At the Store

January in rural Mississippi is a betwixt-&-between month. Fields are bare of last year's cotton; plowing for the next crop has not yet begun. Men and boys old enough to be out of school have plenty of time to "go to the store" or into town, and not much to do when they get there. Even in the southern counties, winds blow chill across the fields. At a crossroad store ("GROCERIES, HARDWARE & GEN'L MERCHANDISE"), the stove is hot, the air laden with the smells of harness leather, coal oil, turpentine, of bodies white and black, of cheese, sardines, tobacco juice, tobacco smoke, Garrett's snuff. A man can always find company at the store, sitting and talking, drinking soda pop, maybe just sitting. In the back of the store or off to one side are Negroes, talking low, speaking to white folks only when spoken to.

Last week in and" around Franklin County, Miss., whites had something more to do, and Negroes prudently stayed away from the stores. At Meadville, Hamburg and White Apple, at Knoxville and Little Springs and Bogue Chitto, something more was in the air than a January breeze. Hard-eyed white men got out their guns, went hunting in the swamps along the Homochitto River. Mistuh P. A. Cooper and his bloodhounds arrived from Brandon. Major T. B. Birdsong brought a troop of National Guardsmen. A hunt was on for two black bucks who supposedly had killed a white constable. A cold, scared Negro whose feet were cased in gunnysacks showed himself to a posse, got peppered with birdshot, vanished into the swamps. Over at Prentiss in Jefferson Davis County, National Guardsmen shepherded two other Negroes safely to trial for killing a former marshal. In the first two weeks of 1940 Mississippi and the U. S. had no lynchings.

In Washington, the House for the fourth time since 1922 considered a Federal anti-lynching bill. When a similar bill was last up in the House, Mississippi lynchers did their timely bit by blow-torching, shooting and roasting two Negroes to death at Duck Hill (TIME, April 26, 1937). The consequent horror sped the bill through the House but did not weaken Southern Senators, who filibustered the measure to sleep, as they had done its predecessors. Last week Congressman William Meyers Colmer of Pascagoula, Miss, addressed himself to the 1940 bill's chief sponsor--white, Tammany-Irish Joe Gavagan, from Manhattan's black Harlem. Said Mr. Colmer, who as district attorney once saved a Negro killer from a mob: "Of course, this bill will pass the House. . . . And I think I can see again . . . the plumed knight of the black people . . . astride a great white steed. ... an emblem of purity. ... All honor to the champion of Harlem. All hail the great white chieftain of the black man!" Contemptuous Joe Gavagan retorted with a newspaper account of the doings in Mr. Colmer's Mississippi, with particular reference to Guardsmen mobilized to prevent a lynching.

What made Mr. Colmer so sure that the bill would pass was that: 1) 1940 is election year, and 2) Negroes in the north and west can vote. The lone Negro in Congress, white-topped Democrat Arthur Mitchell of Chicago, won no friends for the bill. He taunted Republicans with ganging up to "buy" Negro votes, made some almost angry enough to vote against the bill. A Republican who did vote "No" was upstate New York's Wadsworth, one of two ex-Senators who have come down to the House (the other: borderline Ken tucky's solemn, long-jawed Robsion, who voted "Yes"). Rich, wise old Jim Wadsworth called anti-lynching an unenforceable, unconstitutional piece of Federal usurpation of State powers: Under the proposed bill, not lynchers but peace officers who let lynchings happen would be declared felons, subject to fines (up to $5,000) and for imprisonment (up to five years), but peace officers always say that they have been overpowered by mobs and find witnesses to agree. How then, he argued, could the U. S. enforce such a law, even if the courts uphold its questionable constitutionality ?

"Why do you not brag on us a little bit?" cried Texas' Hatton Sumners. What he bragged about was that U. S. lynchings dropped from 231 in 1892 to 130 in 1901, to 54 in 1916, to 20 in 1935, to six in 1938, last year to three* (one in Mississippi, two in Florida, none for rape). These descending figures seemed to point the moral that if Congress lets right-thinking Southern whites alone, they can work their dark problem down to zero.

At debate's end 123 Democrats voted with eight Republicans against antilynching. For the bill were 109 Democrats, 140 Republicans, two Wisconsin Progressives, one New York Laborite -- enough to pass Joe Gavagan's bill along to a sure filibuster in the Senate.

*According to most compilations. Maximum reported: five.

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