ABSTRACT
In the South, black-on-black offenses were considered “negro peccadilloes,” and a waste of judicial time and money. Southern prosecutors and defense attorneys alike trivialized black-on-black crime, suggesting as one did disdainfully in court that a criminal case only involved “these niggers.” Southern newspapers reflected the indifference of whites to the obvious scourge of black-on-black crime. The seriousness of black-on-black crime was almost solely determined by its impact on white interests. Comparisons between black and white homicide rates in the nineteenth century are misleading because white homicide rates did not take into account the thousands of blacks who were lynched and murdered with impunity by whites. In nineteenth-century Philadelphia, for example, black homicides occurred at a rate of 7.5 per 100,000 compared to a white rate of 2.8. At the turn of the century, homicide rates among blacks were almost three times higher than whites.
