Racial Bias and Institutional Racism

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year old African American boy who was murdered in Money, Mississippi after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Since he was from the north, he did not know that he was not allowed to talk to a white woman in the south. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great uncle’s house. They took the boy away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. Roy and Milam were acquitted of murder because of the all-white, all-male Mississippi jury. At the same time, Sheriff Strider booked Levi "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Lee Loggins into the Charleston, Mississippi jail to keep them from testifying. Both were black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.'s brother, in whose shed Till was beaten. Therefore, racial bias effects jurors’ ability to give an impartial trial.
As early as 1879, the United States Supreme Court, in Strauder v. West Virginia, loudly denounced the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from jury pools, finding that the practice violated the constitution, but state officials resisted its finding. The US Supreme Court has had to reapply the same basic principles to stop many state schemes designed to preclude Blacks from participating on grand juries, petit juries or both. In ...

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...s the difficulty proving it to the court that race was a factor in excluding the juror. Psychologically, we cannot expect jurors to be unbiased because we are human beings, so we cannot prevent them from thinking and judging the person in trial. We, human beings judge people by the way they look, talk, and what they wear. In addition, when we have majority white jurors in the jury panel, then we succumb to peer pressures and play “follow the leader.” The environment of racial “norm” is created, resulting in racial bias by the jurors. This “normative” racial attitude cloud jurors’ judgments, so they will make race driven decision. White jurors’ bias is more dangerous than the bias demonstrated by the jurors of a minority group because White jurors are superior in number. Therefore, racial bias does effect and cloud jurors’ ability to give an impartial and just trial.