"A Low Caste White Man with Lust in His Heart": Race, Deviance, and Criminal Justice in Jim Crow New Orleans

On the afternoon of February 10, 1930, Charles Guerand, a white, off-duty New Orleans policeman, fatally shot fourteen-year-old Hattie McCray, an African American dishwasher, after she rebuffed his sexual advances. Repeatedly over the course of the day, the inebriated Guerand had gone into the kitchen of Matt's Place, a local oyster restaurant, and "started fooling around" with McCray. Twice she "repulsed" his overtures. Just before 3:30 p.m., Guerand tried a third time "to have sexual intercourse" with McCray, and the young girl "repelled" him yet again. After determining that Bessie Piacun, the wife of the restaurant's proprietor, Matt Piacun, was not in the building, Guerand announced, "I am going back there and kill that G——D——Nigger wench" and charged from the dining room to the kitchen. A moment later, Matt Piacun heard two shots. "I ran to the kitchen," he told police investigators, "and seen the girl that washes dishes for me lying on the floor in a pool of blood and Officer Guerand standing there with a gun in his hand."¹

For New Orleanians, white and African American alike, the aftermath of this shooting proved to be more shocking than the murder itself. White men often sexually assaulted African American girls and women in early-twentieth-century Louisiana and typically did so with impunity.² Moreover, a white policeman killing an African American resident "hardly surprised many in the Negro community," and such violence had always gone unpunished in New Orleans. Yet, in an era when the local criminal justice system rarely punished anyone for murder, let alone a white cop charged with killing an African American resident, an all-white jury convicted Charles Guerand and sentenced him to death, an exceedingly rare punishment and one usually reserved for the most vicious, predatory killers of white residents.³ Although Guerand eventually escaped execution, his conviction and incarceration made this case stand apart from the other 2,117 homicide cases in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945.⁴

Both national and local observers declared that the verdict heralded the dawn of a new era in race relations. The Chicago Defender called the jury's decision "totally unexpected," reporting that it was "the first time that a white man has been convicted of first-degree murder for having taken the life of a member of the Race in this state [Louisiana]." A white New Orleans newspaper proclaimed the verdict "epochal," while an African American Louisiana newspaper hailed the jury's decision as "the forerunner of a better day in the courts for the colored group.""Every Negro in the city," the Louisiana Weekly continued, "is rejoicing at the turn of justice in the mind of their white brothers."⁵

This essay, however, argues that the Guerand verdict reinforced the racial order of Jim Crow New Orleans. For local law enforcers, and especially for Eugene Stanley, the Orleans Parish district attorney who spearheaded the prosecution, the trial and conviction of Charles Guerand was an expression of a more zealous and more unyielding embrace of Jim Crow and a hardening of racial boundaries. Anxious about the demographic, ecological, and political changes of the 1920s, criminal justice officials believed that social order hinged on regulating the conduct of African Americans, but it also required protecting the racial hierarchy from all perceived threats to the racial order, including challenges from working-class whites whose violent and predatory behavior undermined notions of white superiority and civilization.⁶ Prosecuting Hattie McCray's killer, therefore, had less to do with racial justice than with managing white class relations in order to protect white supremacy.⁷

The legal historian Lawrence M. Friedman has recently observed that high-profile trials are "didactic theater." They are intended "to instruct, to teach, to send a message." Such "open-air" rituals transform "rules, roles, norms, and punishments into living, breathing flesh," making them "real, corporeal, [and] effective."⁸ Using classical sociological theory, particularly Emile Durkheim's formulation of deviance, I...