When somebody starts complaining about the removal of the monuments to armed sedition from the public spaces in the South, you can remind them that they are merely the outward expressions of a commitment to a system of American apartheid, to the habits of bigotry and white supremacy that persist to this day. And then, when this person insists that those habits are parts of a dead past, you can tell them about Louisiana. From The New York Times:

Louisiana is one of only two states in the country allowing a non-unanimous jury to convict a defendant of a felony, and a Louisiana lawmaker says it is time for the practice to end. Sen. J.P. Morrell says the unusual rule is a remnant of the Jim Crow era, stemming from a constitutional convention in 1898 and longstanding efforts to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War. And he wants a change. "This is something that is wholly unnecessary that was born of this fusion of racism and disenfranchisement," he said. "It's a self-defeating, illogical position to have two jurors say 'we don't think he did it,' then prosecutors to say we met our reasonable doubt standard." The New Orleans Democrat has proposed a constitutional amendment to require all 12 jurors in felony cases to agree on a verdict. The measure is gaining steam in the state Capitol.

“Gaining steam.” In 2018. Dr. King’s dream certainly has come true.

Sen. Mack "Bodi" White, a Republican who voted against the bill in committee and in the Senate, said that requiring unanimous juries may lead to more hung juries and costly retrials. Judges often force jurors to continue deliberations for days, making them hash the issues out until holdouts fall in line or a deadlock ends the case with a hung jury. "I know it's different in a jury trial but it's hard to get 12 out of 12 people in these times to just about agree on anything," White said.

Apparently, like decent public schools and national parks, due process is just another thing we can no longer afford.

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The current system goes back to a loathsome event called The Convention of 1898. The purpose of that convention was to re-establish white supremacy and an apartheid political system now that Reconstruction had run its sadly truncated course. Of course, Louisiana had been in a state of open rebellion and white-supremacist terror almost since the day Robert E. Lee rode away from the farmhouse at Appomattox. In 1866, a racist mob attacked a Republican political parade in New Orleans and 150 African-Americans were killed. (Among the rioters were New Orleans policemen and firefighters, as well as a slew of Confederate veterans.) In 1873, 150 black citizens were killed by a white mob in Colfax.

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A year later, a domestic terrorist group called the White League, also largely composed of CSA veterans, many of whom had seen “action” in Colfax, attacked Republican officeholders in a place called Coushatta and overthrew the legitimate government of that parish. They forced white Republican officials to sign promises to leave the state and then killed some of them when they tried. (One man had his arms and legs broken and then was set on fire.) Not long afterwards, the White League launched an unsuccessful coup against the Reconstruction government of New Orleans that culminated in the so-called “Battle For Liberty Place,” in which white-supremacist guerrillas for a time routed a militia force headed by former Confederate general James Longstreet. Chickens roosting and all that. In fact, one of the monuments to sedition removed by the administration of Mayor Mitch Landrieu was a memorial to the “heroes” of Liberty Place. This did not refer to Longstreet and his men.

There were naturally political elements to all this turmoil. Much of the violence of the 1870s was prompted by the election in 1872 of William Pitt Kellogg, a Republican, to be the state’s governor. The Confederate extremists refused to recognize Kellogg’s legitimacy and the state didn’t settle down until President Ulysses S. Grant sent in federal troops to maintain order. And the Colfax massacre resulted in one of the more heinous Supreme Court decisions at the time: the 1876 decision in Cruikshank v. U.S., in which the Court ruled that the participants in the massacre could not be tried under the anti-Klan Enforcement Act of 1870 because the 14th Amendment’s rights of due process and equal protection applied only to state actions, and not to the actions of individuals. This case was central to the rise of white-supremacist terror in Louisiana and elsewhere. In 1883, the Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional.

“Gaining steam.” In 2018.

With all these ducks in a row, and with Plessy v. Ferguson having established the constitutionality of “separate but equal” two years earlier, the Convention of 1898 was called with the express purpose of disenfranchising African-American voters and establishing the legitimacy of Jim Crow government. The state constitution produced by the convention included a poll tax as well as the notorious provisions allowing local registrars to disqualify black voters for not knowing how many beans were in a jar, or being unable to recite a specific passage from the state and federal constitutions. These barriers persisted until the early 1960s.

Also included in the 1898 constitution was the provision calling for non-unanimous verdicts in felony jury trials. A proposal to get rid of that is “gaining steam” here in 20-bloody-18. The statues are gone now, but not all the monuments to a bloody and seditious past are as easily removed.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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