The figures show that while the number of lynchings has steadily declined the proportion of Negro victims has steadily increased. Of these 4,203 lynchings only sixty white victims and only 802 Negro victims were charged with rape or attempted rape. Four-fifths of the lynchings were for causes other than rape.

The states ranking highest in total lynchings for the period 18891924 are as follows:

The falling off in the number of rapes and also in the number of lynchings speaks well for the moral progress of both the Negroes and the whites.

Frank Tannenbaum thinks that lynching is the outcome of the monotonous and dull life of the people of the rural districts and small towns. In Northern and Western towns the people have more varied and satisfying interests. They are more literate, have more libraries, and read more; they have better roads and have more opportunities for getting together. In the South the people of the towns are more isolated, more illiterate, read less, and see less of the world. "It is this dead monotony which makes occasional lynching possible. The white people are as much the victim of the lynching-morally, probably more so, as is the poor negro who is burned. They are starved emotionally. They desperately crave some excitement, some

interest, some passionate outburst. People who live a full and varied life do not need such sudden and passionate compensations; but those whose daily round never varies, whose most constant state is boredom, must find some outlet or emotional distortion.

"Something happens; a rumor is spread about town that a crime. has been committed. The emotions seize upon this, other people are in a state of frenzy before they know what has taken possession of them. Their thwarted impulses become the master of the situation. The emotional grip is unrelenting. Men and women are transported from a state of comparative peace into one of intense excitement. The lynching takes place not because the people enjoy it, but because the passions, the shouting, the running, the yelling, all conspire to give the starved emotions a full day of play. What happens is that instead of planning a lynching for the sake of the excitement the excitement determines the lynching, and the people who commit it are the victims. . . . The outburst victimizes the population, and is only a cruel compensation for many months of starved existence." "

The Tennessee Law and Order League, under the leadership of Dr. Edwin Mims of Vanderbilt University, and the Mississippi Welfare League, directed by Mr. J. C. Wilson, Mr. Alfred Stone, and Senator Percy, have done much in the way of arousing interest in behalf of suppressing mobs and bringing about a better administration of law.

Several Southern states have passed laws especially designed to suppress lynching. In 1920 Alabama passed a law empowering the Governor to employ a special force of not over thirty men as state law enforcement officers, vested with the authority of sheriffs, whose duty is to suppress mobs and bring members of mobs to justice.

A Kentucky law of 1920 makes the penalty for lynching death or life imprisonment, and authorizes the Governor to remove from office any officer who permits a prisoner to be taken from his custody by a mob.

An act of the North Carolina Legislature of 1921 empowers a judge before whom a criminal is indicted to transfer the trial to another county.

In 1921 West Virginia passed a law making participation in a mob equivalent to murder and imposing a fine of $5,000 on any county in which a lynching occurs. The anti-lynch law of South Carolina makes liable to damages any county in which any citizen is injured

in life or property by a mob.

Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South, p. 26.

As an evidence that the South is moving in the direction of better law-enforcement, the following facts should be noted. According to the records compiled by the Department of Research of Tuskegee Institute there were sixty-four instances in 1921 in which officers of the law prevented lynchings in the Southern states. In six instances armed forces were used to repel mobs. In Kentucky, in 1920, the state troops fired into a lynching mob and killed several white participants.

It is also to be noted that persons guilty of mob action are being more frequently convicted and punished. In 1921, four men in Wayne County, North Carolina, were convicted of mob action and sentenced to four years in prison. At Jonesboro, Tennessee, fourteen men were indicted for storming a jail and three were convicted and sentenced to prison for three years. At Houston, Virginia, four men were indicted for attempting to take a prisoner from jail. One of them was sentenced to one year in jail and a fine of $5,000.

In South Carolina, the widow of a Negro who had been lynched brought suit against the county in which the lynching occurred and was awarded a verdict of $2,000 damages.

The fact that lynching is on the decline, and that more effective laws are being enacted to curb the mob is, of course, gratifying, but this fact should not lead us to view the problem of lynching with complacency. The number and character of the lynchings which continue to take place constitute the greatest blot on the character of the American people, and especially on the character of the people of the Southern states where lynching is most prevalent. To a great extent lynching destroys the influence of the United States among the other nations of the world, especially in reference to moral questions in which our nation aspires to lead. When Turkish fanaticism starves, exiles, or massacres Christian people in Armenia, or when rubber exploiters practice abominable cruelties upon the natives of the Congo or the Putomayo, or when Russian pogroms result in the wholesale slaughter of Jews, what does our admonition or protest amount to, when the authorities responsible for these atrocities are able, and invariably do, fling back at us our barbarous record of lynching?

Lynching is an advertisement to the world that the people of the United States are incapable of self-government, for no people can be said to have the capacity for self-government who are unable to provide a legal redress for every wrong, or to defend the laws of their own making.

Lynching deters neither the Negro nor the white man from crime, but, by the spirit of lawlessness which it disseminates, incites more crime among both races.

If there are some signs that public sentiment in our nation, or in any state, is awakening to the enormity of the lynching practice, the considerable extent to which that practice still goes on, is sufficient evidence that public sentiment is not half enough awake. In the Southern states the press generally speaks out strongly against lynching after an instance of it has occurred, and various organizations of good people occasionally express profound indignation against the evil, but there is a general lack of organized propaganda directed to building up a public sentiment strong enough to be felt as a restraining influence in every community. For illustration, I have been a pretty regular attendant at some Sunday service of a Southern church for many years, and, while I have heard denunciations of nearly every sin to which human nature is susceptible, I have never heard from the pulpit one utterance against lynching. To judge Southern clergymen by the themes for their sermons, one would suppose that they did not regard lynching as comparable to the sin of dancing, playing cards, or going to a theater. It may be that some clergymen have thundered against lynching, and I have no doubt that clergymen generally, like other good people in the South, condemn the practice and desire to see it stamped out, but my observation convinces me that they have not yet visualized lynching as a vital problem. There ought to be a civic organization in every Southern city, and this, in coöperation with the churches, schools, and clubs, should launch periodic propaganda in behalf of law and order.

CHAPTER 17

OTHER OUTRAGES UPON NEGROES

Assaults on Negroes by White Mobs-Destruction of Property-Expulsion from the Country-Influence of the Ku Klux-Race Riots

THE

HE white mobs, when not engaged in lynching, frequently commit outrages upon the Negro of a less drastic but equally cruel and unjust character. They inflict bodily injury upon him, destroy his property, deprive him of the opportunity to work, and in some cases drive him out of the country. The class of white people who do these wrongs to the Negro are the class who lead the lynchings. They are generally small landholders, tenants in rural districts and, in the towns, small proprietors and casual wage workers. Because of their low economic status they closely approximate the Negro in' illiteracy and standard of living, and they often find the Negro a competitor. The prosperity of the Negro excites their envy, and having to compete with him arouses their resentment. They pride themselves on their antipathy to the Negro, vie with each other in the number of grievances they have against him, and are ever ready to settle matters by the methods of the bully.

To mention a few illustrations: In a certain county in Georgia the white people, who did not want a Negro neighbor, wrote a letter to the white owner of the tenant house saying, "You had better keep negroes out of this house of yours; if you don't everything you have got will be burned down to the ground." In another county a white mob sent a note to the foreman of a gang of Negro railway workers, stating: "that if they (the Negroes) continued to work, while white men wanted jobs, they (the foreman and Negroes) would be mobbed."?

In many of the Mountain counties of the South, where slavery has never existed, the white people have tried to keep the Negroes out entirely. In several instances where Negroes have invaded these counties the white mob has burnt their churches, schools, and homes.

'Dorsey's pamphlet, sec. C.

Idem. 'Idem.