black belt.

“The conclusions referred to, reached by Prof. Wilcox and Dr. Winston are:
“1. The Negro element is much the most criminal in our population.
“2. The Negro is much more criminal as a free man than he was as a slave.
“3. The Negro is increasing in criminality with fearful rapidity, being one-third more criminal in 1890 than in 1880.
“4. The Negroes who can read and write are more criminal than the illiterate, which is true of no other element of our population.
“5. The Negro is nearly three times as criminal in the Northeast, where he has not been a slave for a hundred years, and three and a half times as criminal in the Northwest, where he has never been a slave, than in the South, where he was a slave till 1865.
“6. The Negro is three times as criminal as the native white and once and a half times as criminal as the foreign white, consisting, in many cases, of the the scum of Europe.
“These conclusions demonstrate that from a moral point of view the education of the Negro is a failure, yet in justice to the Negro it should be said that the industrial discrimination of the North in keeping the Negro out of the trades tends to make him a criminal. In the South, however, where the Negro is not discriminated against industrially, the criminal tendencies of the race are so much in excess of those of the whites, even the scum of Europe, who come over as immigrants, as to occasion great discouragement to the most sanguine.

“Now social equality, the president’s panacea, would result in miscegenation and the ruin of our own race if it could be carried out, which is impossible. There are not nearly enough federal offices to go round. So the president’s other plan is seen to be inadequate. The great mass of the Negroes are not helped a jot by appointments of a few blacks to office and the invitation of a few to White House receptions. Even if we should grant, for the argument’s sake, that these absurd remedies are good remedies they do not stretch far enough to do the slightest good. “Harper’s Weekly takes up the Waco Times-Herald’s suggestion of a Negro State. It points out that the Negroes increased 18 per cent in last decade, now numbering 8,840,789. ‘It is obvious,’ the editor of Harper’s Weekly argues, ‘that at this rate of expansion not many decades can elapse before the colored inhabitants’ of the republic will exceed twenty millions, most of whom will be concentrated in the States south of the Potomac and Ohio. Can we marvel that the Southern whites regard with grave misgivings the ominous increase of this element of their population, or they would gladly seek relief, if they could, in the wholesale deportation of the blacks?’

“The remedy that Harper’s Weekly suggests is the purchase from Mexico of Chihuahua and two or three others of the northern and thinly peopled Mexican States and a voluntary and assisted immigration thither of Southern blacks. We have Indian reservations, why not a Negro reservation? Southern Negroes are better than the Negroes of Hayti and could be depended on not to revert to barbarism. On a reservation of their own they could work out their salvation in their own way, and the Negro problem which has vexed this country for many years in many ways.”