Professor Smith, of Tulane University, is spokesman for thousands of respectable and educated men when he says: “Atrocious as such forms of rudimentary justice undoubtedly are, and severely reprehensible, to be condemned always and without any reserve, it cannot be denied that they have a certain rough and horrible virtue. Great is the insult they wreak on the majesty of the law and brutalizing must be their effect upon human nature, yet they do strike a salutary terror into hearts which the slow and uncertain steps of the courts could hardly daunt. In witness stands the fact that lynch-lightning seldom strikes twice in the same district or community. Such frightful incidents tend to repeat themselves at wide intervals, both of time and place.”
They tend to repeat themselves immediately; it is not an accident that Mississippi, in a large part of which the Negroes are renowned for their freedom from the crime so much reprehended, nevertheless, has more lynchings than any other state; it is because Mississippi has the lynching habit. Strange that in a community like the South, so intelligent, so proud of the superiority and the supremacy of the white race, the deeds of fifty abandoned black men each year should throw millions of Whites into a frenzy of excitement; and that for the crime of those fifty, ten million innocent people are held responsible. Lynching is no remedy for race troubles, and never has been; it intensifies the race feeling a hundredfold; it is a standing indictment of the white people who possess all the machinery of government, yet cannot prevent the fury of their own race. “Surely,” says President Roosevelt, “no patriot can fail to see the fearful brutalization and debasement which the indulgence of such a spirit and such practices inevitably portend.... The nation, like the individual, cannot commit a crime with impunity. If we are guilty of lawlessness and brutal violence, whether our guilt consists in active participation therein or in mere connivance and encouragement, we shall assuredly suffer later on because of what we have done. The corner stone of this republic, as of all free governments, is respect for and obedience to the law.” That the South can get on without lynchings is shown by the gradual diminution in the number of instances. In 1901 there were 135, in 1906 only 45, and in this good result the protests of the good people in the South have been aided by the criticism of the North. Murders of Whites by Negroes are probably just as frequent, but they are more likely to go to the courts.
Some things can still be done to reduce the crime of the individual without increasing the crime of the mob. John Temple Graves has suggested for the Negro that: “Upon conviction of his crime he would cross a ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and disappear into a prison of darkness and mystery, from which he would never emerge, and in which he would meet a fate known to no man save the Government and the excutioners of the law—that the very darkness and mystery of this punishment would strike more terror to the soul of superstitious criminals than all the vengeance of modern legal retribution.”
A kindred suggestion is that a special court of Whites shall be set up to deal with certain aggravated crimes, outside of the technicalities of the ordinary criminal law. If the Negroes would deliver up those of their own number whom they suppose to have committed such crimes, they would relieve themselves of the odium of protecting the worst criminals. The Whites are right in insisting on a stronger feeling of race responsibility, but where is their own sense of race responsibility when the Salisbury lynchers, the Atlanta murderers and the scoundrel Turner, who practically kidnapped and then tortured to death a Negro woman, are protected by public sentiment? Extraordinary remedies are not necessary if the white people will make their own courts and sheriffs do their duty, by speedy trials, followed by swift and orderly punishment; and most of all by disgracing and driving out of society men who take upon themselves the hangman’s office without the hangman’s plea of maintaining the majesty of law.
Lynching is part of the same spirit as that which inspires peonage, the meanest of all crimes in the calendar; for to steal a poor Negro’s labor is to rob a cripple of his crutches; to knock down the child for his penny; it is the fleecing of the most defenseless by the most powerful. One of the remedies for the ills of the South is that the white people shall sternly set themselves against the crime of peonage, which exists in every state of the Lower South, either with or without the color of law; and which secures the most expensive labor that the South can possibly employ, since it alarms and discourages a thousand for every man whose forced labor is thus stolen.
The terrible thing about all the suggestions of violence and hatred as a remedy is that they react upon the white race, which has most to lose in property and in character. “There are certain things,” said Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in a public proclamation, “that must be done for the control of the negro which need not be done for the government of the white man. In spite of the provisions of the federal constitution the men who are called upon to deal with this great problem must do that which is necessary to be done, even though it may have the appearance at times of going somewhat without the law.... If the people of the respective communities of this state will only come together and resolve to convert every negro into a laborer and self-supporter, even though it be necessary to make him a laborer upon the county’s or the state’s property, they will serve their communities and their state well.” No idea is more futile than that you can drive people with whips into the Kingdom of Heaven; that you can teach an inferior race to observe laws by yourself breaking them; that you can put one half the community outside the law, while claiming American liberty for the other half. Though the negro race has little to urge in public, it feels the degradation and the hurt. Violence solves no problems; it does not even postpone the evil day. The race problem must be solved by applying to Negroes the same kind of law and justice that the experience of the Anglo-Saxon has found necessary for its own protection.
CHAPTER XXVI
MATERIAL AND POLITICAL REMEDIES