6 - Persecuting Black Men and Gendering Jury Service: The Interplay between Race and Gender in the NAACP Jury Service Cases of the 1930s

Summary

On October 13, 1936, the sheriff read aloud the jury's verdict: “We, the jury, find Joe Hale, the defendant, guilty of the first degree of murder, fix his penalty death in the electric chair.” Hale probably stood as each white juror nodded, affirming for the judge and record that he had supported that decision. An all-white grand jury had indicted him, and this all-white petit jury convicted Hale, an “illiterate, destitute” nineteen-year-old, of the murder of a forty-year old white man, W. R. Toon. Hale had admitted he confronted—but did not kill—a white man to protect black women. Hale claimed he approached Toon to demand that he stop “accosting” black women walking along the street. According to the defense, he insisted that Toon “quit stopping these colored women.” The NAACP defense team, which included Charles H. Houston, Leon A. Ransom, and Thurgood Marshall, appealed this case to the Supreme Court.

The NAACP, guided by Charles Houston, led a jury service campaign in the 1930s that produced two successful Supreme Court decisions, one nationally publicized case, and a model litigation strategy for other black defendants. In these cases the overt contestations over the existence of racial inequality between the NAACP defenses and the state prosecutions relied on interconnected racialized and gendered understandings of criminality, victimization, and citizenship and reaffirmed jury service as a masculine duty.