How were blacks excluded from juries in the US southern states in the 1930s?
score:8
Traditionally most municipalities in the USA select their jury pool based on their state's voter rolls. That is in fact how Alabama does it today.
This is probably chiefly for convenience sake. A state's voter registrations is about the only convenient database of "of age" residents and where they live that the state (and everyone in it) has access to. Particularly back before the computer age. However, it does have the side effect that if your voter rolls are skewed, your jury pools will be as well.
Alabama of course had very skewed voter rolls in the early 20th Century. From about 1890 to 1965, Jim Crow was the rule in the South, including Alabama. Almost no black Americans could vote.
Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked.
*emphasis mine
The typical methods used were poll taxes and literacy tests. Both tended to include grandfather clauses that gave a free pass if you were related to someone eligible to vote the year before slavery was abolished (a clever, if transparent, bit of legal trickery). In practice, both tended to be selectively applied to only black applicants. It didn't stop there though, in addition to numerous other onerous requirements, in Alabama you got "doxed" as well:
Your name was published in the local newspaper listing of those who had applied to register. That was to make sure that all of your employers, landlords, mortgage-holders, bank loan officers, business-suppliers, and so on, were kept informed of this important event. And, of course, all of the information on your application was quietly passed under the table to the White Citizens Council and KKK for appropriate action. Their job was to encourage you to withdraw your application — or withdraw yourself out of the county — by whatever means they deemed necessary.
So southern blacks were effectively living in a terrorist state.
This is of course the essential backdrop to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Upvote:0
Your statement is incorrect on two counts. First of all, it is not true that the "absence" from the pool denies due process. Secondly, the violation is not of the Due Process clause of the Constitution, it was held to be a violation of the 14th Ammendment. The violation itself occurs when potential jurors are deliberately excluded from the pool. If by chance they are not present, it is not a violation. This is what it says in a contemporary legal handbook:
While a negro charged with crime is not entitled to a negro jury or to a mixed jury, the federal Constitution guarantees him against any discrimination against the negro race in the selection of a jury by whom he is to be tried.
The problem was that it was a common practice in some places for jury commissioners to exclude so-called "negroes" from jury pools on the grounds that they were unfit to serve as jurors. In places where this was occurring, courts routinely overturned verdicts as violations of the 14th Ammendment.
The mechanism of this exclusion is that the jury commissioner would send summonses only to citizens in well off neighborhoods and if a black showed up accidentally the commissioner would just excuse them immediately.
More post
- 📝 What did a train ticket cost on a 1940 Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe train?
- 📝 Did starvation or malnutrition occur in indigenous American societies?
- 📝 Was Marshal Foch predicting WW2 20 years in advance just a coincidence?
- 📝 What involvement did Jonathan Edwards have with the Conspiracy of 1741?
- 📝 The practice of translating foreign monarch's or noble's name
- 📝 What is meaning of 4 letter abbreviations in Roman names like Titus Flavius T. f. T. n. Sabinus?
- 📝 Did the Czech Legion bring POWs to Czechoslovakia? And if so, why?
- 📝 Did Democritus of Abdera, Thrace accuse the Jews of sacrificing Greeks in their religious rituals?
- 📝 Is this movie "History of the World: Every Year" credible?
- 📝 Why did Mozi's philosophy die out in China?
- 📝 Was the 1959 Tibetan Uprising really an uprising?
- 📝 How did the Abbey of Cluny derive revenue from William of Aquitaine's hunting preserve?
- 📝 Did the Minoans practise human sacrifice?
- 📝 Microsocial behaviour 500 years ago in western societies
- 📝 Why does Latin America have a higher number of surviving Native Americans than North America?
- 📝 What uniform is the man in this mid to late 19th century photo wearing?
- 📝 When and where arose the first civilization?
- 📝 Can anyone verify this story about the President's driver?
- 📝 Why were Civil War battle techniques so bloody, if the US had learned guerrilla fighting in the Revolutionary War?
- 📝 What is the real story of the Lion of Gripsholm Castle?
- 📝 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic - Experience
- 📝 Why do Eastern European countries have the greatest female-to-male ratio?
- 📝 Which military uniforms are shown in these photos?
- 📝 Was there a contingency plan in place if Little Boy failed to detonate?
- 📝 Was Donald Knuth the first person to typeset a book using a computer?
- 📝 How and why did trade unions in America become influenced by organised crime, but unions in Britain didn't?
- 📝 Did Naulakha cost more than Burj Khalifa?
- 📝 Any precedents of U.S. presidents having served in other government roles after the ends of their terms?
- 📝 How well did Lenin and Hitler knew each other? Were they some sort of friends?
- 📝 Why was the US table tennis team sent to communist China even after a difference in ideology?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 How were blacks excluded from juries in the US southern states in the 1930s?
- 📝 How were interracial relationships between African-Americans and Latinos treated in Southern states before the Loving decision?
- 📝 Why did the southern states secede from the U.S.?
- 📝 Were bookshops 'common' in the late 19th century, and how did they differ from modern ones?
- 📝 Why were women excluded from the succession line in the Meiji constitution?
- 📝 How many British navy officers were from lower classes at the end of 18th century?
- 📝 How were new states admitted to the Union?
- 📝 How were the Morisco refugees from Europe received in North Africa, given that they were foreigners and Christian?
- 📝 Why were Muslims in Western Thrace and Christians in Constantinople excluded from the population exchange?
- 📝 How widespread was dueling in the United States from its formation to 1860?
- 📝 Why were blacks still victimized in the Northern states after slavery's abolition?
- 📝 How did Southern slaveholders in the United States relate to the Caribbean and Latin America?
- 📝 Did the Southern States make any attempt to secede from the Union through an act of Congress?
- 📝 How were political factions in the late Roman republic different from political parties today?
- 📝 How big was the percentage of white people in the USA who were not against granting the blacks equal rights?
- 📝 How independent were the Eastern European countries from the Soviet Union?
- 📝 If West Virginia could legally secede from Virginia, why couldn't Southern states secede from the USA?
- 📝 Did people from the cities of Uruk, Ur and Sumer have knowledge/recollection of how old their cities were (say, recollection after 2000 BCE)?
- 📝 How do historians and linguists know how to pronounce the names from non-phonetic scripts?
- 📝 How were smallpox vaccines enforced in the US?
- 📝 How severe were the casualties in ancient/medieval battles?
- 📝 Why would silk underwear disqualify you from the United States military draft?
- 📝 How did the American Civil War help the U.S economy recover from the Panic of 1857 given that civil wars are extremely destructive?
- 📝 How was the United States able to produce excellent tanks in 1942?
- 📝 How did gold come to symbolize lower ranks than silver in the United States Air Force?
- 📝 How kind were the Muslim occupations of North Africa?
- 📝 How were horses disembarked from sail ships?
- 📝 How were the cities of Milan and Bruges spared by the Black Death?
- 📝 How beneficial were war bonds to the US during WWII
- 📝 Why were nomadic tribes (like the Mongols) from the Eurasian steppes a much reduced threat from the 15th century onwards?