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"It is my conviction, based on much study of the black people, that a considerable part of them will be found very well fitted for the more serious duties of citizenship, and that, with fit help in education and incentive, somewhere near half of them can be uplifted to a plane where they will contribute to the quality of the state. Of the remainder, the most that can be hoped is that they will make useful laborers. In this lower group there is a remnant, probably not five per cent of the whole black population, which retains so much of the primitive brute that it cannot be turned to account. It is from this very small part of the folk that comes the class of outrages which constitute the real menace of the situation. It is doubtful if the proportion of this primitively brutal element of the Negro population exceeds much, if at all, the corresponding degenerate and otherwise base material in the whites, but it seems probable that it is more inclined to crimes against the person, particularly to assaults on women. Naturally these atrocities excite rage, but this is often visited unreasonably on the unoffending body of the blacks, who, if in close social contact with the whites, are, as is well proved by the history of the people in slavery, no more given to such offenses than those of our own race. It would be quite as reasonable to condemn the English stock for the offenses of its criminals as to condemn the Negroes as a whole for such crimes, which probably do not occur in one in ten thousand of that people, and in only the lowest part of the very mixed stock. Here, as in our own race, this class of malefactors should be weeded out. There is good reason why assailants of women should receive the highest punishment of the law,-that they may not propagate their kind; but there is no reason whatever for allowing these miscreants to prejudice our conduct towards a valuable body of folk who are akin to them only in the color of their skins.” 11

Better training of the Negro's head and hand will go far to reduce his volume of crime. A Virginia lawyer said before a Hampton Negro Conference:

"During my nine years' practice at the bar, I cannot recall one case where any Negro of fair intelligence committed a crime. Of 176 prisoners in the city jail of Richmond, not one has had a thorough education. Nearly all have had a smattering of learning. None are carpenters, bricklayers, tailors, or masters of any particular trade or calling. The possession of some useful trade or calling is a preventive of crime among Negroes.

"Shaler, op. cit., pp. 334-6.

"Of the 2091 prisoners in the Virginia State Penitentiary on May 1, 1909, 1736 were colored. Comparatively few possess any useful trade or occupation. Indeed only 384 of the whole number could read and write." 12

"Southern Workman, Sept., 1909, p. 475.

CHAPTER 16

THE LYNCHING PRACTICE IN THE SOUTH

Its Origin and Present Tendency-The Kinds of Crime Which Provoke Lynchings-Decline in Cases of Rape and in Number of Lynchings-Effort to Repress Lynchings by Educating Public Sentiment and by Raising the Cultural Status of Both Races

OR the punishment of serious crimes such as rape or homicide, the white mob in the South has frequently resorted to lynching. The habit of lynching in the South, as in the West, has grown out of the scattered nature of the population, and the remoteness of the average citizen from the arm of the law. In a big city one's first thought, upon witnessing or hearing of a serious crime, is to call for the police. In the scattered population of rural regions where there is no police, and the nearest sheriff is perhaps fifty miles off, one's first impulse is to grab his gun and go after the criminal. The people of the South still live mostly scattered over vast areas or in small towns, and that is the chief reason why some of the people keep up the lynching habit. When the South comes to be made up of densely populated cities, an act of lynching will be as rare in the South as in any other section of the country. Not only is the practice of lynching favored by a sparsely settled country without effective police, but such a country is apt to have the kind of people who commit the kind of crime which provokes the lynchings. In regions where population is scattered and unpoliced there are exceptional opportunities and temptations for people criminally disposed, and the crimes which they commit arouse the passions of the good people to an extent that would be impossible in a dense population where the stimulation to the passions is more frequent and diversified. The American lynching habit, we should remember, did not originate in the South, but rather in the West. As population pushed westward, it was always a little ahead of the arm of the law, and the settlers who had life and property to protect often found it expedient to deal with criminals in an extra-legal fashion. Lynching for manslaughter or for horse or cattle stealing came to be very common. According to Bancroft, "Out of 535 homicides which occurred in Cali

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fornia during the year 1855, there were but seven legal executions and forty-nine informal ones." During the period when lynchings were common in the West they were very rare in the South. Under the régime of slavery in the South the Negroes were so strictly disciplined that they had little opportunity to commit serious crimes. Among the white people scattered through the Piedmont and Mountain regions there was much fighting and shooting, but revenge was a matter for the individual and rarely for the mob. From 1839 to 1840 the Liberator mentions only one Negro who was put to death by a mob.2 From 1855 to 1856 there were only six lynchings in the South-two for rape and four for murder. Two of those lynched were white men-one in Texas for stealing Negroes and one in Missouri for poisoning a spring.3 Collins was able to find record of only two cases of lynching in the South during the Civil War, and in neither case was the victim charged with rape.*

Lynchings came to be common in the South soon after the Civil War. They were provoked by the crimes committed by the Negro and by the failure of the state governments to protect the persons and property of the white people. During the Reconstruction period, the best white people being disfranchised, the government of the states fell into the hands of Negroes, carpet-baggers, and scalawags, and, while the white people were subjected to every kind of outrage, including the wholesale burning of their homes and barns, they had no redress through the law. A Negro jury would not convict Negro criminals for an offense against a white man. So bad was the situation in Edgefield, South Carolina, that the citizens passed resolutions stating that there was "no security for persons or property, for the Negroes and poor whites who act with them had a majority on every jury so that it was impossible to convict one of their number no matter how plain the evidence. And even if convicted he was promptly pardoned by the infamous executive, Moses. To such an extent was this carried that Carpenter, the Republican Judge of the circuit, announced that he would not permit the State to be put to the expense of trying criminals who were pardoned as soon as convicted." 5

'Quoted by Collins, The Truth About Lynching and the Negro in the South, p. 24.

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According to statistics compiled from the New York Times for the three years 1871-73, there were seventy-five lynchings in that time. The Negro Year Book, 1912, gives the number of lynchings in 1882 as 114, in 1883 as 134, in 1884 as 211. The following is the record of lynchings in the United States since 1884, according to the Chicago Tribune:

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