James Campbell

Crime and punishment in African American history

Introduction.- PART I: SLAVERY TO FREEDOM.- Slave Resistance, Crime and Control.- Slavery and Criminal Justice Before the Civil War.- Reconstruction.- PART II: JIM CROW JUSTICE.- The State and the Mob: Lynching, Criminal Justice and the Death Penalty.- Punishment and Labour: Convict Leasing, Chain Gangs and Peonage.- Resisting Jim Crow Justice.- PART III: FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO THE PRESENT.- Criminal Justice and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1972.- The Modern Penal State.- Epilogue: Politics, Memory and Justice in Modern America.- Further Reading.

Murder appeals, delayed executions, and the origins of Jamaican death penalty jurisprudence

In December 1993, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in Pratt and Morgan v. The Attorney General for Jamaica that excessive delay in the enforcement of death sentences—defined with some caveats as more than 5 years from the time of conviction to execution—was “inhuman” and therefore unconstitutional. The Judicial Committee also reversed earlier rulings in finding that the 5 year time frame for appeals should include those delays that resulted from legal proceedings initiated by prisoners themselves. The result was to clear death row cells across most of the British Caribbean, with the capital sentences of more than 100 condemned prisoners commuted in Jamaica alone. Pratt also ushered in a new era of Judicial Committee activism in Caribbean death penalty cases that resulted in a series of further safeguards against executions, including the abolition of mandatory death sentences. The cumulative effect of these judgments is that there has not been an execution in Jamaica since 1988, even though capital punishment remains legal and, amidst persistently high rates of violent crime across the region, political support for a resumption of hanging is strong.

Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South

spirits in a variety of ways. The Lowcountry simbi provided a spiritual tie to the landscape and helped enslaved Africans gain access to the bountiful produce of the soils, forests and waters. Success in farming, hunting and fishing depended on the support of nature spirits. Using the extremely rich documentation collected by Lorenzo Dow Turner in the 1930s, Brown shows that African-descended people continued to use terms from African languages, to identify plants and animals, long after slave imports from Africa had ceased. This indicates that planting and hunting, which depended on the support of ancestors and nature spirits, continued to be perceived in African ways. Moreover, Lowcountry springs were seen by African-descended people as spiritual sites. Several plantations had a notable number of springs with ‘cymbee’ residents, which were regarded with a strict form of respect. Thus, Brown contends, both the physical and spiritual realms of the Lowcountry were claimed as African spaces. With the conversion process of African-descended people to Protestant Christianity, the simbi continued to play a central role in the Lowcountry spiritual landscape. Joining the Christian community entailed a long period of spiritual transformation under the guidance of a senior member. This ordeal was called ‘seeking’. In order to complete seeking, the initiates had to ‘go in the wilderness’, where they encountered spiritual beings of various kinds and ultimately found white bundles and babies. According to Brown, white babies symbolised another manifestation of the simbi as both guardians and agents of spiritual transformation. The seeking process derived many of its elements from initiation associations, which in the Kongo cultural realm have included Kimpasi, Lembo, Ndembo and Nkimba. As Brown shows, as many as 20 titles and 35 initiation names used in these associations were incorporated by African-descended people into their repertoire of Africanderived names in the Lowcountry. White babies encountered by the seekers were material indicators of their contact with the realm of spirits. The spirits remained important because African-descended people conceptualised transformation in ways that maintained the Kongo spiritual landscape. However, they began to fade from the key process of spiritual transformation by the 1930s when younger seekers no longer went into the wilderness to spend their nights in the forests and fields of the physical landscape. In sum, this book is a significant contribution to the growing number of studies on the cultural history of the Atlantic world. It provides a path-breaking interpretation of Kongo spiritual landscape in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Brown’s interdisciplinary methodological approach is convincing and the extent of primary sources used in this study impressive. Because of its detailed discussion of the African background of Kongo spiritual practices, it is mandatory reading for scholars and students of African religions and African-American history. In reproducing a vanished universe, Brown’s work lifts West Central African nature spirits out of obscurity and gives them a central role in the unfolding of Afro-Atlantic spirituality.

The Death of Frank Wilson: Race, Crime, and Punishment in Post-Civil War Pennsylvania

In 1877, Frank Wilson, an African American man, was executed for murdering a white tramp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This article examines the trial, punishment, and press reporting of the case in the evolving context of race and criminal justice in post-Civil War Pennsylvania. It presents three main findings. First, it documents evidence of racial discrimination and wildly disproportionate rates of African American arrest and imprisonment in Harrisburg and surrounding counties comparable to earlier research focused on the largest northern cities. Second, it shows that views on law enforcement were diverse within both white and black communities and shaped by the exigencies of local and national party politics. Third, it makes the case that African American experiences of law enforcement in northern states are better understood as part of a national criminal justice culture than in distinctively regional terms.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND PAROLE IN DEPRESSION-ERA NEW YORK

In the first half of the twentieth century, parole in the Deep South of the United States was part of a nexus of penal mechanisms providing white employers with a pliant black labour force. By contrast, in New York, which was at the forefront of innovations in parole policy, there was a surprising interracial consensus among white parole administrators and politicians, civil rights activists, and black prisoners themselves that the African American community was integral to parole administration and success. This article explores why different constituencies supported this consensus through debates on parole in the black press and via the desperate, and invariably futile, letters that prisoners wrote to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These sources also indicate that, for black prisoners in New York, African American influence over the parole system was routinely constrained by widespread black poverty, racial segregation, and discrimination in employment.

A Murderer of a somewhat dark complexion ?: Criminal Justice and Constructions of Race in Antebellum Virginia

In 1851, Elizabeth Southard was tried for the murder of William Walker in Richmond, Virginia. Although Southard was ultimately convicted, her case was of unusual complexity, because at every stage of the prosecution process the defense attorneys contested the racial status of Southard herself and two key witnesses. This article examines the various ways in which race was constructed in the course of Southards trial and argues that the legal process of determining racial identity profoundly compromised the stark racial divide that was at the heart of Virginias criminal law. Furthermore, evidence from Southards trial suggests that the problems associated with determining racial identity were greatest in southern cities and particularly in those cases in which the race of a woman was at issue.