Twentieth Century Negro Literature. Various
turbulent convict may be given twenty-one lashes on his bare back; in the absence of the inspector, the whipping boss is limited to fifteen lashes.
"The guards are of the poor white class, dull and illiterate, and receive from $20 to $30 per month and their 'keep.'
"In Florida shackling is seldom practiced except as a punishment for running away, as it interferes with the work of the convict. Guns and bloodhounds are much in evidence in the convict camps. Nothing is done for the betterment of the convicts intellectually or otherwise. Missionaries are graciously permitted to distribute tracts among them.
"White convicts are generally assigned to offices and cook shops, or become gang foremen. For the white prisoner, whatever his offense, there is always a hope of pardon, but the Negro prisoner, unless he be a crap-shooter or chicken thief, congratulates himself on being consigned to open air work in the convict's camps, for he remembers how dreadfully easy in Florida it is for a Negro to be lynched."
Judge M. W. Gibbs of Arkansas said he had known white employers in the South to be in collusion with magistrates to have colored men committed on the flimsiest pretext, simply that they might obtain more free labor on their plantations by means of the convict lease system.
The eleventh census shows that in the United States there were 2,468 county jails and only 44 reformatories. There were no reformatories in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
Great Britain supports over 400 reformatories and inebriate schools, and they have closed 56 out of 113 prisons and jails in ten years, and thereby reduced to that extent the amount of material for the manufacture of criminals.
Said Judge Calhoun, of a recorder's court in Georgia:
"I tremble when I contemplate the future of little boys who come before me for the first time, and are sentenced to the chain-gang. Some of them are bright-faced and intelligent; some are orphans; many thoroughly penitent; and, I believe, nearly all could be reclaimed, could they be sent to a reform school and surrounded with an atmosphere that would benefit instead of contaminate."
Mrs. Helen Cook, wife of Hon. John F. Cook, of Washington, D. C., has established an organization in the District of Columbia, known as "The Woman's League," which is doing a wonderful work in reducing the number of those who are brought into the courts to be justly or unjustly dealt with. Let the good women of the race throughout the country follow her example and do something to rescue the perishing.
In conclusion, let us hope and believe with the widow of the Sage of Anacostia, that "Meanwhile Hampton and Wilberforce, Howard and Shaw and Fiske and Atlanta and Tuskegee and other like institutions are silently setting the seal of manhood and womanhood upon a race whose face, with ours, is set toward a higher and better civilization."
SECOND PAPER.
IS THE CRIMINAL NEGRO JUSTLY DEALT WITH IN THE COURTS OF THE SOUTH?
BY ATTORNEY I. L. PURCELL.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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