The Law and Race Relations

Abstract

T HE potentialities of the law in helping to break down racial bigotry and its chief objective manifestation, discrimination, have been sorely neglected. This neglect arises from an ignorance of the role the law plays in creating and reinforcing racial attitudes,' a failure to distinguish between prejudice and discrimination, and our unhappy experience with unenforced, poorly drafted statutes. This neglect unfortunately is not shared by our southern legislators. The entire apparatus of Jim Crow is employed by them to prevent the white from ever encountering the Negro except in a role which symbolizes inferior status. Southern segregation laws are designed to emphasize this inferior status and to drive home at every opportunity the lesson that the white race is a superior one. The South has always believed that law does affect folkways. Even in the North, the law is far from neutral in the field of race relations. Negroes are penned into black ghettos in northern cities because landlords band together to prevent one of their number from selling or leasing property to nonwhites, and then include in their contracts or deeds a covenant which forbids Negro occupancy. But these restrictive covenants could not be enforced without the aid of our equity courts, and so our courts do what the legislators constitutionally could not 2-they create ghettos.