The painful legacy of excluding Blacks and women from jury service

Tuesday Talking Points!

On May 2, 1911, George Loney, a deputy sheriff in Okemah, Oklahoma, went to the home of Laura and Austin Nelson to investigate the theft of a cow. Allegedly, Laura's 16-year-old son, L.D. Nelson, shot the deputy in the leg, an injury that caused him to bleed to death.

Local authorities concluded that Laura Nelson had first grabbed a gun, as such, she was charged with murder as a principal and arrested along with her teenaged son. Nelson's husband, Austin, would later plead guilty to the theft and be sentenced to state prison, but neither his wife nor his son would have an opportunity to appear in court as on May 24th, 111 years ago today, they were abducted from their jail cells by a group of 40 white men who comprised a lynch mob.

According to the Crisis magazine, the official publication of the NAACP, Laura, 35, was repeatedly raped before being hanged from a nearby bridge alongside her son, L.D. (See below)

The picture of mother and son hanging from the bridge was an extremely popular postcard for many years after their macabre deaths. Even worse is that despite knowing who comprised the lynch mob that served as judges, jury, and executioner, the actual local grand jury concluded that it could not conclusively identify the attackers to warrant indictment.

Of course they couldn't, being all willfully blind and whatnot…

Whenever the subject of white male patriarchy is raised, the predictable eye rolls from those who wish that folks like me would “just give it a rest” does not erase the fact that in America, a country that boasts about “freedom” and “equal justice under the law,” the truth is that those concepts have ranged from totally non-existent, to elusive, for Black people and women throughout much of this nation’s history.

If you remember the story of Dred Scott, then you know that prior to the end of slavery, even free Blacks were not considered American citizens—thus, they had no right to vote or serve on juries. After slavery ended, the emergence of Jim Crow prevented Blacks in most parts of the country from voting, and definitely kept Black men off of juries until well into the 1960s.

The right to vote and serve on juries is just a little over 50-years-old for Blacks in America…

And yes, I wrote “men” above because women were excluded from jury service in most states until, you guessed it, the 1960’s. Such laws and customs were designed by wealthy white men to keep white women dependent upon their husbands and fathers for life, which is why white women could not own or sell property until the late 19th Century; could not vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920; could not open bank accounts until the 1960s; could not own credit cards until the 70's and, pertinent to today’s post, could not be guaranteed jury service until the 1960’s. (Nota Bene: A few states, like Florida and Louisiana, allowed white women to “opt-in” to jury service starting in the late 1940's, but they were not summoned mandatorily like white men and still could be denied slots if the judge or parties believed they would be better served staying home and tending to their household duties).

I have often wondered whether acquittals would have been won for Black women like Laura Nelson or, closer to home, Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman in Live Oak, Florida who was convicted of killing Dr. C. Leroy Adams (a wealthy white doctor and state senator-elect), had women served in some capacity on their cases? Lest we forget that Mrs. McCollum claimed to have been raped dozens of times by the doctor, but she was prevented from giving testimony to this effect by Judge Hal Adams, who was of no relation to the doctor, but served as a pallbearer at his funeral!

Again, would Nelson or McCollum have been acquitted of their alleged offenses had women served as the local sheriff or on the jury?

Ruby McCollum and Dr. Adams, the alleged rapist that she killed in 1952. McCollum was sentenced to death by an all-white male jury, but her conviction was later overturned and she plead “insane” before the second trial and spent two decades at the Florida State Mental Hospital.

The skeptic in me says “probably not,” especially when considering that when one glances at any lynching picture or postcard, often there were white women standing around the lifeless Black bodies, too.

But maybe, just maybe, the outcomes could have been different if even one woman who understood white supremacy or domestic violence raised their voices in mitigation of alleged crimes?

We will never know…

What we do know is that today, women of all races have the opportunity to serve on juries and as I have admonished throughout my adult life, when those jury summonses come for serious felony or civil cases, by all means, please answer the call and lend your voice to the consideration of liberty and justice—for all!

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