In all the Southern states the last state resort for keeping the peace is the militia, and there have recently been two scandalous instances where these volunteer soldiers have permitted themselves to be overrun by a mob, giving up their guns without an effort to fire a shot. In one of these cases it was recorded that “No effort was made to hurt any of the soldiers however, as it was plain to the crowd that they had gained their point.” At Brookhaven, Miss., in 1908, the officer commanding the militia excused himself because the sheriff had not asked him to order his men to fire. These brave soldiers, these high-toned Southern gentlemen, these military heroes, called out for the special purpose of protecting a prisoner, would not draw a trigger!
The militia of course are not cowards, they are simply sympathizers with the mob; and throughout the South, in the press, and from the lips of many otherwise high-minded people, lynching is freely justified. Witness a coroner’s jury in Charlotte, N. C.: “We, the ... jury to inquire into the cause of the death of Tom Jones, find that he came to his death by gunshot wounds, inflicted by parties unknown to the jury, obviously by an outraged public acting in defense of their homes, wives, daughters, and children. In view of the enormity of the crime committed by said Tom Jones, ... we think they would have been recreant to their duty as good citizens had they acted otherwise.” The rector of St. Luke’s Church, Jacksonville, says: “I write as an upholder of law and order; as one who deprecates and denounces mob law; but I write as one who holds that law is but the will of the majority in a democracy, and that will is that every time a negro criminally assaults, or attempts to assault, a white woman, he shall be dealt with by mob law, which is law after all. Only I would say, let that mob be certain, ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ that they have the right man.” Listen to the Atlanta Georgian: “Some good citizens will say they are shocked, and deplore these evil conditions, and the demoralization they are going to produce, and all that, but they really ain’t shocked, although they think they are, and under proper provocation they would be lynchers themselves.” Even the late D. H. Chamberlain, once Reconstruction governor of South Carolina, says: “Practically I come very near to saying that I do not blame the South for resorting to lynching for this crime,” and Benjamin R. Tillman, Senator of the United States, has publicly declared: “I will lead a mob to lynch a man at any time who has attacked a woman, whether he be white or black,” and that it would probably be necessary “to send some more niggers to hell.”
The standard published reason for this acquiescence in lynching is that the usual course of law is inadequate; people point to the legal delays and the technicalities of the courts, courts organized by white men, held by white judges, influenced by white counsel, before a white jury. They claim that lynching is a rude sort of primitive justice, “an ultimate sanction” which is simply a speedier form of law, though mobs are notoriously easily confused as to persons and circumstances. They consider lynching necessary in order to prevent the taking of testimony in open court in cases of rape, a necessity which any legislature could obviate. They plead that lynching is the only penalty which will keep the Negro in bounds, although there are such strings of lynchings as show conclusively that the publicity given to sickening details makes lynching simply a breeder of crime. In the little town of Brookhaven, Miss., there were two lynchings in the first eight weeks of 1908. The Southern defenders of lynching set forth the solemnity of this form of execution, closing their eyes to the fearful barbarities which have accompanied many cases and are likely to occur any day.
The most cogent reason for the practice of lynching is that it gives an opportunity for the exercise of a deep-seated race hostility. Most of the murders and other crimes which lead to lynchings happen where Whites and Negroes are living close together. A lynching is an opportunity for the most furious and brutal passions of which humanity is capable, under cover of a moral duty, and without the slightest danger of a later accountability. Spectators go to a lynching, as perhaps they went to the witch trial in Salem, or a treason case under Lord Jeffreys, to get a shuddering sensation. Kindred of the injured ones are invited to come to the front with hot irons and gimlets; special trains have repeatedly been furnished, on request to the railroads, in order to carry parties of lynchers; in several instances the burning at the stake of Negroes has been advertised by telegraph, and special trains have been put on to bring spectators. After the auto da fé is over, white people scramble in the ashes for bits of bone. Within a few months a black woman was burned at the stake by a mob, though everybody knew she had committed absolutely no offense except to accompany her husband when he ran away after committing a murder. These are not incidents of every lynching, they are not condoned by those Southerners who disapprove of lynching; but when you have turned a tiger loose and given him a taste of blood, you are not entitled to say that you have no responsibility for innocent people whom he may devour.
The whole fabric of defense of lynching, which in some cases and for some crimes is justified by the large majority of educated white men and women in the South, may be exploded into fragments by a single test. If lynching under any circumstances is for the good of the community, why not legalize it? Why does not some state come out of the ranks of modern civilized communities in which public courts replace private vengeance and torture has ceased to be a part of judicial process, and enact that in every town the adult men shall constitute a tribunal which—on the suggestion that somebody has committed a crime—shall apprehend the suspect, and, with the hastiest examination of the facts, shall forthwith condemn him to be hanged, shot, or burned, and shall constitute themselves executioners, after due notice to the railroads to bring school children in special trains to witness the proceedings, and with the right to distribute the bones and ashes to their friends as souvenirs? Then the whole proceeding may be inscribed on the public records, so that later generations may see the care that has been taken to prevent lawlessness.
It would be unjust to leave this subject as though Southern people spent their lives in breathing out threatenings and slaughter. With all the conversation about homicide, all the columns of lurid dispatches about lynchings, in which again white people pen the dispatches and white editors vivify them, the everyday atmosphere seems peaceful enough; the traveler, the ordinary business and professional man, feels no sense of insecurity. Still one wonders just what was in the mind of the Alabamian who, after driving a Yankee a hundred miles through a wild part of his state, prepared to return by another way, but remarked: “I wouldn’t be afraid to drive right back over the same road that we came.” The chance that a respectable man in the South, who attends to his own business, will be shot, is very much greater than in any other civilized country; but powerful influences are at work to bring about better things. There are some indications that the Negroes will be compelled to give up carrying weapons, and then, perhaps, some of the Whites can also be disarmed. Sensible people deplore the insecurity of life. As for race violence, nobody who knows the South can doubt that the feeling of hatred and hostility to the Negro as a Negro, perhaps to the white man as a white man, is sharper than ever before; but that is the feeling of those members of both races who have no responsibility, of the idle town loafer, of the assistant plantation manager who could make more money if his hands would work better. On the other side stand the upbuilders of the commonwealth, the educators, the professional classes, the plantation owners, the capitalists, most of whom wish the Negro well, oppose violence and injustice, and are willing to coöperate with the best element of the Negroes in freeing the South from its two worst enemies—the black brute, and the white amateur executioner.
CHAPTER XVI
ACTUAL WEALTH