A Lesson before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines: Depiction of Injustice Against The Black Population

Ernest J. Gaines wrote a powerful novel, A Lesson Before Dying, based in a small-town Cajun Louisiana in the 1940’s. Gaines tells a story about a young African American male, Jefferson, who was wrongfully convicted of a crime and is sentenced to death. He portrays how the legal system shows injustice against the black population through his story. Behind the justice system, it’s always presumed that colored people are criminals due to prejudice.

In the courtroom, both attorneys take a stance that only dehumanizes Jefferson, which makes him lose his dignity as a man. His defense attorney claims that he is less than a man because of his physical characteristics and his lack of intelligence. Jefferson spent his entire life on a plantation, working for poor wages. He did everything he could without any problems, because he always believed that he was low status. The prosecutor believed that Jefferson and his friends, who were African American, had the intention to rob and kill the Mr. Grope so that he couldn’t identify them. Then he continued to say that when Mr. Grope was dead and his friends were dead, he compared Jefferson to an animal because he didn’t care that there were dead bodies around him and didn’t call the police, instead he stuffed money into his pockets and celebrated by drinking. Jefferson’s’ attorney defended him by insisting he is a boy, hog, and a fool, proving that he is incapable of committing a robbery and murder. However, the white jurors were not siding with Jefferson from the start. The judge was white, the lawyers were white, and all the members of the jury were white. Jefferson was being tried in a community full of white people that robbed him of his legal rights. His lawyer pleads for his innocence through white prejudice, rather than going through the evidence. Therefore, it came down to the fact how the judge had no mercy on the legality of the situation, by sentencing him death by electrocution.

Miss. Emma, the god mother of Jefferson, is distraught of the charges brought against Jefferson. She hated the fact how the prosecutor, called her god-son a “hog” and not a man. However, she could not do anything about the situation because she did not have much of an education or money. So, she went to her nephew, Grant, to ask him to go teach Jefferson on how to be a man before he dies. Grant is an elementary school teacher, who went off to school to get a degree. However, before they can do that, they had to go to the Henri Pichot’s house to get permission from his brother in-law, whom is the sheriff. Miss. Emma was once a slave cook for the Pichot’s family and did a lot for them in the past. More than anything Miss. Emma felt as if the Pichot family owed her the favor of getting Jefferson the right education before he dies. Being an uneducated African American slave, Miss. Emma wasn’t able to provide Jefferson with the proper resources to receive an education, let alone in a community full of African Americans who didn’t know how to read or write or know what’s right from wrong.

Black males that are convicted of a crime primarily come from low socio-economic hardship and low education level. In 2005, 65% black males were high school dropouts and by the time they were in their twenties they were jobless or incarcerated. Black male unemployment rates from twenty-year olds to older risen from 15.4% to 17.2%. Race, gender, and age are important when it comes to criminal punishment against young black males. There are widely held stereotypes about African Americans, that ultimately increase due to the fact they are crime prone or dangerous, which gives them a disadvantage. The judges are more likely to sentence them to more server sanctions than whites.

However, it does not change how African Americans are still living in Jim Crow in the justice system. Alexander claims that mass incarceration of the black population is through war on drugs which replaces Jim Crow laws. The justice system continues to exercise direct discrimination against black people, more so black men, through colorblindness. People fail to see that colorblindness denies racism in the American society. Through the justice system, colorblindness always finds a way to intervene of the incarceration process from policing, to legal deliberations, and life after prison. Black men are more likely to get stopped and searched, which is disproportionate compared with white people. This type of encounter targets and punishes African Americans: 20 to 50 times black men are likely to be imprisoned on drug charges. The total of African Americans that are in prison or jail, probation or parole is greater than the total number is slaves in 1850.

In an article, White Racism, Black Crime, and American Justice, Robert Staples says that the legal system is built by white men to protect white men interest and keep the blacks down. Criminalization against young black men is treated unfairly in the justice system. They face harsh sentencing when it comes to their socio-economic status and education level, which leaves them to settle for what the judge decides. The people that would find this paper significant is the black lives matter movement and all black men activist that are trying to educate the young men in the generation to keep them out of jail.

References

1. Moore, R. (2017). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. Macat Library.
2. Gaines, E. J. (2009). A Lesson Before Dying. Stuttgart: Klett Sprachen.
3. Steffensmeier, D., Ulmer, J., & Kramer, J. (1998). The interaction of race, gender, and age in criminal sentencing: The punishment cost of being young, black, and male. Criminology, 36(4), 763-798.
4. Ladson Billings, G. (2011). Boyz to men? Teaching to restore Black boys’ childhood. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(1), 7-15.
5. Costly, A. (n.d.). The Color of Justice. Retrieved from https://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/the-color-of-justice.html