Patterns of "mono-racial law enforcement," as
Ayers refers to it, were established in Southern states almost immediately after the
American Civil War. Cities that had never had
police forces moved quickly to establish them,
[272] and whites became far less critical of urban police forces in post-war politics, whereas in the antebellum period they had engendered major political debate.
[273] Savannah, Georgia's post-war police force was made up of
Confederate veterans, who patrolled the city in gray uniforms, armed with rifles, revolvers, and sabers.
[273] They were led by an ex-Confederate General,
Richard H. Anderson.
[273] Ayers concludes that white policemen protecting white citizens became the model for law enforcement efforts across
the South after the
American Civil War.
[273]
…
Whites made few attempts to disguise the injustice in their courts, according to historian
Edward L. Ayers.
[278] Blacks were uniformly excluded from juries and denied any opportunity to participate in the criminal justice process aside from being defendants.
[279] Thefts by black offenders became a new focus of the Southern justice systems and began to supplant violent crimes by white offenders in court dockets. Whether they were from the city or the countryside, those accused of property crime stood the greatest chance of conviction in post-war southern courts.
[280] But black defendants were convicted in the highest numbers. During the last half of the nineteenth century, three out of every five white defendants accused of property crime in Southern courts were convicted, while four out of every five black defendants were.
[280] Conviction rates for whites, meanwhile, dropped substantially from antebellum levels throughout the last half of the nineteenth century.
[281]
This system of justice led, in the opinion of
W. E. B. Du Bois, to a system in which neither blacks nor whites respected the criminal justice system—whites because they were so rarely held accountable, and blacks because their own accountability felt so disproportionate.
[282] Ultimately, thousands of black Southerners served long terms on chain gangs for petty theft and misdemeanors in the 1860s and 1870s, while thousands more went into the convict lease system.
[278]
In criminal sentencing,
blacks were disproportionately sentenced to incarceration—whether to the chain gang, convict leasing operation, or penitentiary—in relation to their white peers. Black incarceration peaked before and after radical Reconstruction, when Southern whites exercised virtually unchecked power and restored "efficiency" to the criminal courts.[283][284] For example, 384 of
North Carolina's 455 prisoners in 1874 were black, and in 1878 the proportion had increased slightly to 846 of 952.
[285] By 1871, 609 of
Virginia's 828 convicts in—including all but four of its sixty-seven female prisoners—were black.
[286] But this phenomenon was not specific to the South: The proportion of black inmates in Northern prisons was virtually identical to that in Southern prisons throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
[287]