1896: "Separate but Equal"
The Supreme Court that ruled on Plessy v. Ferguson in 1899.
Source: 1896 Project
The effects of Jim Crow laws were compounded by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 which held that racial segregation did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Taking a narrow definition of the law, this ruling established the racist “separate but equal” culture that pervaded the South and border states, like Maryland, and that led to gross inequality and violence against African Americans.
As the South struggled to recover economically from the old planation system, white anger grew. African Americans were viewed suspiciously, and brutal, extrajudicial killings were used to control them and keep them in a state of fear and subjugation. Lynching became an especially horrendous tool used by the Ku Klux Klan and other white mobs to instill fear and to ensure that Black individuals followed the racial segregation required by whites (Litwack, 2004).
Historian Amy Wood wrote that “between 1880 and 1940, white mobs in the south killed at least 3,200 [B]lack men” (Woods, 2009, p. 3.). While lynching occurred across the United States and against people other than Black Americans, “most Americans at the turn of the century understood lynching as a Southern practice and as a form of racial violence that white mobs committed against African American men” (p. 4).
The same year Plessy v. Ferguson was decided, statistician Frederick Hoffman (1897) published “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.” He argued that recent census number proved African Americans were headed for extinction. Specifically, he wrote, “[a]ll the facts brought together in this work prove that the colored population is gradually parting with the virtues and the moderate degree of economic efficiency developed under the regimé of slavery” (Hoffman, 1897, p. 328). Further, he asserted that the cause of their looming extinction was due to “a low standard of sexual morality” (p. 328).
Hoffman used arrest data to argue that higher Black arrest rates indicated African Americans were naturally drawn toward criminal behavior. Rather than understanding the higher arrest rates to be reflections of racist laws, Hoffman blamed Black individuals for their incarcerations. He represented one of many sources that used biased data to influence 20th century criminology against Black men in particular, thereby deepening systemic racism in America but especially within the law enforcement community (Kendi, 2017; Wolf, 2006).