Black Prisoners, White Law

ROBERT CHRISMAN
T
he first black prisoners in America were
the Africans brought to these shores
in chains in 1619. Like our brothers in
prison todayand like ourselves those Af-
rican ancestors were victims of the politi-
cal, economic and military rapacity of white
America. Slave camps, reservations and
concentration camps; bars, chains and leg
irons; Alcatraz, Cummings and Sing Sing:
these are the real monuments of America,
more so than Monticello or the Statue of Lib-
erty. They are monuments of a legal inequity
which has its roots in the basic laws of the
United States and which still endures.
To justify and protect its oppression of
blacks, white America developed an ideol-
ogy of white supremacy which shaped the
American state, its politics and all its inter-
locking cultural institutionseducation,
church, law. Apartheid, generally attributed
to 20th century South Africa, was developed
as an instrument of oppression by this coun-
try in the 1600s, and has its basis in the laws
themselves, in the Constitution itself.
The function of law is to establish and
regulate the political and economic fran-
chise of the citizens within a given state.
The Constitution, ironically hailed as a mag-
nificent guarantee of human equality and
freedom, deliberately refused franchise to
black Americans and Indians and granted it
only to white Americans of means. Indeed,
Source: Tiie Biaci< Sciioiar, Vol. 2, No. 8/9, The Biack
Prisoner (April/May 1971), pp. 44-46.
black people were defined as a source of
white franchise, in the infamous 3/5 clause.
This clause gave the slaveholder a prepon-
derance of political power by apportion-
ing him 3/5 constituency for every slave he
possessed, in addition to his own free white
constituency.
The right of slaves to escape bondage
was also forbidden: In Article IV, Section 2,
"No person held to service or labor in one
State, under the laws thereof, escaping into
another, shall in consequence of any law or
regulation therein, be discharged from such
service or labor, but shall be delivered up on
claim of the party to whom such service or
labor may be due." Escaped slaves were to
be returned to the slaveownerby national
decree.
Designed by agrarian slaveholders and
northern industrialists and merchants, the
Constitution defined the relationship be-
tween their economic interests and their
political franchise. Hence its preoccupation
with finance and the divisions of power.
The Bill of Rights, appended 4 years later, is
an afterthought, as a concession to human
rights.
Black people were governed by the in-
famous slave codes, which forbade manu-
mission, voting, education, civil status and
personal rights and privileges.
The Constitution was an apartheid docu-
ment that guaranteed the continuance of
slavery and racism as permanent institutions
and perpetuated them as cultural realities.
Despite the elimination by law of slavery
and discrimination, we are still the victims
of that racism sanctioned and encouraged
by the Constitution.
Robert Chrisman Black Prisoners, White Law 33
Black people cannot be protected by Amer-
ican law, for we have no franchise in this
country. If anything, we suffer double in-
demnity: we have no law of our own and
no protection from the law of white America
which, by its intention and by the very na-
ture of the cultural values which determined
it, is inimical to blackness.
In the literal sense of the word, we are
out-laws. We are most subject to arrest
and the most frequent victims of crime. Over
40% of prison inmates in the State of Califor-
nia are black. More blacks than whites are
executed in the United Statesand this does
not include lynchings, "self-defense" or po-
lice killings. From 1930-1969, 2066 black
people were executed, to 1,751 whites. Four
hundred and five black men were executed
for rape, as compared to 48 whites during
the same period. In his article, "Black Ecol-
ogy," {The Black Scholar, April 1970) Nathan
Hare points out that "blacks are about four
times as likely to fall victim to forcible rape
and robbery and about twice as likely to
face burglary and aggravated assault."
Being outside the law, black Americans
are either victims or else prisoners of a law
which is neither enforced nor designed for
usexcept with repressive intent. For ex-
ample, gun control legislation was enacted
by the United States only after black people
began buying guns and endorsing the prin-
ciple of self defense, which is a qualitatively
different inspiration than the assassinations
of individuals such as John F. Kennedy and
Malcolm X.
Furthermore, black leaders who address
themselves to the fundamental question
that black Americans must have full politi-
cal and economic franchiseare arrested
or harassed. To list just a few black leaders
who have been or are political prisoners:
W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm
X, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Martin
Luther King, as well as some of the currently
embattled brothers and sisters: Rap Brown,
Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Ahmed Evans,
Ericka Huggins, the Soledad Brothers, and
Cleveland Sellers. The demand for black
equality in America exposes its most basic
contradiction: that as a democracy it can-
not endure or allow the full liberation of its
black citizens.
All black prisoners, therefore, are political
prisoners, for their condition derives from
the political inequity of black people in
America. A black prisoner's crime may or
may not have been a political action against
the state, but the state's action against him is
always political. This knowledge, intuitively
known and sometimes transcribed into polit-
ical terms, exists within every black prisoner.
For we must understand that the black of-
fender is not tried and judged by the black
community itself, but by the machinery of
the white community, which is least af-
fected by his actions and whose interests
are served by the systematic subjugation of
all black people. Thus the trial or convic-
tion of a black prisoner, regardless of his of-
fense, his guilt or his innocence, cannot be
a democratic judgment of him by his peers,
but a political action against him by his
oppressors.
34 THEBLACKSCHOLAR
TBS Volume 43 Number 3 Fall 2013
Grand Juries, the State and Federal judges
of the Circuit Courts, Superior Courts and
Supreme Courts, are appointed, not elected.
This fact alone prejudices a fair trial and
precludes black representation, for black
people do not have a single official in this
country who has the power to appoint a
judge or grand jury to the bench. Further-
more, because of the appointive nature of
most judgeships, judges have no direct re-
sponsibility to the persons they try, through
recall or election. Nor do trial juries reflect
the racial and economic compositions of the
populations which they represent. If a city
has a 40% black population it should have
the same percentage on its juries, in its legal
staff and in its judges.
It is of course obvious that mugging,
theft, pimping and shooting dope are not
themselves political actions, particularly
when the victims are most often other black
people. To maintain that all black offenders
are by their actions, politically correct, is a
dangerous romanticism. Black anti-social
behavior must be seen in and of its own
terms and corrected for the enhancement
of the black community. But it must be un-
derstood that the majority of black offenses
have their roots in the political and eco-
nomic deprivation of black Americans by
the Anglo-American state, and that these are
the primary causes and conditions of black
crime. The individual offender and his black
community must achieve this primary un-
derstanding and unite for our mutual protec-
tion and self determination.
Thus the matter of black prisoners and white
law involves the basic question of self-
determination for all black people. Black
people must determine when a black man
has violated the black community and that
black community must take the corrective
action. As we drive for new economic and
cultural institutions, we must also create
new legal institutions that will accurately
reflect the judgment, the social fabric, the
conditions of the black community. As it
stands now, only the white American com-
munity determines when a black person has
offended the black community, and this is a
colonial imposition and a political injustice.
Most important, the black community out-
side of bars must never divorce itself from
the black community within bars. Freedom
is a false illusion in this society; prison is a
reality. Black prisoners must be supported by
the black community during their incarcera-
tion, and after they are released.
For the black prisoner is the most vulner-
able member of our communityin a naked
way he is directly at the mercy of the white
power structure. It is also apparent that the
black prisoner is one of the most valuable
members of our community, as wellthe or-
ganization, the discipline, the fraternity that
black men have developed within prison to
survive, must be developed by us outside the
prison if we are to survive.
We must employ all means necessary
to protect and support black people within
prison walls. We are all prisoners and our
unwavering task must be the achievement of
organization, unity and total liberation.
Robert Chrisman Black Prisoners, White Law 35