Judge Lynch

ROPE & FAGGOT: A BIOGRAPHY OF JUDGE LYNCH--Walter White--Knopf ($3).

P: At Sardis, Miss., in 1921, 500 men and women collected a mass of leaves. To a log in the middle, they fastened Henry Lowry. When his feet began to roast they brought his wife and small daughter to see how Lowry strained to swallow hot ashes.

P: In South Georgia recently a suspected murderer could not be found, but his friend could. After the mob had revenged itself on Friend Turner, Mrs. Turner threatened court action. For that she was strung up by the heels, her clothes drenched with gasoline, wrapped in sudden flames. She was pregnant at the time. "Mister, you ought to've heard that nigger wench howl!" When the flames went out, a man stepped up with a knife and made sure her unborn child died too.

P: In South Carolina in 1925, "Bertha Lowman . . . squirmed in her pain over the cleared space of the tourist camp. . . . The shifting target and the half-light cost the mob many bullets."

P: A mob of Georgians in 1925 broke into an insane asylum, lynched a demented Negro who had killed his nurse.

P: At Waco. Tex., in 1916, children were let out of school to join a mob of 15,000 led by the Mayor and the Chief of Police. They burned a defective.

P: Decreasing in number since 1900, lynchings have increased in savagery since 1773 when Negroes were "genteely Tarr'd and Feather'd." Now lately, eyes have been knocked out with sticks, fingers saved as souvenirs, pieces of flesh removed with corkscrews, men tied to automobiles and dragged through the streets until dead, men and women mutilated unprintably.

P: Reasons given for lynchings have been: murder, rape, "incendiary language," unpopularity, talking back to a white man, jilting white girls, not jilting them, attempting court action against white men, forgetting to use "sir," seeming prosperous, attempting to enter a car where white men were sitting, attempting to vote or run for office, mistaken identity, standing in the way of a cool breeze.

African savages do not lynch people. Southern white "crackers" do. Psychiatrist A. A. Brill has said: "Anyone taking part in or witnessing a lynching cannot remain a civilized person." Lynching is a handy substitute for the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions which "crackers" lack. Author White has enough sense not to present lynch-law as an indictment of civilization below the Mason-Dixon line. Instead he conducts an inquiry which blames, not the whole white Southern civilization itself, but elements thereof.

These elements:

1) Ignorance: "Crackers" believe there are only three Negroes: the buffoon, the menial, the criminal.

2) Fear of Negro progress, not of Negro crime. "The tendency to direct mob violence against successful Negroes has been especially noticeable during the past ten years of lynching."

3) Pseudo-science -- the brain-weight theory of white superiority to the Negro. Scientists have exploded the theory that the heaviest brain is necessarily the most highly developed. But the idea persists in the popular mind.

4) Religion: "As death and age thin their ranks [the fundamentalist ministers] and the effect of their efforts now beginning towards greater liberalism becomes evident, then and only then will Protestantism in the South turn from its advocacy of mob-law, its crippling of universities [exception: University of North Carolina], its opposition to knowledge, and its handicapping of Southern mentality."

5) Labor: Negroes were needed more, subjugated more, lynched more, maligned more, after the rise of King Cotton in 1830 than in the two centuries prior. In 1916, Northern industrial centres sent out a call for Negro labor. Two million Negroes responded. After a lynching whole areas would be depopulated overnight. In lynching's golden age (1890-1900), mob-murders were less expensive.

6) Law: The anti-lynching bill proposed by Socialist Victor Berger never became U. S. law. As for the Southern States, their laws are mainly equivocal on the subject. Lynchers do not feel they are breaking the law.

7) Sex: Less than one out of three Negroes lynched is even charged with rape of, or advances to, white women. White women have not half the attraction for Negro men that Negro women have for white men--say Negro men. Many a Southern gentleman had, and has, children by his cook. Author White points out that Southern white women themselves frown on lynching as a means of protecting their virtue, which Negroes protected during the Civil War, when white husbands were away. Lynchers, usually sexual perverts, seldom wait for confirmation of alleged attacks. A rumor, a whisper, a bloodthirsty suggestion by one of a crowd of street loungers, is enough.

The Significance. Author White shows how any one of these seven elements may enter into the cry of "Lynch the nigger!" When a white man is charged with a crime, there is often some evidence, he is always given a trial. It is not the crime itself which causes a lynching so much as the idea of a "nigger" committing it. That is the Negro view of the law according to "Judge Lynch."

The Author. Walter White is a Negro so light-complexioned that in his personal investigations of 41 lynchings, he safely passed for white. After being graduated by Atlanta University, he became Assistant Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This group, employing detectives and research workers, has made the most authoritative set of statistics on lynchings. It is the N.A.A.C.P., alert since 1909, which has made the lyncher think twice before he lynched, caused a sharp decrease in lynchings (115 in 1900, 90 in 1910, 65 in 1920, it last year, 5 so far this year). Not to the N.A.A.C.P., however, but to Author White goes the credit for this arresting exposition of a not-yet-vanished U. S. folkway.