Granted that the black man is the under man as far as the Whites are concerned, is he not entitled to some protection for his own women? One of these Georgia lynchings which occurred last year was a characteristic affair. It occurred at the town of Milan. Two young white fellows tried to break into a house and seize two colored girls living there with their mother. They ran screaming to a neighbor’s home. The Whites tore down a door, ripped up flooring, fired a gun, and made a great disturbance. One old Negro woman was so frightened she jumped into a well, and a worthy Negro grandfather of seventy-two years came out with a shotgun and fired in defence of the women. One of the white men fired on him. The Negro fired back and killed him. The other white man fled. Now, for that deed, instead of being honored as a brave man, the Negro was seized by the white mob and hanged on a high post, and his old body was shot to pieces. This man was a good and quiet citizen who went to chapel every Sunday, and had performed his duty at peace with God and man for a lifetime. The man who led the lynchers was a “Christian” preacher. Sworn evidence on the matter was taken, but the officers of the law in the county refused to act.
This lynching was by no means exceptional in its character. To cite an exceptional affair, one might well take the happenings in Brooks and Lowndes Counties, Georgia, in May, 1918. Here a white bully with a pronounced spite against Negroes had been in court and paid the fine of thirty dollars for gambling which had been pronounced against a certain colored man called Sidney Johnson, and the latter had been sent to his estate to work off the debt. This is an example of the abuse of the law for keeping Negroes still in a state of slavery—a characteristic example of peonage.
Johnson did the work to pay off the fine, but the farmer held him to do a great deal more. Eventually the Negro feigned sickness as an excuse for not doing any more. The farmer then came to his house and flogged him. It must be supposed this roused the devil in Johnson; he threatened the farmer, and he paid a return visit to the white man’s house, fired on him through the window, killing the man himself and dangerously wounding his wife. At once the usual lynching committee was formed, and for a whole week they hunted for Johnson, who had gone into hiding. During that time they lynched eleven Negroes, of whom one was a woman.
The white farmer had given cause for much hatred. He had constantly ill-treated his colored laborers. On one occasion he had flogged a Negro woman. Her husband had stood up for her, and he had him arrested and sentenced to a term of penal servitude in chains. The white mob concluded that he must have shot the farmer for revenge, and they accordingly lynched him. He was shot to death. His wife would not be quieted, but kept insisting that her poor husband had been innocent. The mob therefore seized her. It tied her upside down by her ankles to a tree, poured petrol on her clothing, and burned her to death. White American women will perhaps take note that this colored sister of theirs was in her eighth month with child. The mob around her was not angry or insensate, but hysterical with brutal pleasure. The clothes burned off her body. Her child, prematurely born, was kicked to and fro by the mob and then—— Well, that is perhaps sufficient. There are many details of this crime which cannot be set down in print. But all these facts were authenticated and submitted to the governor of the State. The point that struck me was the pleasure which was taken by the mob in the sufferings which it was causing. It was drunk with cruelty. Here was little idea of a deterrent. Here was no question of racial prudence. From the point of view of the natural history of mankind, it put those white denizens of Georgia on a lower level than cannibals.
It was America’s glorious May, when she was pouring troops into Europe and winning the war; hundreds of thousands of Negroes were clad in the uniform of the army and were fighting for “freedom and justice” in Europe. The moral eloquence of the President was in all men’s minds. America had the chance to take the moral leadership of the world.
But away back in Georgia the mob pursued its horrible way. At length it found the original Johnson who had committed the murder, and he defended himself to the last in a house with gun and revolver, and died fighting. His dead body was dragged at the back of a motor car through the district, and then burned.
The facts were brought to the attention of the governor, and he made a statement denouncing mob violence. But no one was ever brought to justice, though the names of the ringleaders were ascertained. No committee of inquiry was sent from Washington. In fact, the people of Georgia were allowed thus to smirch the glorious flag of the republic and to lower the opinion of America in every capital of the world; for the facts of this story have been printed in circular form and distributed widely. It is undoubtedly a remarkable example of lynching.
It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all eager, some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor afraid.
Northern Negroes go down to investigate lynchings, buy these photographs, bring them back to safe New York, and then print them off in circulars with details of the whole affair. Southern newspapers, though reticent, cannot forego giving descriptions of lynchings, everyone is so much interested in them. Newspaper reports are also reprinted. There is no need to resort to hearsay in telling of the mob murders of the South. They are heavily documented and absolutely authenticated. The United States Government cannot, for instance, prosecute such a Negro association as the N. A. A. C. P. for the pamphlets it issues on lynchings, because it does no more than publish facts which have been publicly authenticated. If prosecuted, worse details would see light. Therefore, these pamphlets go forth.
The first thing they do is tell the colored people as a whole what has been happening. The Negroes of Alabama and Tennessee hear what has been happening in Georgia; the Negroes of Florida and Louisiana hear what has taken place in Arkansas and Texas. Above all, the educated Northern Negroes know of it. Advanced papers such as the Crisis, the Chicago Defender, and the Negro Messenger are giving the Negro people as a whole a new consciousness. First of all in Christianity in the days of slavery and in their melancholy plantation music they obtained a collective race consciousness. And now, through persecution on the one hand and newspapers on the other they are strengthening and fulfilling that consciousness. Destiny is being shaped in this race, and white men are the instruments who are shaping it. May it not emerge eventually as a sword, the sword of the wrath of the Lord.