Appeals: Desegregating the Jury Box

If the law of averages prevailed, the racial composition of juries in Sumter County, Ga., would be three-fourths white and one-fourth Negro. The two races are represented in just about that proportion on the county’s tax rolls, from which jury panels are drawn. But rarely in modern times has a Negro served on a jury in Sumter County, where even the tax rolls are segregated: the names of white and Negro taxpayers are separately registered. By order of the Georgia Court of Appeals, the law of averages now prevails along with the law of Georgia in the selection of Sumter County juries.

Local Precedent. Ironically, the decision was handed down in the case of a white defendant convicted by an all-white jury in Americus, the county seat. Arrested during civil rights demonstrations there last August, Ralph W. Allen, a student from Connecticut’s Trinity College, was first charged with inciting an insurrection, a capital offense in Georgia. But before Allen could be tried, the state’s insurrection law was held unconstitutional by a federal court (TIME, Nov. 8). On the testimony of an Americus policeman who claimed that Allen threw a bottle at him, the 22-year-old civil rights worker was brought to trial instead on a charge of assault with intent to murder. The all-white jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to two years.

The appeals court’s opinion upholding Allen did not rest entirely on the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has long been held to bar racial discrimination in jury selection. Nor did it rely on the now familiar civil rights argument that a white man who came to the South to register Negro voters might get something other than dispassionate justice from an all-white Southern jury. This time the court also invoked Georgia precedent. Since 1882, it has been a felony in that state to exclude citizens from jury duty on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Fresh Spelling. For all its significance, the new decision was not likely to pack Georgia jury boxes with Negroes. Almost no one down South wants them there, not even some Negro defendants, who seem to suspect that they will surely get unduly harsh justice from Negro jurors leaning over backward to suppress a natural sympathy for their race. Nor does the decision go so far as to order jury service for Negroes. “The test,” says Presiding Appeals Court Judge Horace E. Nichols, “is not whether any Negroes are actually on a jury. It is whether they are on the jury panel, available for jury duty, and, if so, whether they are discriminated against.”

But the appeals court decision was likely to have an impact in many another state, and it was certain to desegregate the jury-picking system all over Georgia, as the state’s courts hastened to obey an old mandate freshly spelled out. “It would be prohibitive from a financial standpoint not to,” says Judge Nichols. “Their decisions would be reversed, and have to be reheard, every time.” That was just what happened in Sumter County, where Civil Rights Worker Ralph Allen will almost certainly be tried again—this time by a legally correct jury.