Myths of Black Criminality: Everlasting Chains Tied on Emancipated Slaves

Han Zhu

History 74

11/03/2022
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Myths of Black Criminality: Everlasting Chains Tied on Emancipated Slaves

When Walter McMillian, a black wood logger, was sent to the court in 1988, he never

thought he would be put on death row for over six years for the murder of Ronda Morrison, an

18-year-old girl he had never met. When Morrison was murdered, McMillian was 11 miles away

frying fish with family members and guests.1 Despite alibis provided by many witnesses and a

lack of physical evidence, the jury pronounced McMillian guilty. Bryan Stevenson, McMillian's

lawyer, said that his case showed "the unreliable verdicts," people's "comfort with bias," and

society's "tolerance of unfair convictions."2 McMillian was just one of the millions of people

severely impacted by the myths of black criminality created by Whites to continue the control of

Blacks after their emancipation. In the 19th century, using direct accusation and pseudoscience,

Whites created the false impression that the tendency to commit crime was a problem within the

Black race, and the myth continued to the 21st century and became the tool to create judicial

injustice against Blacks.

Slavery: The Culprit of the Myths

The prolonged restraint of slaves profoundly affected the thinking of Whites, forming

preconditions for creating the myths. Black slaves were considered commodities, and

reproductive restraints were vital for their control. Because slaves' children were also their

property, slaveowners forced slaves to reproduce often.3 For instance, they awarded pregnant

female slaves more food, clothes, and less work; punished those who refused to give birth; and

1
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Random House,
2014), 55.
2
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 20.
3
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
(New York: Patheon Books, 1997), 10.
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controlled marriage between slaves.4 Likewise, male slaves also experienced white people’s

control over their reproduction. Slaveowners selected healthy and strong male slaves as "studs"

and forced them to mate with female slaves to birth better-quality slave children.5 Besides

reproduction control, Whites also controlled slaves in other aspects. They sexually assaulted

slaves as punishment6 and used the children of slaves as hostages to prevent them from

escaping.7 These inhumane controls were so deeply rooted in the White’s mind that when slavery

was abolished, “southern white people had been educated so long in that school of practice …

that they disdained to draw strict lines of action in dealing with the Negro.”8

Accusations and Pseudoscience: The Formation of the Myths

When slavery was abolished in the 19th century, to continue to dominate and control

Blacks as before, Whites created myths of black criminality to justify their behavior. They used

both direct accusations and pseudoscience to make people believe that Blacks were more willing

to commit crimes and that the propensity of crime was rooted in their race, so Whites were

justified in killing and lynching them. After decades of oppression of slaves, the idea of white

supremacy was prevalent. When Blacks got the right to vote, the southern Whites thought Blacks

should not have any rights and white men should rule the government, and soon Blacks were

eliminated from state and national elections.9 Besides, because Blacks were not the property of

Whites anymore, they would have no use for Whites. As a result, the white people’s punishment

4
Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 11.
5
Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 14.
6
Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 42.
7
Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 30.
8
Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United
States: 1892-1893-1894 (Chicago, 1894), 1.
9
Wells, A Red Record, 2.
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of Blacks turned from abuse to outright killing and lynching.10 When Whites lynched black

people, they justified their behaviors by using the crimes allegedly committed by Blacks. From

1865 to 1872, hundreds of black men and women were murdered, and all were accused of

participating in insurrection or rioting, but there was no evidence that they did any of these

things.11 In addition to direct accusations, another, more insidious way was devised to legitimize

the control of blacks: pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience was a common practice used to justify racism to control Blacks, like

Eugenics, which suggested that Blacks were genetically defective and needed sterilization. The

pseudoscience also included fake social science, like The Moynihan Report, in which the author

believed that black families were destroyed and the black women's dominations in their families

showed signs of being "defective."12 Among all the pseudoscience created, the most prominent

one that justified the myths was the statistics used by Frederick Ludwig Hoffman in the 19th and

20th centuries. In his books, Hoffman studied Blacks' mortality, suggesting that Blacks' high

mortality was caused by "consumption and venereal diseases" and concluded that Blacks had

"inferior constitution and gross immorality."13 However, when he studied the high rate of suicide

among Whites, he attributed it to social problems and called for economic intervention and

reform.14 This contrast in the treatment of the two races was evidence of Hoffman's racism and

social Darwinian thought. When he started calculating the criminality among Blacks, he used

statistics to justify that the criminality was rooted in the black race. He analyzed the percentage

10
Wells, A Red Record, 1.
11
Wells, A Red Record, 2.
12
Alice O’Connor, (November 2, 2022).
13
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of
Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5.
14
Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 7.
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of black criminality to overall crime in the society at the time and determined that it was high.

Using this as the only piece of evidence, he demonstrated that Blacks lacked regard for life and

property and were thus inferior.15 This statistic was problematic: Hoffman did not account for the

healthcare discrimination and racial oppression blacks faced at the time and jumped to

conclusions to justify white supremacy and myths of black criminality.16 Despite the enormous

problems with Hoffman's theory, it was highly regarded at the time and led to an increasing

consensus among whites that African Americans were inferior.17 Combined with direct

accusations, the pseudoscience helped to create the myths of black criminality and justified the

continuing control of Blacks.

Myths: The Tools Continued to Be Used

By the end of the 20th to the 21st century, myths of black criminality became the tools

used to create judicial injustice against Blacks to control them. In his book Just Mercy, attorney

Bryan Stevenson addresses the great injustice done to Blacks in the judicial process. He argues

that for Walter McMillan, the myths had a significant impact. When the officers were

reprimanded for their inability to find the culprit, they arrested McMillan, who had an affair with

a white woman, a highly taboo act in small-town Alabama in the 1980s.18 Because of the lack of

physical evidence, police first arrested Walter for sodomy to "shock the community" and

"demonize McMillian."19 Police created the myth to make people believe that McMillian

committed sodomy by spreading the information in newspapers. McMillian was depicted as a

15
Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 17.
16
Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 39
17
Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 18.
18
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 31.
19
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 53.
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part of a "burglary, theft, forgery, and drug smuggling ring."20 Then, corrupt police used death

row to pressure Ralph Mayer, a suspect in another murder case, to give false evidence of

witnessing McMillian murder Morrison.21 The justice system sentenced McMillian to death row

using falsified testimony as the only evidence and created the myths, which permeated through

the community because people could not get a fair picture of the fact. If Walter could be

released, he would face hostility from people who believed in the myths. Stevenson wrote in his

book, "I wonder how safely he [McMillian] could live in the community if everyone was

persuaded that he was a dangerous murder."22 In 1993, 128 years after the abolition of slavery,

McMillian's conviction was reversed after five appeals. Even after all these years, myths of black

criminality still had substantial impacts: innocent black people were sent to jail, and the myths

continued to function as a tool to control black people.

From the 19th to the 21st century, myths of black criminality continued to be created and

used to control Blacks inhumanely and unjustly. Walter McMillan, a kind and hardworking black

man, developed dementia from the trauma of imprisonment and died in 2013, but he remained

kind and charming.23 His case was so tragic and impressive, through which people could see that

myths are so deeply engraved in people's hearts that they were formed in the justice system. For

over a hundred years, emancipated Blacks still wear the chains of the myths of criminality,

another kind of slavery.

20
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 214.
21
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 56.
22
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 62.
23
Stevenson, Just Mercy, 213.
 Bibliography

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of

Modern Urban America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010.

O'Connor, Alice. “Body Politics History.” University of California, Santa Barbara. Lecture,

November 2, 2022.

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New

York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Random House,

2014.

Wells, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United

States: 1892-1893-1894. Chicago, 1894.