"Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression.
- The laws are made by men who have little interest in him;
- they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the Black people with courtesy or consideration;
- and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape…
… Thus grew the double system of justice, which erred on the white side of undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed, criminals, and erred on the Black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination.
For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re-enslaving the Blacks.
It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims."
W.E.B Dubois - The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk: Essays and Sketches.
-Yogabrofessor
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