"To Get Their Labor For Nothing" Criminal Courts And Jim Crow In Tarrant County, Texas: 1887-1908

Abstract

The county jail records reveal that Tarrant County Jim Crow was a function of custom and thoroughly institutionalized as a matter of public policy by 1890, before the Texas state legislature required separate railroad coaches for blacks and whites in 1891. Chapter 1 explores Tarrant County's founding as a slave jurisdiction, the county's support of the Confederacy, and the county's post Civil War success in segregating blacks. Chapter 2 describes the machinery of county law enforcement and analyzes the county jail records between 1887 and 1890 using modern statistical methods. The analysis demonstrates that whites used the county court system to incarcerate black citizens because of their race and for their labor, justifying an inference of discrimination using twenty first century federal civil rights legal principles. Chapter 3 analyzes the Tarrant County jail records between 1906 and 1908, which reveals that disproportionate incarceration of African Americans continued into the early twentieth century.