"Justice Is Something That Is Unheard of for the Average Negro": Racial Disparities in New Orleans Criminal Justice, 1920–1945.

Historians of race relations and criminal justice have emphasized the ways in which the rule of law emerged as a mechanism of racial control in the early twentieth-century South, gradually supplanting rough justice. This essay examines the protracted, uneven pace of this transformation and the development of Jim Crow criminal justice in New Orleans. An analysis of the adjudication of homicide cases in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945 reveals that the majority of black-on-white homicides did not result in convictions, and only a small minority of African Americans suspected—or even convicted—of interracial murder went to the gallows. But racial disparities in convictions and executions widened dramatically during the interwar era. Thus, this essay analyzes the social, cultural, and legal shifts that expanded race-based differentials in criminal justice. It also argues that, ironically, Jim Crow prescriptions intensified white fears of African American crime and helped to generate the anxieties that legal measures were imposed to address, increasing racial disparities and making racial biases in criminal justice self-perpetuating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]