Lynching in America

AUSTIN GILMOUR

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Costigan-Wagner Anti-lynching bill, the strongest yet introduced, is again waiting the Senate's pleasure. It provides heavy fines, or imprisonment, or both, for officers failing to be diligent in apprehending and prosecuting lynchers, for those conspiring to kill a prisoner, and for those who allow a prisoner to be taken from them. In the event of a lynching, the State is given thirty days grace in which to act against the lynchers. After that, the U. S. District Court has jurisdiction. Counties in which Ivnchings occur will be fined 82,000 to $10,000, the money payable to the victim's family. At its last session, the Senate failed to act on this hill.

One bright winter morning in 1931. Raymond Gunn, twenty-seven-year-old buck Negro, was taken from the sheriff by a Maryville, Missouri, mob and. to the accompaniment of kicks and cuffs, marched to a one-room schoolhouse where he had attacked and murdered the schoolmistress. Leaders of the mob, which numbered several thousand, hoisted the Negro to the roof, chained him to the ridgepole and then (it being a chilly morning) set fire to the building.

Gunn became the 4,998th victim of Judge Lynch since 1882, when the first authentic record of lynching was begun. Of that number, ninety-four were women.

The Maryville incident is selected for dissection because it bears nearly all the earmarks associated with the American phenomenon, especially of the recent trend. Among other things, it took place in a community neither North nor South, East nor West; it struck about the average in brutality, being a little less delicately performed than the one at San Jose, California, in 1933, a little more so than the one near Marianna, Florida, last fall. It illustrates the formula: If N=Negro and R=Rape, then N+R —Lynching.

Moreover, in common with many others in recent years, the Missouri jubilee shows that despite a decline in lynching it has developed into a spectacle, a grand sport which draws huge "gates. Promoters— and that term is no exaggeration—frequently have excellent organization. They easily circumvent the perfunctory objections of peace-officers to their plans. They are aided by improved means of transportation, the telephone, the radio and the press—the latter being essential for ballyboo and for furnishing a pictorial and reportorial account just as for any chartered amusement. The Gunn case suggests what the ambitious modern mob leader strives for.

Nordic blood boiled when on December 16, 1930, the body of the Maryville schoolmistress was found. Two days later Gunn was nabbed and quickly confessed, when "religion was tried on him. Immediately afterwards lie was whisked away to Si. Joseph.

All next day, Friday, lynch-talking crowds milled in Maryville. In the office of a county official a round-table confluence was held and plans laid to storm the St. Joseph jailhouse, provided the sheriff didn't object too forcibly. At any rate, the conferees agreed, it wouldn't hurt to try to get the Negro and have il over with. Saturday a mob called at St. Joseph, but found that its arrival had been anticipated by the militia.

The date of Gunn's trial in Maryville, Monday, January 12, was given widespread publicity, many papers running stories calculated to arouse interest.

"A week in advance, a county official stated, "they came here to discuss their plans.... I he main point was that the Negro was not to come to trial. I went to the sheriff repeatedly and told him what was to happen. He wouldn't listen to me."

A conductor on a Burlington train observed to a Maryville woman: "Gettin back borne just in time; they're goin to lynch that nigger Monday. Reporters and photographers, with orders to get lynching pictures, flocked to Maryville.

Sunday afternoon the Missouri Adjutant General offered his services. "Well, replied the sheriff, "I don t think we 11 need you." He refused to sign an order giving the Adjutant General authority to act in case of emergency.

By Sunday night the town bulged with cars, many of them from other states. In every third or fourth machine were men sitting quietly, wrapped in overcoats and robes. In the hotel lobbies and square, plans for next day's work were openly discussed, while all night long rural phone wires hummed with the message: "Be at the courthouse at 8 o'clock; you know the rest.

At 7:30 o'clock Monday morning the militia unit was mobilized, armed, and held at the armory a block from the courthouse, about which the mob leaders were giving low orders—"You fellers watch over here at this door; you watch here. . . . '

When court opened Gunn was taken from the jail by the sheriff and placed in the rear of a car beside a deputy. The sheriff climbed in front. The car started up the street, turned the corner and drove directly into the mob about the courthouse door. There was a cry, "Here he is. Grab him. as the mob surged around the car and jerked out the Negro. At ibis juncture the "Man in the Red Coat" took command. No one seemed to know who be was, except that he "came in here to help out. But the story persists that this mystery leader was a plenipotenliary of a prominent Shreveport business man.

I be schoolhouse, and its black ornament perched on top, didn't burn long, causing some of the crowd estimated at two to four thousand, of which a fourth wore skills to feel they bad been rooked, After poking about in the embers for pieces bone and other mementos, spectators drifted home.

Apart from the specific causes of lynehings. Judge Lynch's Four Horsemen, responsible for 5,068 lynehings since 1882. are pretty well known today. Reading from left to right. they are Economic Struggle Sadism Public Indifference to Lynching Ineffective Law-enforcement. Tough fellows. At main of the ninety-five mob-murders since 1929, all four of the Horsemen were stomping around.

After setting fire to the courthouse in order to gel a Negro locked in the vault, a Sherman, Texas, mob in 1930 yelled. "Let er burn: the taxpayers 'II put 'er back. Collegians sang "Happy Days Are Here Again. Later, the mob burned the Negro section. I wo months afterwards, in Sumter County, Alabama, a black was shot to death by a pack of whites. His color, and the fact that he was one of the few land-owning Negroes thereabouts, were, apparently, the charges against him.

Rape is not the only crime for which Negroes are awarded the rope and faggot. Murder ranks first in the list. But there another errors which it is highly dangerous for blacks to commit. Incredible as it may seem, they have been F uelled for such reasons as colonizing members of their race, violating contracts and, even, engaging in politics.

Coincident with a fairly steady decline in lynchings—from a peak of 255 in 1892 to a paltry ten in 1932 there lias been a sharp upturn in their unmistakably sadistic nature. Forty-five persons have been burned to death since 1919. Two were white men one in Alabama, the other in Montana. At least a fourth of the victims were tortured in other ways. Photographic studies of Claude Neal's corpse show the precise nature of the operations.

These pictures sold for fifty cents each, as did those showing the swinging bodies of kidnapers Thurman and Holmes at San Jose. A lynched Negro's teeth have brought a top price of $5. Shin bones, fingers, and cars have been offered for sale and many were bought.

Young girls and women, some with babies nestling in their arms, urged on the mob which in 1930 hanged two blacks at Marion, Indiana. One girl rooted from atop an automobile: "Hang-that-nigger. Hang-that-nigger." Nor were the weaker sex and children conspicuously absent from many of the better lynchings.

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On at least two occasions railroads ran "Lynching Specials," while in 1925 passengers on a train passing near Excelsior Springs, Missouri, were jerked out of their boredom when the train stopped for a hanging going on beside the tracks—a piece of luck like having the elevated break down opposite the ball park. But, in these days, the motor car is relied upon. Informed that the principal actor was ready, the elite of a mob left their supper at Memphis' fashionable Pea-body Hotel and drove to Sardis, Mississippi, arriving in ample time for "The Burning of Henry Lowery." Marianna had a time taking care of the guests who had rolled in from eleven Southern states. Some got their jubilee invitation through the press, Others through courtesy of the Dothan, Alabama, radio station a modern note.

Since 1900, less than one per cent of lynchings have been followed by conviction of the mobsters. If busybodies force an investigation of a lynching, there seems to be only one individual who had any connection with it—that's the one whose neck was cracked. The others are those nebulous creatures classified as "unknown persons."

In 1933, pro-lynchers madly fought militiamen in an effort to rescue four suspects arrested after the Princess Anne, Maryland, carnival. Although the suspects were released, the Eastern counties, in which Princess Anne squats, were so piqued that they talked secession.

A few years ago, South Georgia rural folk, using knives, pointed sticks and wire pliers, performed protracted surgical and dental operations on a Negro and then cauterized the wounds with fire. Informed that the governor wanted an investigation, a local paper indulged in a loud editorial cat-call, to the vast delight of several other weeklies.

A State's Attorney bluntly refused to investigate the Princess Anne affair, but ordinarily they' are simply allowed to die of old age. If not, gentle warnings may be given the zealots. A letter in the vernacular to a South Carolina sheriff who hail been too active in prosecution ends with a crude drawing of a coffin with "Ded" written on it, and, underneath, the inscription:

"Yo are new in this box."

The late Governor "Sunny Jim" Rolph was only heeding precedent when he permitted San Jose's red-bloods to save California the expense of hanging a couple of kidnapers. The flood of unctuous drivel following the lynching didn't show that Rolph's actions were disapproved. It showed merely that his remarks were considered unseemly. Governor Sholtz of Florida was not castigated for permitting Claude Neal to die last fall; nor were other officials who could easily have prevented many macabre festivals in the past few years.

Apathy toward lynching has not decreased greatly, but there is a vigorous, if tiny, anti-lynch current which at times somewhat disturbs the placid waters. For obvious reasons, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the principal force which keeps it flowing. Other small but articulate groups have joined the Negroes, while lip service at least is given by powerful organizations. Most influential, perhaps, is the Southern Association of White Women for the Prevention of Lynching, whose members are prominent in Dixie life.

Opponents of the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynch bill argue that it won't stop Judge Lynch, because it strikes only after he has paid a call. In rebuttal, supporters of the measure recite these facts:

In 1923, following a national campaign for a similar bill, lynchings dropped thirty-five points from the previous year's high of sixty-three. Since South Carolina enacted its antilynch bill, which contains the "county responsibility" clause, no county which had to pay up has treated itself to another lynching, and the number in the state has declined sharply. Georgia sent sixteen mobsters to the big house in 1926, a phenomenon which caused a complete depression in its lynch industry. In January, 1934, two lynchings occurred. There were no more until June, when it became apparent that the Costigan-Wagner bill wouldn't make the grade. Then Judge Lynch and his boys got busy and brought the year's record up to seventeen.

The Judge has been successful only three times this year, hut for further reports read your daily papers.