SAFEKEEPING: A Linguistic Monument to a Racist Past - Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty

Even the language of criminal punishment is freighted with our nation’s history of injustice. Prisoners awaiting trial are usually held in county jails. But some are moved to the state prison system.

The official term for this type of transfer is SAFEKEEPING. Judges, jailers, and lawyers using this word every day probably have no idea it originated in slavery.

SAFEKEEPING referred to the practice of jailing enslaved runaways until their enslavers paid a reward and collected them.

“I will pay the above reward to any person who will deliver said boy to any jail for safe-keeping so that I can get him.”

The Daily Progress (Raleigh), 1863

After slavery was abolished, SAFEKEEPING described the practice of holding an accused in Raleigh’s state penitentiary, rather than the county jail, to prevent his lynching.

“This last action was made necessary as it is confidentially believed here that a crowd is coming to Fayetteville… tonight thinking the negro is in jail here, to lynch him.”

The Semi-Weekly Messenger (Wilmington), 1907

“… he ran for his life and got away from a mob of white men…. The young Negro… gave himself up… and was taken to Raleigh for SAFEKEEPING…”

The Charlotte News, 1947

SAFEKEEPING is still an official term within the criminal punishment system today, used regularly by judges, sheriffs, lawyers, and prisons.

Next – For Native Americans, First Genocide Then the Death Penalty

Most people know this country was “settled” by Europeans who waged war and subjected Native Americans to genocide. Less well known is how the government has used the death penalty to subjugate and terrorize Native people.

During the Civil War, even as the Union fought to free enslaved Americans, the United States executed nearly 40 members of the Eastern Sioux tribe. Thirty-eight men were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota in December 1862, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The condemned were sentenced to death by a military court following the Dakota War, a battle between European immigrants and Native Americans defending their land.

In North Carolina during the Civil War, Confederate authorities conscripted Native Americans as laborers. Native Americans were forced to work on military fortifications at Fort Fisher in Wilmington, for example. In Robeson County, a Lumbee farmer named Allen Lowry led members of his tribe in resistance to Confederate authorities. Rather than work as forced laborers along the Cape Fear River, the group hid in swamps.

Confederates also suspected Lowry of fomenting rebellion by enslaved Blacks. In March of 1865, as Sherman’s Army neared Robeson County, Allen Lowry and his son William were accused of illegal possession of firearms. After a hasty trial, they were convicted and executed the same day.

Over the next decade, Allen Lowry’s surviving son, Henry Berry Lowry, led a multi-racial guerilla war against powerful whites. The Lowry Gang, made up of Native Americans, Blacks, and whites, raided plantations and distributed food to poor people. They later killed the head of the Ku Klux Klan. The Governor set a bounty on their heads, and by 1872, most if not all of the Lowry Gang were dead at the hands of the military and ...