Black Rage Confronts the Law. Paul Harris
But during those years Seward’s theme that white supremacy causes black violence was rarely debated in criminal courtrooms. The anger of African Americans was as yet too threatening to acknowledge. Society had to be shaken by the civil rights sit-ins and black power movement of the sixties before white Americans would open their eyes to the rage of black America.
By the end of the sixties the country had been forced to confront its racist institutions. The stage was set for black rage to enter the courtroom without the burden of nineteenth-century paternalism and without the fear of a jury’s blind rejection. In the midst of these changes two cases evolved that would lay the groundwork for what is now know as the black rage defense.
Chapter 2 The Black Rage Defense, 1971
My skin is like my shadow,
I can’t seem to shake it.
—M. C. Identity, San Francisco
Street Music
In the years since William Freeman died in a jail cell, many lawyers have argued that there is a causal relationship between suffering from racism and engaging in a criminal act. Some of those attempts, such as Clarence Darrow’s defense of Henry Sweet for shooting into a white mob and Charles Garry’s defense of Black Panther leader Huey Newton for shooting a policeman, have been preserved in our legal literature. But most of those attempts have been lost to history. Lawyers less famous than Darrow or Garry have stood next to their clients and urged judges or juries to recognize racial oppression as an accomplice in crime. But before 1970, in these unsung trials, it is doubtful that the lawyers used the words “black rage.” Lawyers and the language they use are bound by their historical circumstances; the time was not yet right for the acceptance of a concept as threatening as black rage. But times change.
In the early 1960s the civil rights movement was struggling for the right of blacks to sit in the front of a bus, to go to the school of their choice, to eat at a lunch counter, to gain employment according to their skills, and to vote in elections. People such as Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer organized in the South against America’s version of apartheid.
In 1962, the National Lawyers Guild opened a law office in Jackson, Mississippi, specifically to provide legal support for the hundreds of black people who were trying to register to vote and to destroy segregation. In June 1963 Medgar Evers, president of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was assassinated. Three months later in Birmingham, Alabama, four girls, ages eleven to fourteen, were killed when their church was bombed. Still, people refused to give up and organizing intensified. Martin Luther King, Jr., viewed as the national spokesman for the civil rights movement, called for integration, equality, and nonviolence. These were the dominant words in the public dialogue.
The courage and contributions of the civil rights workers would leave a lasting mark on the country. But in some ways the movement was failing. The right to sit in the front of the bus did not change the fact that the transportation system in Watts was hopelessly inadequate. The right to go to school with whites did not change the fact that in the North the proportion of black children going to segregated schools had increased since 1954. The right to eat anywhere one chose did not change the fact that food costs money and that, between 1949 and 1959, the income of black men relative to white men had declined in every section of the county. The right to vote did not change the fact that Californians voted nearly two to one to repeal fair housing laws. The right to be employed according to one’s abilities did not change the reality that in the major ghettos one out of three black men was either jobless or earning too little to live on.
Having black skin not only meant suffering economic and social discrimination, it meant a lack of positive identity, a vague but corrosive sense of shame, a hostility that vented itself on others in the community, and a volatile, building frustration that often destroyed the self as well as others. Roy Wilkins and the NAACP and Whitney Young and the National Urban League did not speak to the problem of pride; they spoke of integration. The philosophy of integration encouraged the black person to get rid of his ghetto accent, to speak like white people, dress like them, and accept their values and aspirations. Hopefully the white society would then accept the black person, and the end result would be a world of equality and brotherhood. But the means to that goal did not work. In fact, the means never were accepted by the majority of black people. Blackness and poverty, not integration, were the issues for the man and woman in the ghetto.
By 1964, a new voice was commanding attention. Malcolm X’s message of black pride and self-determination rapidly gained adherents, particularly among northern urban blacks. In February 1965 Malcolm was assassinated while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. But his message found new ears and minds, and thousands began to advocate his ideas.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement grew stronger. In 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project sent hundreds of students into the belly of the beast to register voters. By the end of the project, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered, one thousand people had been arrested, eighty people had been beaten, three people had been wounded by shotguns, thirty-five churches had been torched, and thirty-one homes and stores had been burned to the ground. But the project was successful, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sent delegates to the National Democratic Convention and forever changed the racist face of southern politics.
That same summer, the Harlem section of New York erupted in violence after a thirteen-year-old boy named James Powell was killed by a policeman. This was the first of five years of black uprisings, usually referred to as riots by the media and the government. Race riots were not new in America. After a white police sergeant was killed in 1917 in East St. Louis, mobs of whites marched on the ghetto, and thirty-nine blacks and nine whites were killed. That same year, in Chicago, a seven-day riot left twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites dead. In 1920 in Elaine, Arkansas, eighteen blacks and five whites were killed in racial fighting. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, twenty-one blacks and ten whites died. In Detroit, on June 20, 1943, a fight started between a couple of black youths and a white man. Soon white sailors joined in and within hours a major race riot was in progress. White mobs, estimated at over a thousand people, attempted to march into the black ghetto but were turned back. When the violence ended two days later, twenty-four blacks and nine whites had been killed. In the same month in Los Angeles, large groups of white soldiers and sailors attacked Mexican Americans and blacks in what was described by the media as the “zoot-suit riots.” Fifty people were seriously injured and some four hundred Mexican Americans were jailed. All these riots were marked by intensive fighting between people of different races. The Harlem uprising of 1964 was different, however, because it did not involve fighting between black people and white mobs. Rather, it was distinguished by blacks attacking the most visible signs of their oppression—police and merchants. It was a difference that would become clearer in the next few years.
In 1965, one year after the Harlem uprising, the ghetto of Watts, California, exploded to the cry of “burn, baby burn.” Millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed. Thirty-three blacks were killed as police, the National Guard, and the Army surrounded and marched into Watts. Only two whites died in the violence.
In 1966 there was a large civil rights march in Mississippi. At the march, one of the nation’s young civil rights leaders, Stokely Carmichael, coined the slogan “black power.” The television news showed images of young black people shouting “black power” as they marched through Mississippi for twenty-one days.
In the spring of 1967 black uprisings occurred around the country, including five days of violence in Cleveland and four in Boston. In July, Newark, New Jersey, broke loose with a fury that caused the governor to describe it as an “open rebellion” and “criminal insurrection.” One month after Newark, a storm of fire and violence hit Detroit. In many sections of the city, poor whites and poor blacks looted side by side; more than seven thousand people were arrested. During that summer there were over a hundred days of uprisings. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders summed up five years of violence: “While the civil disorders of 1967 were racial in character, they were not interracial. The 1967 disorders, as well as earlier disorders of the recent period, involved