Race: Black
Sex: Male
Crime: Assault [with] Intent to Ravish
Verdict: Guilty
This is how Cousin James is described in the July 14, 1930, court records from Edgefield, South Carolina. Some full names have been left off throughout this piece in order to protect people’s identities. The records omit his age, but James was 13 years old at the time. According to the handwritten documents, James “pleads guilty” to “intent to ravish”—a euphemism for rape. According to my mother, Bernice, her cousin had no other choice but to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit.
How did this happen?
The first thing you need to know about the case is this: Merdis S. was a White girl of about 8 years of age when James came to work for her father as a field hand at a farm in Edgefield.
Why, you might rightly ask, was a 13-year-old boy working in the fields and not in school? Well, first, let me tell you, dear reader, about the South Carolina James knew.
English settlers founded the first permanent colony in present-day South Carolina with enslaved Africans brought from Barbados in 1670. The town of Edgefield was founded in 1785, shortly after the American Revolution. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Edgefield’s economic dependence on slavery had made it into the center of South Carolina’s cotton production. By 1917, when James was born, Edgefield, like the rest of the U.S. South, was amid the Jim Crow era that legislated racial segregation from the late 1870s to the start of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s.
Public education, though segregated, existed throughout the South as fruit of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). But Black boys like James were often taken out of school, even earlier than Black girls, to be hired out to, and sometimes live on, White families’ farms. The wages were arranged by the adults.
James’ father, Ben (my mother’s father’s brother), was a sharecropper who exchanged his and his children’s labor for a portion—ideally, but rarely, half—of the White landowner’s income from the crop’s yield. Uncle Ben’s family depended on James’ wages, especially during lean winter months.
Another thing you need to know: James was born just one year before the death of Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, a fellow Edgefieldian who was reelected as both state governor and U.S. senator. Tillman unapologetically championed white supremacy. He boasted about rewriting the State Constitution by “calmly, deliberately, and avowedly” revising it to disenfranchise Black residents under the law. Tillman also said he would “willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro [sic] who had committed an assault upon a White woman.”