As National Police Week 2025 concludes, it’s appropriate to reflect on a summary that captures the fates of Black and white South Carolinians, nearly all of them men, who were either accused of, or indicted and tried for, the killing of a Jim Crow law enforcement officer whose name adorns the marble walls of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in DC’s Judiciary Square.

When considering these outcomes, we might bear in mind the cogent observation of historian Barbara Fields that “racial justice” has long denoted what southern segregationists believed appropriate for Black people.

Statistics can numb us to the individuals and groups they aim to reify but aid in making crystal clear how effectively “racial justice” worked in Jim Crow South Carolina. Of eighty-one Black defendants caught up in alleged law enforcement killings between 1896 and 1951, forty-five, or 55 percent, died as the result of the encounter, whether killed by the officer or from sustained wounds (seven), a posse (four plus the wife of one), hanging (ten), electrocution (nineteen), or lynching (five).

A remarkable showing by court-appointed defense attorneys saved another ten from electrocution, while thirteen received life sentences in the penitentiary or on the chain gang, and five served lesser sentences for manslaughter. (A guard shot and killed one of those, the teenaged son of a Charleston undertaker, shortly after his arrival at the gruesome state farm in Sumter County.) Eight Black men escaped altogether, suggesting their intimate knowledge of the terrain and/or network of family and allies willing to smuggle them out of state. Not a single Black man in Jim Crow South Carolina ever received an acquittal on the charge of killing a law enforcement officer.

By contrast, of the seventy-five white men involved in police killings, twenty-seven, or 36 percent, received acquittals from their all-white male juries; three cases were nol-prossed; eighteen, or 24 percent, died in the altercation or from sustained wounds; twelve received life sentences; twenty-two were sentenced for manslaughter, and two escaped.

Most white men were quickly paroled or pardoned, while Black men served long periods of incarceration. Three white people received commuted death sentences from the governor but six were electrocuted, all for the stabbing death of the penitentiary superintendent in December 1937. An uproar over the sentences captivated the capital city of Columbia for months, eliciting condemnation of the excessive punishment for the action of the single murderer.

Pleas for commutation fell on the deaf ears of Governor Olin Dewitt Johnston, father of National Police Week. Thus has South Carolina bequeathed an abhorrent legacy to the nation, much at the behest of its Jim Crow police establishment.

As his second term wound down, Governor Johnston voiced his full-throated support for the convictions and death sentences of the six white men held responsible for the superintendent’s murder, even though each was already serving a prison sentence and only one wielded the knife that killed him. Appeals delayed their executions until March 24, 1939, just weeks after Johnston left office. In a breath-taking 48 minutes, the electric chair dispensed with their lives, tying for the second time the national record previously set by South Carolina for the largest number of people executed in a single day.

(Note: Unlike their white counterparts, the six Black men put to death on February 27, 1931, had no lawyers to appeal their sentences. In less than two months after the conclusion of their show trials, they died in a serial electrocution that occupied one hour and 45 minutes. To its credit, the Columbia Record denounced the execution as “wholesale legal slaughter.” These men were not convicted of killing a law enforcement officer, but as in all Jim Crow capital cases, the police played a crucial role in securing their death sentences.)

In June 1944, as American GIs stormed the beaches of Normandy, Johnston crowned a repugnant record of sending mentally incompetent Black youth to the electric chair by thumbing his nose at the national outcry over the scheduled electrocution of 14-year-old George Junius Stinney, Jr, a frail Black youth and youngest victim of American capital punishment. Convicted in less than 10 minutes by an all-white jury in a rural Clarendon County show trial, Stinney’s death sentence rested on circumstantial evidence and the blatant lies of law enforcement that he bludgeoned to death two young white girls to rape the dead body of one, despite there being no forensic evidence of sexual violation.

Johnston repeated those lies to justify his denial of clemency. To a woman who pleaded that he spare the child’s life, he wrote, “It may be interesting for you to know that Stinney killed the smaller girl to rape the larger one. Then he killed the larger girl and raped her dead body. Twenty minutes later he returned and attempted to rape her again, but her body was too cold.”

In 2014, Judge Carmen T. Mullen vacated Stinney’s wrongful conviction after hearing the egregious facts of the case and horrifying testimony from his surviving family.

South Carolina still holds these repugnant records, the deadly legacy of the partnership forged between its apartheid police state, the judiciary, and a legion of baleful politicians. Near the head of that line stands Olin Dewitt Johnston, who, from his perch in the U.S. Senate, gifted us with National Police Week.