TWELVE GOOD MEN AND TRUE

If Lawyer Leibowitz brought to public attention an already well-known fact, Judge Lowell, sure of a share of the encomium which has been enthusiastically bestowed upon the denouncer of Alabama justice, has gone out of his way to keep the issue on the front page by releasing a Virginia negro facing extradition. While there is obviously much truth in his description of the farcical Southern trial system, Judge Lowell's faith in "Yankee commonsense" is only aggravating a situation which cannot be ameliorated by such a display of Northern sentiment, judicial or otherwise.

While criticism of the Southern courts is not to be scorned, the intensity of racial feeling in the region of the black belt precludes any solution which the northern reformers have to offer. Judge Lowell and the exponents of open-eyed justice seem to forget, like the Republicans of the Reconstruction Era, that race feeling by no means applies to whites alone. On this issue, no compromise is possible. Mixed juries will result in innumerable disagreements regardless of the defendant's guilt or race; all the terrorism which has blighted the tradition of the South must recur with undiminished zeal. An even greater degree of injustice is a high price to pay for the conversion of nominal rights into real rights, if their exercise is more than ineffectual.

It is argued that a negro defendant should be tried by a jury entirely of his own race; it is conceivable that these jurors would be competent enough. Nevertheless this plan would have to combat all the prejudice and hatred of the South. Clearly the only way to achieve Judge Lowell's idea of a more equitable justice for the persecuted race is not to antagonize with embittered criticism, but to educate gradually, with constructive suggestions.