The Killing Fields

The results were unmistakable: a sudden rise in black criminality in the South of the 1880s and early 1890s and, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the time, the emergence of "a class of black criminals who are a menace to both black and white . . . instead of petty stealing and vagrancy, we . . . have highway robbery, burglary, murder and rape." More perniciously, as Du Bois and other black observers--as well as honest whites--noted, because of the persistent injustice of the Southern courts and the notorious convict lease system (which victimized poor whites as well as blacks), when what Du Bois called "the real Negro criminal" emerged, he was made a hero and martyr by large numbers of blacks and thus "the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one's own social caste, was lost." Whites and blacks, estranged by white racism, became self-consciously opposed over the very definition of crime: As one white Georgia prison official lamented, whites' injustice had created a setting in which too many blacks were unable or "unwilling to discover the clear distinction between unwarranted persecution and the just enforcement of the just penalties." And with startling frequency, whites and blacks recognized that a new generation of black men, chafing under their many injustices, committed crimes against whites, as one white Southerner observed, "in the spirit of getting even." Du Bois darkly noted that "to natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge that stir up the latent savagery of both races."

As revolt and revenge lapsed all too easily into nihilistic rage, what blacks called the "bad nigger"--a sociopath who killed blacks and the weak as easily and unhesitatingly as whites and the strong--became, as historian Edward Ayers writes, "a stock figure in the region's imagination as well as its reality." Quite suddenly in the late 19th century, a new hero emerged in black lore: a hard merciless man who killed, as historian and folklorist Lawrence Levine notes, "from sadistic need and sheer joy," a hero not in spite of the fear and horror he inspired but in some ways because of them. Thus, ironically, tragically, the white South's prejudice and oppression had helped create a monster on which whites then unleashed their outraged fury, becoming even more monstrous themselves. "When . . . [black] crimes increased. . ," Du Bois wrote, "the wrath of a people [whites] broke all bounds and reached strange depths of barbaric vengeance and torture."