How One Newark Teen's Not-So-Excellent Adventure Bruised The Jim Crow South of the 1930's

David Kraft was bored. A freshman at Newark’s Central High School, he apparently had had enough of the hum-drum life of a city kid. He needed to bust out, to see the world, to have an adventure. To his credit, he lasted in school for the first half of the 1932-33 academic year, but then Christmas Break came. With time on his hands, he planned his “escape” from the Brick City for a more exciting life, or at least, an audacious episode. Like many young people in this more so-called innocent age, Kraft made his way out of town by hitching rides. He sought a sunnier climate than the New Jersey winter, and headed South.

At first, all went according to plan. Kraft threaded his way through New Jersey, Delaware and the lengths of Virginia and North Carolina. Not exactly “progressive” states, but not the “Deep South,” either. But then he crossed a line that mattered, really mattered, at December’s end. He was a young, unemployed teen journeying far away from his Northern home, and he had crossed a boundary too far. He had crossed into South Carolina.

South Carolina was about the last place than any penniless out-of-town northerner (of any color) wanted to be in the early 1930's. This was a state where the Confederate Flag flew over the State Capitol in Columbia. This was a state that, well into the 1960’s, kept an overwhelming majority of its black and poor white population in a condition of endless penury and peasant-hood. In South Carolina, like most other “conservative” Southern states, Jim Crow stood strong, and had since the departure of occupying Union troops in the 1870’s.

States like South Carolina trapped African-Americans (and many lower class, working whites) in a complex web of elite white supremacy enforced by law, custom and blatant illegal violence. Though blacks and poverty-stricken whites were technically “free” there in the 1930’s, poll taxes, impossible literacy tests, long residency requirements and voter disqualification laws for minor convictions kept them from voting. Segregation, as we all know, ruled the land. Blacks were forced into their own urban and rural ghettoes, wood shack schools, treated in barren hospitals and forced to the backs of trains and trolleys. The same voting laws kept them from sitting on juries, and in most of the state the only seat in any courthouse reserved for a black man was that of the accused. White-on-black crimes, typically committed in the same of racial regulation, were rarely if ever investigated, and even more seldom prosecuted. But even with all of these laws, there was one danger that, on a daily basis loomed over every teenage and adult poor man. It wasn’t abstract and it wasn’t sporadic. It was facing arrest for no reason at all, for being poor, for standing around, or for what southern authorities throughout the former Confederate states called “vagrancy.”

Vagrancy laws were really a tripwire for poor (mostly black) southern men, meant push them into a state of slavery – or worse – hapless, endless, humiliating and debilitating punishment. Vagrants were typically arrested and brought into court, “convinced” to plead guilty, and fined. Being too poor to pay, steep fines ($10 or more) would then have to be “worked off” either through a state-approved contractor (neo-slave-owner) or by being hauled to a form of Hell itself. That Hell wasn’t prison, either. It was the chain gang, and it was a real and present danger. It was this nightmare that grabbed a young David Kraft of Newark, New Jersey by the neck in early 1933. It turned his adventure, his flight from boredom into a dramatic struggle against racial and economic injustice, physical abuse and state-sponsored criminality.  

Let’s get back to the young man, David Kraft. Kraft had spent New Year’s Eve in Greenville, South Carolina. Sometime before midnight he was arrested by local authorities and charged with vagrancy. Much like a young Emmet Till, a black teen murdered two decades later in Mississippi, Kraft had no idea of the immediate, mortal danger facing him.  

The Newark teen was hauled into court and “counseled” by some adult present – we don’t know if it was a lawyer, or the judge himself – to plead guilty, which he promptly did. His sentence was either to pay an enormous $10 cash fine (more than a week’s wage of the time) or spend a month in jail. Being broke, and probably thinking that sitting around for a month wasn’t the end of the world, Kraft entered into one of the harshest and most perilous historical environments of the 20th century: the South Carolina penal system.

What Kraft described next later horrified readers in the North. The 14-year-old was forced into prison stripes and shackled at all times like a convicted mass murderer, though his only crime was standing around and being broke. Along with dozens of others he was taken to work on various county roads and labored without pay or meaningful rest from 5 a.m. to sundown. At times Kraft became so physically ill he could not continue, only to face the disfiguring lash at the hands of his sadistic guards. Somehow he was able to get a letter out to his parents back in Newark and within a few days his father sent him the money to pay his fine and his bus fare to Washington, D.C. Once there, David he met up with his father who then brought him home to freedom, to Newark.

Kraft’s story was immediately published in papers nationwide. The Associated Press quickly dispatched a reporter to Greenville. Once there, the reporter interviewed the convicting Magistrate, L. Cooley, and the county “Supervisor of Chain Gangs” (and certainly, local S.O.B.) J. Ed Means. The judge claimed that he had never been told of Kraft’s actual age and that Kraft had never used his real name. Means also denied any whippings, though he did admit, perhaps with some measure of professional pride, that he had instituted a “sweat box” where “unruly prisoners” were sent to cool off.

Not being satisfied with the explanation of the “unbiased” authorities, a reporter then interviewed another former prisoner. The man not only confirmed Kraft’s experience but actually spoke of much worse conditions for African-Americans, whereby sadistic guards had extorted bribes from black prisoners to avoid beatings and lashings.

By mid-year papers all over the nation were publishing stories about the plight of “vagrants.” Clearly embarrassed at the unwanted exposure, many southern governors ordered investigations, and some localities claimed to stop the chain gang practice altogether. But there was little real progress made, and Jim Crow’s harsh burden on Southern blacks and underprivileged whites continued unabated until the well-publicized Till murder in 1955. But that was a different time in history. In 1933 there was no television. African-Americans (and poor whites) in the South had little access to instant, private communications like the telephone, which proved instrumental in all organizing efforts during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s.     

Though this story ended somewhat well for the once-adventurous Freshman of Central High, who did escape with his life, the nightmare of Jim Crow would take the efforts and many lives of voting organizers, freedom riders, protesters and others before vagrancy laws were finally repealed. Still, Newark’s wandering David Kraft deserves our thanks for (eventually) thinking smart under pressure and publicizing the South’s brutal way of life and punishment decades before the efforts of King and countless others.