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c h a p t e r 2 Postbellum Violence and Its Causes “Displaced Rage” in a Preindustrial Culture What accounts for this genre of folk song? To what extent did such men exist in the real black world in these years? How widespread was the kind of intraracial violence that these men committed and the songs tell us about? There was, in fact, an unusually high homicide rate among lower-class African Americans in the years between the Civil War and World War I. Both North and South were af¶icted, with violence among blacks increasing in both regions in the last several decades of the century. While the statistics recent scholars have turned up apply to blacks in both the North and the South,1 it is the South that is most relevant to the early development of the image of the violent man, in part because ninety percent of the black population still lived in the South in these years and in part because it is the southern, not the northern, badman mostly memorialized in the ballads. In his study of Mississippi’s Parchman State Prison in the early Jim Crow years, David Oshinsky found that “blacks comprised about 67 percent of the killers in Mississippi and 80 percent of the victims.”2 Another scholar, citing “court, prison, and arrest records,” says that in Memphis, in more or less the same period, “the great proportion of violent crimes by Negroes were . . . committed against other Negroes, including repeated cases of gambling altercations, barroom brawls, and domestic ¤ghts.”3 City historian William D. Miller turns up truly breathtaking numbers for Memphis in 1916, which led “the 31 large American cities” that were surveyed with 89.9 murders per 100,000 as compared, for example, with 20 | “BORN IN A MIGHTY BAD LAND” Atlanta’s thirty-one. Moreover, the homicide rate seems to have increased exponentially in the ¤rst years of the twentieth century, jumping from twenty-four arrests for murder in 1902 to 134 in 1917. Most of the murders were committed by blacks. Miller reports that “70 per cent of the homicides in the years 1920– 1925 were committed by Negroes,” and while the evidence is sketchy for the years before World War I, he speculates that the ¤gures for those years were proportionately the same.4 The situation in Memphis seems to have been merely a heightened version of what was going on in other southern African American communities in the years before World War I. Atlanta, Shreveport, St. Louis, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Kansas City—all saw their black neighborhoods grow, and along with the law-abiding came others more prone to crime and disruption . Atlanta had a large population of black pimps who “controlled much of the sporting action and barrooms on Decatur Street. Rowdiness, violence, and gangsterism were common occurrences.” Razor ¤ghts were common. Deaths were frequent.5 Jim Crow cars on trains, as black contemporaries complained , were also sites of cursing, ¤ghting, shooting, cutting, and murder.6 Most observers tacitly assume that this real-world violence needs explaining , since it seems to occur in greater abundance between blacks than between the members of most other groups in the America of these years. What’s wrong with these people? That is the unspoken question. How is it that so many black men (and even women) incline toward violence? Surely something has gone wrong with the cultural psyche. It is illuminating, for two reasons, to examine the attempts to explain these questions. They reveal how scholars think about this group of African Americans, and they ¤ll in many of the details of the period’s socio-economic background. Unfortunately, these details do not change materially over the decades, but simply get worse. The badman grows out of them. So common had alarm in the African American community over this violence become that in 1904, W. E. B. Du Bois’s think tank on black social problems at Atlanta University did a study of southern Negro crime. The study found that while African Americans made up about one-eighth of the population in the South, they accounted for about one-¤fth of the crime. A quarter of Negro prisoners had been con¤ned for “¤ghting and quarreling, ending at times in homicide, and also the crime of rape.”7 Even before the Atlanta study was made, Du Bois readily conceded that “There can be no doubt that crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty...

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