Copyright © 2002-2005
by James P. Hauser
except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
Stagger Lee: From Mythic Blues Ballad to Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll Record
The AKA Blues Connection: Documenting the Blues Roots of Rock 'n' Roll
The Story of the Black Badman, the Stetson Hat, and the Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll record
Part 2: The Law in the Jim Crow South
Note: The purpose of the discussion below on how the law in the Jim Crow south was an oppressive force against black people is to provide the historical background necessary for understanding how the legend of Stagger Lee evolved from that of a ruthless badman to that of a civil rights hero. When we think of what Jim Crow was all about, many of us think of things like separate drinking fountains and bathrooms for whites and blacks. This is what most of us were taught about in our American History classes in school. However, while it is correct that Jim Crow involved legal segregation, there were aspects to it which were much crueler and more sinister than separation of the races. Some of this is discussed below.
Jim Crow, the system in the southern states of legal segregation of black people from white people, came about after the end of the Civil War Reconstruction period and lasted until it was wiped out in the 1960s by the civil rights movement. Whites established segregation because they believed that African-Americans were inferior to them and that the mixing of the two races would corrupt the white race. They felt that they were maintaining the "purity" of the white race by separating blacks from whites. Segregation was the norm in schools, hospitals, restaurants, public transportation, etc. It was a part of everyday life.
Segregation was the most visible evidence of how the law treated African-Americans unfairly during the days of Jim Crow, but there were many other forms of discrimination. Many southern lawmakers--and the system of law, in general--worked very hard to deny blacks their civil rights in additional ways. For example, in many areas, government officials established poll taxes and literacy tests to keep blacks from voting. Georgia's own governor, Eugene Talmadge, worked in concert with the Ku Klux Klan to prevent blacks from voting in elections. Furthermore, laws were established which made it easy to arrest poor people, and they were then enforced almost exclusively against African-Americans. For example, blacks would be arrested for vagrancy, and--since they often could not pay the fine--they would be forced to pick cotton in the fields of the planters who paid off their fines. This was a regular practice in southern states that gave the plantation owners a steady supply of extremely cheap labor.
Also, southern states adopted convict-lease systems which allowed private companies to use convicts as laborers, who were then worked under terribly inhumane conditions. The black prison population was targeted by the system. It was simply another form of slavery. Some of the worst offenders were the turpentine companies which used convicts in Florida to extract sap from pine trees and convert it into turpentine. Working conditions in the camps were horrible, and prisoners were given cruel punishments including being placed in cramped sweatboxes and being hung off the ground by their thumbs. There was little chance of escape. Some men committed suicide as a way out of the hellish camps.
Other examples of the way that the law worked against African-Americans come from the barbaric act of lynching. There were some brave law enforcement officers who risked their own lives to prevent these murders, but there were many others who did far from their best in stopping them. Sometimes they actually participated in the lynchings and even posed for photographs with the victims. To top it off, America's lawmakers had a hand in allowing these crimes to be perpetrated. There was strong resistance against passing anti-lynching laws in America--and not just in the south. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed the establishment of these laws (Note 1). Lynchings were incredibly savage. Before the victim was hanged, he could be subjected to hours of torture. Knives, branding irons, blowtorches, and even corkscrews were used. Fingers and toes were cut off as souvenirs. Sometimes victims were forced to mutilate themselves. Many of the men and women who were lynched were completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Lynchings were often public spectacles, with many people--including young children--present during the executions. The fact that the American systems of government and law did not do more to prevent these horrible murders is one of this country's greatest shames.
During the Jim Crow era, many blacks were sent to prison for the slightest offenses, but it was difficult to send a white man to prison unless he had committed a very serious crime. Prison populations became predominantly black. Many of those men were innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. And many of those innocent men were executed. There certainly were racists among the men who worked in the system of law that sent those innocent men to prison and to the gallows. One of those men was Sheriff Willis McCall of Lake County, Florida. (Note 2)
McCall was pitted against Harry T. Moore, an African-American educator and civil rights leader, over a case known as the Groveland Four when Moore and his wife were killed in their home by an explosion on Christmas night in 1951. Years later, Raymond Henry, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, confessed to making the bomb and accused Sheriff McCall of planning the murders. Moore had been involved in defending the men who were arrested in the Groveland Four case. They were all black men and they had been accused of raping a white woman in Sheriff McCall's Lake County. (The case has come to be known as "Florida's Little Scottsboro" due to its similarity to a case involving the frame-up of a group of African-Americans for rape in Scottsboro, Alabama.) After the Supreme Court ordered a new trial for two of the Groveland defendants, McCall shot both of them while they were manacled together in his custody. One of the men died. The other survived by playing dead. The sheriff claimed he shot them in self-defense. For the next 20 years, he was regularly involved in controversies that exposed him as a racist. He clearly had little concern over being labeled a racist--in 1971, it took the threat of a court order to force him to take down a sign in his office which read "Colored Waiting Room". Despite all the trouble that surrounded him, he was re-elected as sheriff seven times in a row. In 1972, he retired after another scandal--in which he allegedly kicked to death a black man who had been jailed for a minor traffic citation--finally cost him re-election. There is no way of knowing how many of his fellow officers of the law were also racists. But a clue might be found in the fact that McCall was elected president of the Florida Sheriff's Association after he shot the Groveland Four defendants.
From the above discussion of the law in the Jim Crow south, it is easy to understand why African-Americans saw officers of the law and the whole system of law as a threat rather than a protective force. W. E. B. DuBois, in his classic book The Souls of Black Folk, pointed to the white man's law and system of justice as "sources of humiliation and oppression". When an African-American citizen had a run-in with the law, for even just the slightest offense, he could suffer terribly for it simply because the color of his skin was black. Due to this state of affairs, a black man had to constantly have his guard up to protect himself. An experience that bluesman Mississippi John Hurt once had serves as an excellent example of the wariness that African Americans held for the law. Hurt, after making some remarkable recordings in 1928 (including his classic "Stack O' Lee Blues "), disappeared into obscurity until he was discovered in the early 1960s working on a farm in Mississippi. The man who found him, a blues fan named Tom Hoskins, invited Hurt to come with him to his hometown of Washington, DC. At first the bluesman hesitated in accompanying Hoskins because he suspected that this white man was a police officer or an FBI agent who was attempting to take him into custody. Knowing that he had done no wrong, he went along with Hoskins anyways, figuring that he would have to go either voluntarily or by force. (What he didn't know was that his reluctant trip to Washington would lead him on to fame as one of the biggest stars of the 1960s blues revival.)
It is no surprise that trouble with the law is one of the major themes of the blues. There are many blues songs dealing with sheriffs and police officers, judges and trials, and jails and prisons. Many of them are autobiographical. The great Delta bluesman Charley Patton sang about his experiences with the law in "High Sheriff Blues" and "Tom Rushen Blues". "Duncan and Brady", a song with some similarities to "Stagger Lee", tells the legend of a black bartender who kills a white policeman for interfering with his business. "Joe Turner Blues", sometimes referred to as the "granddaddy of the blues", is a song about a real-life prison transfer agent. In "Penitentiary Blues", Lightnin' Hopkins sings about doing time for another man's crime and ends the song by warning listeners that the same thing could happen to them. Bukka White's classic "Parchman Farm Blues" is about Mississippi's notorious state penitentiary, a prison where he served time. The most famous of all the prison songs may be Leadbelly's "Midnight Special". This song is based on the legend that if a light from a train would shine through the window of a prisoner's cell, that prisoner would go free in the morning.
Note 1:
FDR's opposition to anti-lynching legislation and the African-American reaction to it are discussed in a book by Philip Dray titled At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.
Note 2:
Before you have finished reading this essay, it might occur to you that, in discussing the days of Jim Crow (here and in later parts of this essay), I am unfairly picking on the state of Florida. Racism and discriminatory laws were certainly not limited to Florida (or to the south for that matter), but I have focused on this state for several reasons. First of all, this essay was sparked by my correspondence with Stetson Kennedy, a man who has labored for the cause of civil rights for many years, doing much of his work in his home state of Florida. Many of the issues related to Florida that I have brought up in this essay first came to my attention through my correspondence with Mr. Kennedy and my reading of his own writings. Second, Florida is my adopted home and my curiosity about its history had led me to learn that it has an important and largely unknown past--both bad and good--related to racism and the civil rights struggle. Below is some of what I have learned.
Although Florida is our southernmost state, many people do not think of it as a southern state. It is set apart from other states in its region in several ways. Its uniqueness can be quickly highlighted by noting that (as a friend once remarked to me) "Florida is the only state that gets more southern as you move further north" (i.e. the further north you travel, the more southern drawls you hear, the more rebel flags you see, etc.). Despite its uniqueness, with respect to the issue of race relations, Florida has a history which makes it much more similar to southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama than the average person realizes. Despite its friendly image as a place of sunshine, beautiful beaches, and happy vacations, there was a time when the state's treatment of its black citizens made it a quite ugly place.
For example, the Orlando area was once a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and it harbored so much racism that it was characterized by the Orlando Sentinel as once being "a bastion of southern hatred". A large majority of vacationers who have visited Disney or some of the many other attractions of central Florida would be surprised to find out that America's first civil rights martyr, Harry T. Moore, was killed not far from the land of Mickey Mouse and Snow White. Moore, an African-American educator and civil rights activist, was murdered along with his wife on Christmas night in 1951 when a bomb exploded inside their house in the small central Florida town of Mims.
In another incident, in the town of Ocoee which is just outside of Orlando, at least five black people were killed and much of the black neighborhood in which they lived was destroyed by a white mob. The exact number of people who died is not known, but some accounts place the death toll at closer to 50. It happened on election day in 1920; the killings and destruction were triggered by racist anger over a few blacks who had the courage to exercise their right to vote.
A similar massacre occurred in 1923 in Rosewood, Florida, a black town which was 50 miles from Gainesville and only a few miles from the idyllic fishing village of Cedar Key. The destruction wreaked by a white mob was so complete that the town was wiped completely off the map. While newspapers reported that only seven African-Americans were killed, some eyewitnesses claimed that 30 or more died.
There were many lynchings in Florida, and--in what was probably the most barbaric lynching that ever took place in America--a black man named Claude Neal was brutally tortured and killed in 1934 in the north Florida town of Marianna. When people think of sunny Florida, they do not envision lynchings, but between 1900 and 1930 the state probably led the nation in lynchings per capita (i.e. per number of black residents) according to Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore, a PBS documentary produced by the University of Florida.
To Florida's great fortune, a man named Leroy Collins became governor of the state in 1955. Governor Collins--who at one time was in favor of segregation--went against both his fellow southern Democrats and popular opinion in his state by moving Florida steadily in the direction of racial tolerance and integration. The work he did spared his state from much of the racial strife that occurred in other states during the 1960s. Collins was a man of great courage, vision, and leadership; his story should be required reading for any person holding public office.