America Is Reaping Two Centuries of Law Treating Blacks Lawlessly : By every measure of equality, the “haves” maintained the edge, from legal lynching to broken promises.

In Richland County, South Carolina, in the 1920s, a black storyteller talked about the law and the courts and how they operated half a century after the abolition of slavery: “Dere ain’ no use. De courts er dis land is not for n------ . . . It seems to me when it come to trouble, de law an’ a n----- is de white man’s sport, an’ justice is a stranger in them precincts, an’ mercy is unknown.” The Bible, he noted, asked people to pray for their enemy, and so he offered up this prayer: “Drap on you’ knee, brothers, an’ pray to God for all de crackers an’ de judges an’ de courts an’ solicitors, sheriffs an’ police in de land.”

The jury in Simi Valley delivered a verdict altogether familiar to black America. The principal surprise in the Rodney King case is that so many people were surprised. The verdict was deeply rooted in the history of racial attitudes, in the assumption that blacks are by nature more impulsive and violent than whites and require more rigid control and restraint. This is hardly the first time that white Americans (including those sworn to uphold and enforce the law) have in the name of law and justice made a mockery of law and justice. The history of race relations is replete with such examples. It has, in fact, often been a history of legal violence, violence sanctioned by the law. For nearly two centuries African-Americans have been denied full protection of the law--a perversion of justice in which law-enforcement agencies, the courts and the legal profession (judges and lawyers alike) have often been deeply implicated.

The machinery of the law has functioned historically to contain and control African-Americans, not to mete out equal justice. From the end of Reconstruction to the 1960s, the judicial system in the South granted virtual immunity to whites accused of crimes against blacks. All too typical was the case in Hinds County, Mississippi, in 1897, in which a black woman charged a white man with having beaten her with an ax handle. The presiding justice of the peace told her he could find “no law to punish a white man for beating a negro woman.”

No wonder legal lynching figured so prominently in black song and folklore: the bigoted police, judge and jury, the coerced confessions, the petty prosecutions, the leniency shown white offenders, the impossibility of securing a fair trial and the discriminatory sentences (a black newspaper in New Orleans once said of an unfortunate black defendant, after he had been sentenced to 90 days in jail, that he was given “three days for stealing and eighty-seven days for being colored”). Apocryphal or not, the story that resonated with truth in the black community told of a judge who tried to stop a lynch mob by pleading with them, “We’ve always been considered a progressive community and I think we’re progressive enough so’s we can give this boy a fair trial and then lynch him.”

From the very outset of their lives, young blacks came to learn that the distinction between the law and lawlessness, justice and injustice was so blurred as to be indistinct. Nothing, in fact, seemed more contrived to drive blacks into exasperation and lawlessness than the law itself--from the police to the judge to the jury. Even a white Southern sheriff could at times express his exasperation, as did Alexander M. Salley in a South Carolina court in 1889: “I never have heard of a clearer case in my life, but it is the height of folly to try to convict a white man for killing a poor negro. A certain class think it is something to be proud of.”

Nothing in the legal system instilled in African-Americans any respect for law, order, justice, the courts or the police. White people, as James Baldwin suggested in “The Fire Next Time,” “had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law--in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.” If most whites were inculcated from childhood with the image of the policeman as a friend and protector, most blacks learned to fear him as the enemy. “History proves that nearly all race riots are started by white policemen,” a Chicago black newspaper charged in 1919. “Instead of acting in behalf of law and order, white policemen usually act in behalf of some passion that tells them Negroes are convenient brutes.” Not only did the police deal severely with blacks accused of crimes against white persons or property; they also often chose to ignore black violence against blacks. The cynicism that blacks manifested toward the police and the courts was captured in the folk saying: “If a n----- kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a n-----, that’s justifiable homicide. If a n----- kills another n-----, that’s one less n-----.”

The jury in Simi Valley, like innumerable juries that preceded it, below and above the Mason-Dixon line, underscored a continuity in racial attitudes that the civil-rights movement in the 1960s was unable to overcome.

The historic inability of blacks to obtain legal justice has been compounded, moreover, by their difficulty in gaining economic justice. Both judicial and economic violence have taken an extraordinary toll. Thus, 130 years after emancipation, 25 years after the civil-rights movement, this nation finds itself in a heightened racial crisis. The deepening economic disparities, the upper redistribution of wealth and income, the controversy over affirmative action, the deteriorating quality of public education, the breakdown in the principle and enforcement structure of civil rights, the exploitation of racial fears in appeals to the electorate, the social and economic devastation of much of black America--all of these suggest that the commitments once made to racial equality and equal opportunity have been revised, compromised, diluted, permitted to erode or abandoned altogether, to accord with new priorities, new ideologies, a new politics, and with old and still deeply held convictions, what W.E.B. DuBois called “age long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.”

Twenty-five years ago, the Kerner Commission warned that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.” That process continues. The brutalizing effects of more than two centuries of slavery and another century of enforced segregation and miseducation continue to shape race relations. Racism remains the most debilitating virus in the American system, nourished by historical and cultural illiteracy. No matter how it is measured--the number of unemployed, the quality of housing, the schools children attend, the prospects for the future--this nation remains in critical ways two societies, sharply divided between the haves and the have nots, and the consequences spill over into almost every facet of American life. The victims threaten to become, if tens of thousands have not already become, a vast shadow population of interior exiles, aliens in their own land, locked into a cycle of deprivation and despair, empty of faith or hope, volatile and combustible.

The outbreak in Los Angeles brought into full public view the war at home. Where is the national commitment to winning this war? The yellow ribbons of support and concern? The daily briefings? Will the White House and Congress, without regard to expense, authorize the full prosecution of a war in which the enemies are poverty, homelessness, unemployment, racism, sickness and disease --problems not susceptible to surgical strikes, carpet bombings, smart missiles and macho posturing?

The lawlessness that the entire world saw last week did not begin in South Los Angeles. The lawlessness did not even begin with the brutal clubbing of Rodney King and the verdict of jurors in Simi Valley who were asked to put themselves in the shoes of the white policemen--and they did. The lawlessness began with the clubbing of black America, the conscious and criminal neglect and fashionable racism characteristic of the Age of Greed over which Ronald Reagan and George Bush have presided.

The jury in Simi Valley underscored how far this nation has yet to travel if Americans are to become what they have long claimed to be. The frustration builds, the resentments heighten, the feelings of despair and hopelessness deepen and the need to address this crisis has become a condition for survival. The appeal to white America’s sense of fair play yielded the unconscionable verdict in Simi Valley. The appeal to America’s fear of social upheaval may produce more positive results.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” poet Langston Hughes asked in 1951. It explodes.