By Michael Tonry

Whites have been afraid of Black people since “20 or so” were “purchased” in Jamestown, the first permanent British colony, in 1619. Southern Whites’ fears of racial insurrections and wars pervaded American politics through the Civil War. For nearly a century afterward, southern and many other Whites feared economic and social competition from Black people and believed they were inferior human beings. Since the 1960s, most Whites have ceased believing in inherent Black inferiority but have continued to oppose integration of schools and housing and exaggeratedly feared Black criminals. Two widespread earlier practices, vigilantism and lynching, although in retrospect reviled, have modern equivalents that target Black people. Police use of the “third degree,” curbside punishment, and brutal prisons were for long acceptable to fearful and angry White citizens, just as racial profiling, police violence, and extreme punishment disparities are in our time. Call that “delegated vigilantism.” White citizens no longer themselves capture and kill alleged wrongdoers but, not so different, majorities have for a half century supported policies that authorize or mandate routine use of unprecedentedly severe punishments that ruin lives. Call that “less-than-lethal lynching.”

United States, Crime and Justice Volume 52. 2023

By Jeffrey S. Adler

This article explores a horrific 1945 child murder in New Orleans and argues that the case revealed broader developments in Southern criminal justice in the age of Jim Crow. Ernestine Bonneval tied her young children to an ironing board and lashed them, killing her 7-year-old daughter. The murder generated outrage, with residents demanding severe punishment, even the gallows, for the brutal crime. After a jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge sentenced the killer to one year in the state penitentiary. New Orleanians initially expressed fury at the lenient punishment but quickly conveyed sympathy for the murdering mother and perceived her as the victim of a failed legal system. The shift reflected four wider changes in white sensibilities about the role of the state. First, New Deal programs establishing a safety net during the Great Depression transformed white attitudes toward government authority. Second, Clementine Bonneval’s death became tethered to a national panic over juvenile delinquency, even though the victim was only 7. Third, gender ideals influenced perceptions of women who engaged in criminal violence. Fourth, and most important, Southern whites increasingly encoded violence as an African American behavior. As a consequence, white killers became hapless victims of circumstances beyond their control. The Bonneval murder was reinterpreted within a racialized construction of crime and criminal culpability that produced more aggressive policing and more draconian punishment for African American suspects and fewer arrests, indictments, convictions, and long prison sentences for white killers. Jim Crow, in short, shaped the modernization of Southern criminal justice.

USA, American Journal of Legal History. 2023, 17pg