Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement

Introduction

1 Introduction On the morning of December 11, 1961, civil rights activist Dr. William Anderson sat down with his family to eat breakfast at home in Albany, Georgia. He was president of the newly formed Albany Movement, an organization established to lead the local black community in protest against segregation and discriminatory employment practices. That morning he explained to his family that the movement was about to undertake a series of mass demonstrations, and that he expected to be in jail by the end of the week. In an interview, he later recalled how difficult it had been to break that news to his family. “You’d have to understand that going to jail was probably one of the most feared things in rural Georgia,” he recalled. “There were many blacks who were arrested in small towns in Georgia never to be heard from again. We have every reason to believe many of these were lynched. So going 2 | Ain’t Scared of Your Jail to jail was no small thing. It was nothing to be taken lightly by any black.”1 In communities across the South during the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans faced the same difficult decision: to participate in the civil rights movement, they had to accept the likelihood of arrest and imprisonment and, as Anderson understood, that decision was fraught with danger. Anderson’s fear of imprisonment was well-founded. The criminal justice system in the South played a central role in white segregationists ’ efforts to maintain black social, political, and economic inferiority , and had done so for almost a century. In the midst of the postemancipation chaos of the late 1860s and 1870s, the criminal justice system—reconstructed by white communities to enable suppression of challenges to the racial status quo—had emerged as a central part of state and local government’s campaign to bring the black population back under white control. As Gail Williams O’Brien has demonstrated with great skill, the southern criminal justice system derived its power from the way in which it prioritized the protection of white supremacy over all other issues.2 From arbitrary police brutality to the complicity of legal officials in acts of lynching, every aspect of this system reminded black communities that they had no claim to legal protection. This was a highly effective and ruthless tool with which white communities controlled black lives; it represented one of the strongest symbols of black powerlessness in the South. Generations of abuse by white legal officials left a deeply ingrained fear of “the law” within the minds of most African Americans.3 While some of the worst abuses of the southern criminal justice system were eliminated during the 1940s and 1950s, it remained a staunch guardian of white supremacy. Civil rights activists had long been a target of legal officials, but the increasingly organized and militant style of civil rights protest during those decades made legal repression ever more central to the preservation of white supremacy in the South and, for those who engaged in activism during these years, the criminalization of black protest could be a deeply destructive process. The example of New Iberia, Louisiana, during the latter years of World War II provides evidence of how legal officials often Introduction | 3 spearheaded campaigns to destroy civil rights activism. A new NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) chapter was founded in the town in 1943. Focusing upon voter registration, education provision, and employment rights, the NAACP launched an assault upon the white power structure. In 1944, a black representative of the Fair Employment Practices Committee arrived in town, acting on a complaint about the lack of industrial training for local African Americans. A welding school was subsequently established, much to the chagrin of the local white community, and after a series of confrontations, the NAACP branch president, J. Leo Hardy, was arrested and ordered to leave town by 10 p.m. the next day. When he failed to follow the sheriff’s orders, he was bundled into a police car and driven out of town, where he was badly beaten and told to leave New Iberia. This was just the beginning of a series of expulsions of NAACP leaders and black professionals, all overseen by Sheriff Ozenne and his deputies.4 While a chapter of the NAACP continued to function in New Iberia, it did not return to its previous level of...