Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.: The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities as Second-Class Citizens

By Stetson Kennedy

Jim Crow Guide documents the system of legally imposed American apartheid that prevailed during what Stetson Kennedy calls "the long century from Emancipation to the Overcoming." The mock guidebook covers every area of activity where the tentacles of Jim Crow reached. From the texts of state statutes, municipal ordinances, federal regulations, and judicial rulings, Kennedy exhumes the legalistic skeleton of Jim Crow in a work of permanent value for scholars and of exceptional appeal for general readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780817385644

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CHAPTER 1

NO ROOM FOR REDSKINS

IF you're a real American—that is, an American Indian—you're lucky to be alive.

For whether he really believed it or not, the white man has acted on the principle that The only good Indian is a dead one. This was certainly one of the foundation stones upon which the white European invaders of North America and their descendants established and built the republic of the U.S.A.

When in 1492 Christopher Columbus opened the door to the white conquest of the Americas, there were nearly a million native Indians living in what is now the United States. Far from permitting this number to increase, the white man has vigorously pursued—both as individual enterprise and national policy—a genocidal campaign expressly aimed, until quite recently, at the effective extermination of Indians from the continent.

This campaign—consisting of relentless warfare, massacre, confinement, starvation, and neglect—was so successful that by 1923 less than a quarter of a million Indians remained in the U.S.A. Since then the pressures have been relaxed somewhat, permitting a certain increase in the Indian population, but with intensified efforts being made to exterminate Indian culture. By 1958 their number was still only half what it was upon the white man's arrival.

As has been characteristic of white imperialism, the European settlers and their descendants in America were inclined to look down upon the native Indians as pesky redskins, savages, and heathens. This attitude, coupled with an avowed desire to convey the blessings of Christianity and European civilization on the benighted barbarians, salved the consciences of those who went about the profitable business of divesting the Indians of life, liberty, and property.

The genocidal programme likewise called for expropriating or liquidating the Indians’ culture. Four-sevenths of the agricultural production of the U.S.A. now consists of plants which were originally domesticated by the Indians (the white man has failed to domesticate a single important staple on the continent). Numerous other things, including snow-shoes, toboggans, woodland garments, and even methods of warfare were appropriated from the Indians with scarcely an acknowledgment. On the contrary, American history books and Hollywood movies generally perpetuate the notion that the white man contributed all, the Indian nothing. However, one thing which the white man did introduce—Hollywood and the history books to the contrary notwithstanding—was the practice of scalping one's victims.

Because the Indians were thinly scattered, it was a case where the existing racial and cultural slate could be wiped relatively clean, the historian Dr. Everett Stonequist has observed.

An early Pilgrim in Massachusetts, thanking God for a pestilence that wiped out an Indian tribe, wrote in his journal: By this means Christ, whose great and glorious works throughout the earth are for the benefit of his churches and his chosen, not only made room for his people to plant, but also tamed the hearts of the barbarous Indians.

Evidently not content with the rate at which the white man's diseases decimated the Indians, one colonial general ordered his subordinates to wage bacteriological warfare as follows: You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets in which smallpox patients have slept, as well as by other means that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.

In like vein, a pioneer immigrant to California wrote at the time: I often argued with Good regarding disposition of the Indians. He believed in killing every man or well-grown boy, but in leaving the women unmolested. It was plain to me that we must also get rid of the women.

In the opening up of Oregon to white settlement, even Methodist clergymen expressed no regret at seeing Indian women being clubbed to death and Indian babies dashed against trees by white settlers. One Oregon settler named Beeson wrote: It was customary [for the whites] to speak of the Indian man as a buck ; of the woman as a squaw ; until at length in the general acceptance of the terms, they ceased to recognize the rights of humanity in those to whom they were applied. By a very natural and easy transition, from being spoken of as brutes, they came to be thought of as game to be shot, or as vermin to be destroyed.

In Colorado, an early legislature seriously considered adopting a law providing for cash bounty payments for the destruction of Indians and Skunks.

At the outset of the white conquest of North America, the competing European imperialist powers of Spain, France, Great Britain, and Holland all followed a policy of dealing with the various American Indian tribes as nation-to-nation. Since the American Indians had traditionally looked upon the land as a communal asset, it was relatively easy for the European powers to defraud them of it by treaty or purchase for some trivial amount. It was thus to the advantage of these powers to acknowledge that the Indians were the original owners of the land, since in subsequent deals among themselves these powers could then transfer with some semblance of legality the lands they had acquired from the Indians.

But as soon as the white settlers had thrown off the yoke of European imperialism, the new republic tended to drop the old diplomatic approach of dealing with the Indians as nation-to-nation, and instead decided to dictate its will by force of arms. As Chief Justice Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court put it, the Indian tribes were no longer to be regarded as independent nations, but rather as domestic dependent nations.

To facilitate imposing its will upon the native Americans, the white republic of the U.S.A. in 1824 established an Indian Office as an adjunct of its War Department. The so-called Indian Wars, which continued intermittently until the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, were in most instances deliberately provoked by the white settlers and troopers as an excuse for massacring the Indians and depriving them of their land and cattle. Official records of the U.S. Government are replete with instances of treaties and truces being violated by whites, including U.S. military commanders in the field. Many U.S. Army generals felt their country's honour was not at stake when they betrayed flags of truce and other confidences of the Indians. This sentiment found expression as national policy when the U.S. Congress in 1871 forbade the Government to enter into any further treaties with the Indians.

The subjugation of virtually all tribes had been completed by 1880, with the only respite for the redmen coming during the Civil War of 1861-5, when the white Americans were busy killing each other. With the Indians disarmed and reduced to military impotence, the U.S. Government herded the remnants of the tribes on to reservations on the principle that it was cheaper to feed them than to fight them.

The official U.S. policy, according to William Christie MacLeod in his book, The American Indian Frontier, became merely to keep the Indian at peace pending his gradual dying off from more insidious causes than the sword or bullet.

From time to time, U.S. agents resorted to more direct methods of extermination. For example, a Government agent who in 1866 hanged a recalcitrant Indian, upon being called to report the matter, replied: Indians sometimes have to be dealt with severely and promptly. I made no mention of the execution in my report of Indians, as I did not know whether others could see the necessity for it that I did, and thought it as well to say nothing about it to the authorities at Washington.

U.S. General Ord, in his report to the War Department in 1869, said he encouraged the troops to capture and root out the Apaches by every means and to hunt them as they would wild animals.

U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Walker said he would prefer to see the Indians exterminated altogether rather than permit them to intermarry with whites. In his official Report of 1872, Commissioner Walker went on:

"There is no question of national dignity, be it remembered, involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question whether in a given situation one shall fight, coax, or run, is a question merely of what is easiest and safest. The Indians should be made as comfortable on, and as uncomfortable off, their reservations as it is in the power of the Government to make them; such of them as behave should be protected and fed, and such as go wrong should be harassed and scourged without intermission.…

It is only necessary that Federal laws, judiciously framed to meet all the facts of the case, and enacted in season, before the Indians begin to scatter, shall place all the members of this race under a strict reformatory control by the agents of the Government…. No one certainly will rejoice more heartily than the present Commissioner when the Indians of this country cease to be in a position to dictate, in any form or degree, to the Government; when, in fact, the last hostile tribe becomes reduced to the condition of suppliants for charity.

In practice, the U.S. Army often went beyond this in its handling of the Indians. Carolos B. Embry, in his book, Americas Concentration Camps (1958), tells of the treatment of a tribe of Cheyennes captured in 1879: In the midst of the dreadful Winter, with the thermometer at forty degrees below zero, the Cheyennes, including the women and children, were kept five days and nights without food or fuel, and for three days without water.

The establishment of a dictatorship over the Indians was accelerated toward the end of the nineteenth century by an influx of former Army officers into the Indian Bureau. Taking note of this, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in his Annual Report for 1892 said: Appointed at first in the capacity of a commercial agent or consul of the United States in the country of an alien people, the Indian agent…has developed into an officer with power to direct the affairs of the Indians and to transact their business in all details and in all relations. This is a very curious chapter in our history. There is a striking contrast between ‘ministers plenipotentiary’ appointed by the U.S.A. to treat with powerful Indian nations, and an army officer, with troops at his command, installed over a tribe of Indians to maintain among them an absolute military despotism.

It was generally assumed by white America that the Indian was the vanishing American—that in a short time he would become altogether extinct. U.S. Senators learnedly cited the works of Spencer and Buckle to prove that the Indian was incapable of adapting to the white man's civilization.

Little can be hoped for them as a distinct people, declared General Sanborn. The sun of their day is fast sinking in the western sky. It will soon go down in a night of oblivion that shall know no morning.

(In view of this record, it was little wonder that when in 1957 American politicos began to venture critical observations concerning the sanguinary struggle being waged by France against the Algerian independence movement, thousands of Frenchmen felt moved to write the U.S. Embassy in Paris, calling attention to the fact that whereas the white settlers of America had set out to systematically exterminate the native population, French settlers in Algeria had, through the introduction of sanitation, facilitated a ninefold increase in the native population.)

Wards of the Government

American Indians today are organized into some 300 tribes speaking about 250 dialects. The elder members of the tribes speak no English, and the others are but semi-educated, with very few having any technical training. At least two-thirds of the Indians live on reservations in the desert lands of the midwest, while less than 10 per cent have become city-dwellers.

American Indians are in the anomalous position of being at the same time citizens of the U.S.A. and Wards of the Government, the net result being far from first-class citizenship. The U.S. Congress has adopted no less than 5,000 laws which apply to American Indians as such, and these, together with more than 2,200 regulations imposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, regiment the lives of Indians from the cradle to the grave.

Between the years 1800 and 1858 the U.S. Congress passed a series of laws giving the President and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs the powers of absolute potentates over American Indians as subject peoples. These powers included the right to issue or deny passports to persons wishing to visit Indian territory, and to deport from the reservations anyone deemed detrimental to the peace and welfare of the Indians.

For a long time Indians were excluded from the protection of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, even though these documents explicitly apply to all persons under the jurisdiction of the U.S.A. This meant, among other things, that the Indians were held as prisoners on the reservations. It was not until 1891,. when an Indian named Standing Bear defied the authorities, left his reservation, and was arrested by the U.S. Army at the request of the Secretary of the Interior, that the Supreme Court finally admitted that Indians are persons. But it was not until 1924 that Congress saw fit to bestow limited citizenship upon the Indians, in response to a popular demand that they be rewarded for fighting for the U.S.A. in World War I. However, for a long time afterwards the five states where most Indians live refused to let them vote or sit on juries, the last two states to give way being New Mexico and Arizona in 1948.

Under the treaties whereby the Indians were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and placed on reservations, the Government of the U.S.A. solemnly promised the tribes that they would be permitted to govern themselves and make and enforce their own tribal laws. As has been noted, however, the U.S.A. soon violated this agreement by establishing a military dictatorship over the reservations.

The constitutions adopted by the tribes and approved by the U.S. Government specifically assure the Indians the right to hold their own elections. But since 1950 the Government has repeatedly interfered, directly and indirectly. For instance, in the Blackfeet election of 1952, reservation superintendent Guy Robertson insisted that the election be conducted by Bureau agents. He mobilized his Bureau police, shut down the voting places set up by the Indians, tried to strike 1,000 names from the voters’ lists, and confiscated Indian funds to pay for the mock poll which he conducted. The Bureau in Washington not only upheld his action, but asserted its right to take similar steps at any time in the future.

The U.S. Government has also intervened in tribal elections by flooding the reservations with propaganda for or against certain candidates (according to their subservience to the Government). This happened in the Blackfeet elections of 1950 and 1952, and in the Choctaw election of 1952, among others. When the Association on American Indian Affairs wired the Interior Secretary, asking whether such intervention had his approval, he replied that it had.

The American Bill of Rights guarantees that all citizens shall have equal rights under the law. American Indians, however, have never enjoyed this right, even after they were declared to be citizens. The Social Security laws, for example, provide that the Federal Government shall match whatever sums are provided by the states for benefit payments to the aged, the blind, and dependent children. And yet Arizona and New Mexico have been given these U.S. funds even though they refuse to pay any pensions whatever to their Indian citizens. Indians were also excluded from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's housing and other loan programmes until, in 1950, 24 tribes united in protest.

Another gross discrimination lies in a Federal prohibition against the sale of alcohol to Indians in any form—even in hair tonic or vanilla extract. Any liquor dealer caught selling to minors or Indians must forfeit his licence. (Sometimes this prohibition has been enforced by bar-tenders against persons of Asian extraction, such as Filipinos and Japanese-Americans, in the mistaken belief that they are American Indians.)

Efforts in recent years to persuade Congress to repeal this paternalistic prohibition have been opposed by the Bureau. But at the same time Bureau agents have given the Indians to understand that if they will surrender their tribal courts, the Bureau will endorse their demand for an end to liquor prohibition. The tribes of Montana have protested that repeal of liquor prohibition should not be made conditional upon acceptance of state taxation, the elimination of tribal law-and-order codes, or any other surrender of Indian rights.

During the 12 years Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the U.S.A. (1932-1945) and Harold Ickes was Secretary of the Interior, the Indian made substantial progress. But this trend has been reversed ever since 1950, when Dillon Myer was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs. A former U.S. State Department official, Myer achieved notoriety as head of the War Relocation Authority which herded Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War II.

Upon being made head of the Indian Bureau, Myer promptly fired its most capable officials and replaced them with men who had carried out his orders in the concentration camp agency. A superintendent who was said to be too soft with the Indians and Eskimos of Alaska was replaced by a former F.B.I, agent; a former concentration camp warden was made superintendent of the Montana Blackfeet reservation. As Ickes later commented: A blundering dictatorial tin-Hitler tossed a monkey-wrench into a mechanism he was not capable of understanding.

As if to further fulfil this characterization, Myer asked Congress to give his Bureau agents the right to carry arms and make arrests and searches without warrants, for violations of Bureau regulations both on and off reservations. Not even F.B.I, agents or U.S. marshals have such arbitrary powers. There is no more reason why Indians should be arrested for violating Indian Bureau regulations than why women and children should be arrested for violating regulations of the Women's Bureau or Children's Bureau.

The way American Indians were robbed of one of the richest continents on earth has few parallels in the annals of Empire. Since the Indian had always looked upon his lands as a communal asset, the full implications of the white man's peculiar concept of land as private property were not immediately apparent to him. In a typical transaction between the white man and the red, the island of Manhattan, on which the bulk of New York City now stands, was purchased for 24 dollars’ worth of trinkets. It was customary in negotiating such purchases for the white men to first ply the redmen with alcohol until they became so intoxicated they did not know or care what they were signing. When such devices failed, the whites simply bought the signature of any Indians who might be available, regardless of how little right they might have to dispose of the land in question. Then, armed with such documents (and firearms), they simply drove the Indians from the land. The bulk of the continent, indeed, changed hands through military conquest without even token payment being made.

One reason why the Indians agreed to accept the paltry compensations offered was a formal assurance that they and their descendants would not be taxed by the American Government. Since 1950, however, the Indian Bureau has been urging Congress to start taxing Indians.

The reservations to which the Indians were confined in and around the American desert embraced some of the most worthless land in the country. Under a concept unique in American law, these reservations were regarded as hereditary, but held in trust for the tribe by the U.S. Government. The Indians were forbidden to sell, rent, or lease the reservation lands, or to sell minerals, timber, oil, fish, cattle, or agricultural products from them without the prior consent of the Government. In other words, Indians were put in the same legal class as congenital idiots deemed incapable of handling their own affairs.

When it was discovered that some portions of the Indian lands contained oil and other valuable resources, something had to be done to enable the white man to lay hands on these riches. So in 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which was hailed by some as a Red Man's Emancipation Proclamation. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, it seems, was complaining bitterly that the Indians still thought in terms of we instead of I in dealing with land. The new law gave the tribes title to 138,000,000 acres, and provided that after an interim of 25 years much of it was to be given out in parcels to individual Indians. It was assumed, as Senator Dawes put it, that this taste of private property would create in the red men "that spirit of selfishness which was the main motivation of white