[*"Lynching" 1923*} [*SPEECHES & WRITINGS FILE*] [*[1923]*] Chapter 11 Lynching. The failure of the sixty seventh Congress to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill was the hardest blow which colored people had been dealt for many years. There had been eight years of a Democratic administration in which colored people felt they had been losing ground in every respect. For instance, there had been more humiliating and irritating segregation in the government departments at Washington than there had ever been before. The very atmosphere at the National Capital was heavier with scorn and contempt for the struggling race than it had previously been. And now a Republican president was in the White House, having been placed there by the largest vote which had ever been polled. Congress was Republican by a safe majority, so the hearts of colored people were filled with joy and hope. To be sure, the few political plums which colored men had been in the habit of receiving from the Republican party in the good old days had not been shaken down from the tree to them by Mr. Harding. Naturally there was considerable dissatisfaction thereat. But the political prospects and their friends decided to swallow their disappoinment and chagrin philosophically and it was cheerfully agreed by everybody that individuals should forego political preferment, provided something were done for the race as a whole. Having been helpless victims of violence for so long a large number of colored people worked for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. But the Republican Congress allowed a few Southern Democrats to filibuster this bill to death. The provisions of this bill were as follows: Everybody who is well-informed on the subject of lynching knows that many a colored man who has been accused of assault or murder, or of other violations of the law, and has been tortured to death by a mob, has afterward been proved innocent of the crime with which he was charged. So great is the thirst for the Colored-American's bllod in the South, that but a single breath of suspicion is sufficient to kindle into an all-consuming flame the embers of hatred ever smouldering in the breasts of the fiends who compose a typical mob. When once such a blood-thirsty company starts on a colored man's trail, and the right one can not be found, the first available specimen is sacrificed to their rage, no matter whether he is guilty or not. A white man who died near Charleston, South Carolina, a few years ago confessed on his death bed that he had murdered his wife, although three colored men [were] had been lynched for this crime at Ravenel, South Carolina two years previously. This murder was one of the most brutal ever committed in the State, and the horrible tortures to which the three colored men were subjected indicated plainly that the mob intended the punishment to fit the crime. In August, 1901, three colored people- a mother, her daughter and her son- were lynched in Carollton, Miss, because it was rumored that they had heard of a murder before it was committed, and had not reported it. A colored man was accused of murdering a woman and was lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana, in April 1902, who was afterward proved innocent. Many cases might be easily cited to prove that innocent colored men are frequently lynched. It is not strange, therefore, that even reputable, law-abiding colored people should protest against the tortures and cruelties inflicted by mobs to wreak vengeance upon the guilty and innocent and upon the just and unjust of their race alike. It is to the credit and not to the shame of the Colored-American that he tries to uphold the sacred majesty of the law, which is so often trailed in the dust and trampled under feet by white mobs. In the fourth place, it is well to remember, in discussing the subject of lynching, that it is not always possible to ascertain the facts from the accounts of the newspapers, The facts are often suppressed intentionally or unintentionally, or distorted by the press. The case of Sam Hose to which reference has so often been made, is a good illustration of the unreliability of the press in reporting the lynching of colored men. San Hose, a colored man, murdered Alfred Cranford, a white man, in a dispute over wages which the white employer refused to pay the colored workman, It was decided to make an example of a negro who dared to kill a white man, a well-known, influential newspaper immediately offered a reward of $500 for the capture of Sam Hose. This same newspaper prediceted a lynching, and stated that, though several modes of punishment had been suggested, it was the consensus of opinion that the negro should be burned at the stake and tortured before burned. A rumor was started and circulated far and wide by the press, that Sam Hose had assaulted the wife of Alfred Cranford, after the latter had been killed. One of the best detectives in Chicago was sent to Atlanta to investigate the affair. After securing all the information it was possible to obtain from black and white alike, and carefully weighinh the evidence, this white detective declared it would have been a physical impossibility for the negro to assault the murdered man's wife, and expressed it as his opinion that the charge of assault was an invention intended to make the burning a certainty. The Sunday on which Sam Hose was burned was converted into a holiday. Special trains were made up to take the Christian people of Atlanta, Georgia, to the scene of the burning, a short distance from the city. After the first train moved out with every inch of available space inside and out filled to overflowing, a second had to made up, so as to accommodate those who had just come from church. After Same Hose had been tortured and burned to death, the great concourse of Christians who had witnessed the tragedy scraped for hours among his ashes in the hope of finding a sufficient number of his bones to take to their friends as souvenirs. The charge has been made that Sam Hose boasted to another negro that he intended to assault Alfred Cranford's wife. It would be difficult for anybody who understands conditions in the South to believe that any sane negro would announce his purpose to violate a white woman there, then deliberately enter husband's house, while all the family were present, to carry out his threat. A few years ago a riot occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, in which four white policeman were killed and several wounded by a colored man named, Richardson, who was himself finally burned to death. Through the press the public was informed that the colored man was desperado, As a matter of fact, Richardson was a merchant, well to do and law-abiding. The head and front of his offending was that he dared to reprimand an ex-policeman for living in open adultery with a colored woman. Then it was learned that this negro had been so impudent to a white man, the sheriff led out a posse, consisting of the city police, to arrest Richardson. Seeing the large number of officers surrounding his house, and knowing what would be his fate, if caught, the colored man determined to sell his life dear, and he did. With the exception of the Macon"Telegraph", but few white newspapers ever gave the real cause of the riot, and son Richardson has gone down to history as a black desperado, who shot to death four officers of the law and wounded as many more. Several years ago, near New Orleans, a colored man was at work in a corn field. In walking through the corn he made considerable noise, which frightened a young white woman, who happened to be passing by. She ran to the nearest house, and reported that a negro had jumped at her A large crowd of white men immediately shouldered guns and seized the colored man, who had no idea what it meant. When told why he was taken the man protested that that he had not even seen the girl whom he was accused of frightening, but his protest was of no avail and he was hanged to the nearest tree. The press informed the country that this negro was lynched for attempted rape. Instance after instance might be cited to prove that facts bearing upon lynching, as well as upon other phases of the race problem, are often garbled- without intention, perhaps- by the press. women and children in this country have become so common that such occurrences create but little sensation and evoke but slight comment now. In spite , however , of this general indifference to the savagery of the lynching , there are many who are jealous of their country's fair name and feel eenly the necessity of extirpating this lawlessness which is so widespread and has taken such deep root. But means of prevention can never be devised, until the cause of lynching is more generally understood. The reasons why the whole subject is deeply and seriously involved in error are obvious, Those who live in the section where nine-tenths of the lynchings occur do not dare to tell the truth, even if they perceive it. When men know that the death knell of their aspirations and hopes will be sounded as soon as they express views to which the majority in their immediate vicinage are opposed, they either suppress their views or trim them to ft fit the popular mind. Only martyrs are brave and bold enough to defy the public will, and the manufacture of martyr's in the negro's behalf is not very brisk just now. Those who do not live in the section where most of the lynchings occur borrow their views from their brothers who do, and so the errors are continually repeated and inevitably perpetuated. In the discussion of this subject four mistakes are commonly made. In the first place, it is a great mistake to suppose that rape is the real cause of lunching in the South. Beginning with the Ku Klux Klan immediately after the Civil War, the Negro has been constantly subjected to some form of organized violence ever since he became free. It is easy to prove that lynching is simply the pretext and not the cause of lynching. Statistics show that out of every hundred colored people who are lynched, from seventy five to eighty five are not even accused of this crime, and many who are accused of it are innocent. And yet, men who admit the accuracy of these figures gravely tell the country that lynching can never be supppressed, until colored men cease to commit a crime with which less than one fourth of those murdered by mobs are charged. The prevailing belief that colored people are not tortured by mobs unless they are charged with the "usual" crime, does not tally with the facts. The savagery which attended the lynching of a woman is May 1918 was probably never exceeded in this country or anywhere else in the civilized world. In Brooks County, Georgia a white plantation owner was killed by a tenant with whom he had quareled. The mob which sought to avenge his death could not find the suspected man. They therefore lynched another colored man whose name was Hayes Turner. Mary Turner, his wife, threatened to have members of the mob arrested. The mob, therefore, started after her. She ran home and was found there the next morning. Although she was in the eighth month of pregnancy, several hundred men took her to a small stream, tied her ankles together and hung her head downwards on a tree. After her clothes had been saturated with gasoline, she was set on fire. One of the members of the mob took a knife and split her abdomen open, so that the unborn child fell from her womb to the ground. Then one member of the mob crushed the baby's head with his heel and finally Mary Turner's body was riddled with bullets. The lynching of a man and his wife in March, 1904 might be cited as another proof of the fact that mobs subject colored people to fiendish torture, whether they are charged with the "usual crime" or not. A white planted was murdered at Doddsville, Miss., and a colored man was charged with the crime. The man fled, and his wife who was known to be innocent, fled with him to escape the fate which she knew awaited her, if she remained. The two people were pursued and captured, and the following account of the tragedy by an eye witness appeared in the "Evening Post," a Democratic daily of Vicksburg, Miss. "When the two negroes were captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as a souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holdbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes knocked out with a sick, hung by a shred from a socket. Neither the man nor the woman the woman begged for mercy, nor made a groan or plea. When the executioner cam forward to to lop off fingers, Holbert extended hand without being asked. the most excruciating form of unishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. The instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and woman, in the arms, legs and body and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn. Even this devlish torture did not make the poorbrutes cry out. When finally they were thrown on the fire and allowed to be burned to death, this came as a relief to the mamimed and suffering victims." The North frequently sympathizes with the Southern mob, because it has been led to believe the colored man's diabolical assaults upon white women are the chief cause of lynching. In spite of the facts, distinguished representatives from the South are still insisting, in Congress and elsewhere, that "whenever negroes cease committing the crime of rape, the lynchings and burnings will cease with it." But since three0fourths of the colored people who have met with a violent death at the hands of Southern mobs have not been accused of this crime, it is evident that, instead of being the "usual" crime rape is the most unusual of all the crimes for which colored people are shot, hanged and burned. Although Southern men of prominence still insist that "this crime is more responsible for mob violence that all other crimes combined", it is gratifying to observe that a few of them, at least, are beginning to feel ashamed to pervert the facts. During the past few years, several Southern gentlemen, of unquestioned ability and integrity, have publicly exposed the falsity of this plea. A few years ago in a masterful article on the race problem, Professor Andrew Sledd, at that time an instructor in a Southern college, admitted that only a small number of colored men who are lynched are even accused of assaulting white women. Sid he: "On the contrary, a frank consideration of all the facts, with no other desire than to find the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, however contrary to our wishes and humiliating to our section the truth may be, will show that by far the most of our Southern lynchings are carried through in sheer, unqualified and increasing brutality." But a heavy penalty was paid by this man who dared to make such a frank and fearless statement of facts. He was forced to resign his position as professor, and lost prestige in his section in various ways.. Some years ago Bishop Candler of Georgia made a strong protest against lynching, and called attention to the fact that out of 128 Negroes who had been done to death in 1901, only 16 were even accused of rape. In the second place, it is a mistake to suppose that the colored man's desire for social equality sustains any relation whatsoever to the crime of rape, as some claim. According to the testimony of eye witnesses, as well as the reports of Southern newspapers, colored men who are known to have been guilty of assault have, as a rule, been ignorant, repulsive in appearance and as near the brute creation as it is possible for a human being to be. It is safe to assert that, among the colored me who have been guilty of ravishing white women, not one had been taught that h he was the equal of white people or had ever heard of social equality. And if by chance he had heard of it, he had no clearer conception of its meaning than he had of the principle of the binomial theorem. In conversing with a large number of ignorant colored men, the writer has never found one who seemed to have any idea of what social equality means, or who expressed a desire to put this theory into practice when it was explained to him. Colored men who have been educated in Northern institutions of learning with white men and women, and who for that reason might have learned the meaning of social equality and have acquired a taste for the same, neither assault white women nor commit other crimes, as a rule. A careful review of the facts will show that colored men who have the "convention habit" developed to a high degree, or who are able to earn their living by editing newspapers, do not belong to the criminal class, although such colored men are always held up by Southern gentlemen as objects of ridicule, contempt and scorn. Strange as it may appear, illiterate colored men, who are the only ones contributing largely to the criminal class, are coddled and caressed by the South. To the educated, cultivated members of the race, they are held up as bright and shining examples of what a really good Negro should be. The dictionary is serached in vain by Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen for words sufficiently ornate and strong to express their admiration for the dear old "mammy" or a faithful old"uncle" who can neither read not write, and who assure their white friends they would not, if they could. On the other hand no language is sufficiently caustic, bitter and severe, to express the disgust, hatred and scorn which Southern gentlemen feel for what is called the "New Issue", which, being interpreted, means, colored men who aspire to knowledge and culture, and who have acquired a taste for the highest and best things in life. At the door of this "New Issue" according to writers like Mr. Thomas Nelsen Page, now gone to his reward, the aims and shortcomings of the whole race is laid. This "New Issue" is beyond hope of redemption, we are told, because somebody, nobody knows who, has taught it to believe in social equality, something, nobody knows what. The alleged fear of social equality has always been used by the South to explain its unchristian treatment of colored people and to excuse its many crimes. How many crimes have been committed, and how many falsehoods have been uttered, in the name of social equality by the South? Of all these the greatest is the determination to lay lynching at its door. In the North, which is the only section that accords the colored man the scrap of social equality enjoyed by him in the United States, he is rarely accused of rape. The only form of social equality ever attempted between the two races, and practiced to any considerable extent, is that which was originated by white masters of slave women, and which has been perpetuated by them and their descendants even unto the present day. Of whatever other crime we may accuse the big, black, burly brute, who is so familiar a figure in the reports of rape and lynching-bees sent out by the Southern press surely we cannot truthfully charge him with an attempt to introduce social equality into this republican form of government, or to foist it upon a democratic land. there is no mere connection between social equality and lynching to day that there was between social equality and slavery before the war, or than there is between social equality and the convict-lease system, or any other form of oppression to which the colored man has uniformly been subjected in the South. The third error on the subject of lynching consists of the widely-circulated statement that the moral sensibilities of the best colored men in the United States are so stunted and dull, and the standard of morality among even the leaders of the race is so low, that they do not appreciate the enormity and the heinousness of rape. These who claim to know the Colored American best and to be his best friends declare, that he usually sympathizes with the black victim of mob violence rather than with the white victim of the black fiend's lust, even when he does not go so far as to condone the crime of rape. Only those who are densely ignorant of the standards and sentiments of the best Colored-Americans, or who wish willfully to misrepresent and maliciously to slander a race already resting under burdens greater than it can bear, would accuse its thousands of reputable men and women of sympathizing with rapists, either black or white, or of condoning their crime, the colored preachers and teachers who have had the advantage of education and moral training, together with others occupying positions of honor and trust, are continually expressing their horror of this one particular crime, and exhorting all whom they can reach by voice or pen to do everything in their power to wash the ugly stain of rape from the race's good name. And whenever the slightest pity for the victim of mob violence is expresses by a Colored-American who represents the intelligence and decen of his race, it is invariably because there is a reasonable doubt of his innocence rather than because there is condonation of the alleged crime. What then, is the cause of lynching? At the last analysis, it will be discovered that there are just two causes of lynching. In the first place it is due to race hatred, the hatred of a stronger people toward a weaker who were once held as slaves. In the second place, it is due to the lawlessness so prevalent in the section where nine-tenths of the lynchings occur. Consider the question of lynching from any point of view one may, and it is evident it is just as impossible for the colored people of this country to prevent mob violence by any attitude of mind which they may assume, or any course of conduct which they may pursue, as it is for a straw dam to stop Niagara's flow. Upon the same spirit of intolerance and of hatred the crime of lynching must be fastened as that which called into being the Ku Klux Klan immediately after the Civil War, and which has prompted more recent exhibitions of hostility toward the Colored-American, such as the disenfranchisement acts, the Jim Crow Car Laws, the new slavery called, "peonage", the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan with a renewal of its wicked campaign against the persecuted race together with other acts of oppression which make the lot of its representatives so hard. Lynching is the aftermath of slavery. The white men who shoot colored people to death and flay them alive, and the white women who apply flaming torches to their oil-soaked bodies to day, are the sons and daughters of women who had but little, if any, compassion on the race when it was enslaved. The men who lynch colored men to day are, as a rule, the children of women who sat by their firesides happy and proud in the possession and affection of their own children, while they looked with unpitying eye and adamantime heart upon the anguish of slave mothers whose children had been sold away, when not overtaken by a sadder fate. If it be contended, as it often is that colored people are rarely lynched by the descendants of former slaveholders, it will be difficult to prove the point. According to reports of lynching sent out by the Southern press itself, mobs are generally composed of the "best citizens" of the place, who quietly disperse to their homes as soon as they are certain that the negro is good and dead. The newspaper that predicted Sam Hose would be lynched, which offered a reward for his capture and which suggested burning at the stake, was neither owned nor edited by the poor whites. But if it be conceded that the descendants of slaveholders do not burn and shoot colored people, lynching must still be regarded as the legitimate offspring of slavery. If the children of the poor whites of the South are the chief aggressors in the lynching bees of that section, it is because their ancestors were brutalized by their slaveholding environment. In discussing the lynching of colored people at the present time, the heredity and environment, past and present of white mobs are not taken sufficiently into account. It is impossible to comprehend the cause of the ferocity and barbarity which attend the average lynching bee without taking into account the brutalizing effect of slavery upon the people of the section where most of the lynchings occur, as it is to investigate the essence and nature of fire without considering the gases which cause the flame to ignite. It is too much to expect, perhaps, that the children of women who for generations looked upon the hardships and degradation of their sisters of a darker hue with few if any protests, should have mercy and compassion upon the children of that oppressed race now. But what a tremendous influence for law and order, and what a mighty foe to mob violence Southern white women might be, if they would arise in the purity and power of their womanhood to implore their fathers, husbands and sons no longer to stain their hands with the black man's blood! While the men of the South were off fighting to keep the colored American in bondage, their mothers wives and daughters were entrusted to the black man's care. How faithfully and loyally he kept his sacred trust the records of history attest! Not a white woman was violated throughout the entire war. Can the white women of the South forget how black men bore themselves throughout that trying time? Surely it is not too much to ask that the daughters of mothers who were shielded from harm by the black man's constancy and care should requite their former protectors, by at least asking that, when the children of the latter are accused of crime, they should be treated like human beings and not like wild animals to be butchered and shot. If there were one particularly heinous crime for which an infuriated people took vengenance upon the Colored-American, or if there were a genuine fear that a guilty colored man might escape the penalty of the law in the South, then it might be possible to explain the cause of lynching on some other hypothesis than that of race hatred. It has been already shown that the first supposition has no foundation in fact. It is easy to prove that the second is false. Even those who condone lynching do not pretend to fear the delay or the uncertainty of the law, when a guilty colored man is concerned. With the courts of law entirely in the hands of the white man, with judge and jury belonging to the superior race, a guilty colored man could no more extricate himself from the meshes of the law in the South than he could slide from the devil fish's embrace or slip from the anaconda's coils. Miscarriage of justice in the South is possible only when white men transgress the law. In addition to lynching, the South is continually furnishing proof of its determination to wreak terrible vengance upon the colored man. Not long ago there were shocking revelations of the extent to which the actual enslavement of colored people has been carried under the peonage system of Alabama and Mississippi, and the unspeakable cruelties to which men, women, and children were alike subjected, all of which bear witness to this fact. In January 1904, for instance, a government detective found six colored children ranging in age from six to sixteen years working on a Georg Georgia plantation in bare feet, scantily clad in rags, although the ground was covered with snow. The owner of the plantation is one of the wealthiest men in northeast Georgia, and is said to have made his fortune by holding colored people in slavery. When he was tried, it was shown that the white planter had killed the father of the six children a few years before, but was acquitted of the murder, as almost invariably happens, when a white man takes a colored man's life. After the death of their father the children were treated with incredible cruelty. They were often chained in a room without fire and were beaten till the blood streamed from their backs, when they were unable to do their stint of work. The planter was placed under $5000 bail, but he did not pay the penalty of his crime. Like the children just mentioned hundreds of colored people during the years that have passed since their martyrdom have been and still are groaning under a bondage more crushing and more cruel than that abolished forty years ago. This same spirit manifests itself in a variety of ways. Efforts are constantly making to curtail the educational opportunities of colored children. Already one State has enacted a law by which colored children in the public schools are prohibited from receiving instruction higher than the sixth grade, and other States will, doubtless, follow his lead. It is a well known fact that a few years ago the Governor of a Southern State owed his popularity and his votes to his open and avowed opposition to the education of colored people. Instance after instance might be cited to prove that the hostility toward the Colored-American in the South is bitter and pronounced, and that lynching is but a manifestation of this spirit of vengeance and intolerance in its ugliest and most brutal form. To the widespread lawlessness among the white people of the South lynching is also due. In commenting upon the blood-guiltiness of South Carolina, the Nashville "American" declared some time ago, that, if the killings in the other States had been in the same ratio to population as in South Carolina, a larger number of people would have been murdered in the United States during 1902 than fell on the American side in the Spanish and Philippine wars. Whenever Southern white people discuss lynching, they are prone to slander the Colored-American as a whole. In the January number of the North American Review for 1904 Thomas Nelson Page declared without qualification or reservation that the "crime of rape is well-nigh wholly confined to the negro race.," and insisted that "negroes furnish most of the ravishers." These assertions are as unjust to the Colored-American as they are unfounded in fact. According to statistics only one colored male in 100,000 over five years of age was accused of assault upon a white woman in the South in 1902, whereas one male out of every 20,000 over five years of age was charged with rape in Chicago during the same year. If these figures prove anything at all, they show that the men and boys in Chicago are many times more addicted to rape than are the colored men in the South. Not long ago two white men were arrested in the national capital for attempted assualt upon little children. One was convicted and sentenced to six years in the penitentiary. The crime of which the other was accused was of the most infamous character. A short account of the trial of the convicted man appeared in the Washington dailies, as any other criminal suit would have been reported; but if a colored man had committed the same crime, the newspapers from one end of the United States to the other would have published it broadcast. Editorials upon the total depravity and the hopelesss immorality of the negro would have been written, based upon this particular case as a text. In 1917 in New York County, one of the five counties forming the city of greater New York, 230 persons were indicted for rape, of whom 37 were indicted for rape in the first degree. Among these 37 men there was not a single colored man. With sich facts to prove the falsity of the charge that "the crime of rape is well-nigh wholly confined to the negro race," it is amazing that any writer of repute should affix his signature to such slander. But even if the colored man's morals were as loose and as lax as some claim them to be, and if his belief in the virtue of women were as slight as as we are told, the South has nobody to blame but itself. The only object lesson in virute and morality which the Colored-American received for 250 years came through the medium of slavery, and that peculiar institution was not calculated to se his standards of correct living very high. Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thisltes and more to day than they did whn when the Savior walked among men. Throughout their entire period of bondage colored women were debauched by their masters. From the day they were liberated to the present time, prepossessing young colored girls have been considered the rightful prey of white gentlemen in the South, and they have been protected neither by public sentiment nor by law. In the South, the Colored-American's home is not considered sacred by the superior race. White menaare neither punished for invading it, nor lynched for violating colored women and girls. In discussing this phase of the race poroblem a few years ago, one of the most godly and eloquent ministers in the Methodist Episcopal Church (white) expressed himself as follows: "The negro's teachers have been white. It is from the white man the negro has learned to lie and steal, If you wish to know who taught the negro licentiousness, you have only to look into the faces of thousands of mulatto people and get your answer." When one thinks When one thinks how Africans and the descendants were degraded in slavery, wh which discouraged, when it do not positively forbid, marriage between slaves and considers the bad example set them by white masters upon whom these slaves looked as scarcely lower than the angels, the freedmen's self-control seems almost like a miracle of modern times. In demanding so much of colored people, the South places itself in the anomalous position of insisting that the conduct of the inferior race shall be better, and its standards higher, than those of the people who claim to be superior. The lynching in Springfield, Ohio, the race riots in Chicago and in other cities of the North, show how rapidly this lawlessness is spreading throughout the United States. If the number of Americans who participate in this wild and diabolical carnival of blood does not diminish, nothing can prevent this country from becoming a by-word and a reproach throughout the civilized world. When a few years ago Secretary Hay appealed to Roumania in behalf of the Jews, there were many sarcastic comment made by the press of that country and of other foreign lands about the inhuman treatment of colored people in the United States. I November, 1903, a manifesto signed by delegates from all over the world was issued at Brussels, Belgium, by the Internationalist Socialist Bureau, protesting against the lynching of colored people in the United States. It is a source of deep regret and sorrow to man good Christians in this country that the church puts forth so few and such feeble protests again against lynching. As the attitude of many ministers on the question of slavery greatly discouraged the abolitionists before the war, so silence in the pulpit concerning the lynching of colored people to day plunges many of the persecuted race into deep gloom and dark despair. Thousands of dollars are raised by our churches every year to send missionaries to Christianize the heathen in foreign lands, and this is proper and right, But in addition to this foreign missionary work, would it not be well for our churches to inaugurate a crusade against eh barbarism at home, which converts hundreds of white women, men and children into savages every year, while it crushes the spirit, blights the hearth and breaks the heart of hundreds of defenceless blacks? Not only do ministers fail, as a rule, to protest strongly against the hanging and burning of colored people, but some actually condone the crime without incurring the displeasure of their congregations or invoking the censure of the church. Although the church court which tried the preacher of Wilmington, Delaware, accused of inciting his community to riot and lunching by means of an incendiary sermon, found him guilty of unministerial and unchristian conduct," of advocating mob murder and of thereby breaking down the public respect for the law, yet it simply admonished him to be "more careful in the future," and inflicted no punishment at all. Such indifference on the part of the church recalls the experience of Abraham Lincoln, who refused to join church in Springfield, Illinois, because only three out of twenty-two ministers in the whole city stood with him in his effort to free the slave. But, however unfortunate may have been the attitude of some of the churches on the question of slavery before the war, from the moment the shack shackles fell from the black man's limbs to the present day, the American Church has been most kind and generous in its treatment of the handicapped and struggling race. Nothing but ignorance or malice could prompt one to disparage the efforts put forth by the churches in the Colored-American's behalf. But, in the face of so much lawlessness to day, surely there is a role for the Church Militant to play. When one reflects upon the large number of colored people hurled into eternity, unshriven by priest and untried by law, one cannot help realizing that as a nation we have fallen upon grave times, indeed. Surely it is time for the ministers in their pulpits and the Christians in their pews to fall upon their knees and pray for deliverance from this rising tide of barbarism which threatens to deluge the whole land. How can lynching be extirpated in the United States? There are just two ways in which this can be accomplished. In the first place, lynching can never be suppressed in the South, until the masses of ignorant white people in that section are educated and lifted to a higher moral plane. It is difficult for one who has not seen these people to comprehend the density of their ignorance and the depth of their degradation. A well-known white author who lives in the South describes them as follows: "Wholly ignorant, absolutely without culture, apparently without even the capacity to appreciate the nicer feelings or higher sense, yet conceited on account of their white skin which they constantly dishonor, they make, when aroused, as wild and brutal a mob as ever disgraced the face of this earth." In lamenting the mental backwardness of the South the Atlanta"Constitution" expressed itself as follows a few years ago: We have as many illiterate white men in the South to day as there were when the census of 1850 was taken." Over against these statistics stands the record of the Colored-American, who has reduced his illiteracy 44.5 in forth years. The hostility which has always existed between the poor whits and the colored people of the South has been greatly intensified in these latter days, by the material and intellectual advancement of the Colored-American. The wrath of a Spanish bull, before whose maddened eyes a red rag has been flaunted, is but a feeble attempt at temper compared with the seething, boiling rage of the average white man in the South who behold a well-educated colored man dressed in fine or becoming clothes. In the second, place, lynching can not be suppressed in the South until all classes of white people who dwell there, those of high as well as low and middle degree, respect hte rights of other human beings, no matter what may be the color of their skin, become merciful and just enough to cease their persecution of a weker race and learn a holy reverence for law. It is not because the American people are cruel as a whole, or indifferent on general principles to the suffering of the wronged or oppressed, that outrages against the Colored Americans are permitted to occur and go unpunished, but because many are ignorant of the extent to which they are carried, while others despair of eradicating them. The South has so industriously, persistently and eloquently preached the inferiority of the colored man, that the North has apparently been converted to that view - the thousands of colored people of sterling qualities to the contrary notwithstanding. The South has insisted so continuously and belligerently that it is the colored man's best friend, that it understands him better than any other people on the face of the earth and that it will break interference from nobody in its method of dealing with him, that the North has been persuaded or intimidated into bowing to this decree. Then, too, there seems to be a decline of the great convictions in which this government was conceived and into which it was born. Until there is a renaissance of popular belief in the principles of liberty and equality upon which this government was founded, lynching, the Convict Lease System, the Disfranchisement Acts, the Jim Crow Car Laws, unjust discrimination in the professions and trades and similar atrocities will continue to dishearten and degrade the Colored-American, and stain the fair name of the United States. For there can be no doubt that the greatest obstacle in the way of extirpating lynching is the general attitude of the public mind toward this unspeakable crime. The whole country seems tired of hearing about the Colored-American's woes. The wrongs of the Irish, of the Armenians, of the Roumanians and Russian Jews, of the unfortunates of Russia and of every other unfortunate The failure of this Republican Congress to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was literally the last straw that broke the camel's back. Many colored people believed that they had been duped by the Republican Party, that it had never had the slightest intention of passing the bill to prevent lynching and and they felt that they had been stabbed in the house of a friend. It is the consensus of opinion among colored people to day that if the Republican Party had really wanted to enact the Anti-Lynching Bill into law its representatives could not have been frustrated by the tricks and schemes of a few opponents who were allowed to talk the Bill to death. Editorials expressing this opinion appeared in many reputable newspapers in nearly every section of the United States. The statistics showing the large number of colored men and women who have been lynched are so shocking and the need of protecting colored people from mobs is so dire that one can do nothing but wonder why the Republican Party with its history and its traditions allowed such a necessary and beneficent measure to be rejected by the Senate, after it had been passed by the house. According to statistics given out early in February, 1923, by the commission of church and race relations of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America 3001colored men and 68 colored women [have been] were lynched in the United States from 1885 to 1921. During 1922 colored men were lynched According to the report given out by the Federal Council of Churches there are only four States of this Union, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont in which no lynchings have ever occurred and none has been reported in New Jersey, Utah or Connecticut since 1889. The indifference with which practically the whole country regards the outbreaks of mob violence of which colored people are usually the victims may be given as the main reason for the frequent lynchings which besmirch the record of the United States. Hanging, shooting and burning black men, women and children in this [country that such occurrences create but little] Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.