Influences Tending to Prevent Future Lynchings in the South
The influences against lynching in the South are constantly growing stronger. With most (not all) of the newspapers, the preachers and the best citizens united against it, the outlook is full of hope. And rural free delivery and country telephones, spreading in every direction, are inestimable influences in the quickening of public opinion. Better roads are being built, the country is settling up with white people, schools are improving and the population generally, after a series of profitable cotton crops, is highly prosperous—all influences working toward the solution of this problem.
When I went South I shared the impression of many Northerners that the South was lawless and did not care—an impression that arises from the wide publication of the horrible details of every lynching that occurs, and the utter silence regarding those deep, quiet, and yet powerful moral and industrial forces which are at the work of rejuvenation beneath the surface—an account of which I have given. I came away from the South deeply impressed with two things:
That the South is making fully as good progress in overcoming its peculiar forms of lawlessness as the North is making in overcoming its peculiar forms.
II.—LYNCHING IN THE NORTH
Having looked, into two Southern lynching towns, let us now see what a Northern lynching is like. The comparison is highly interesting and illuminating.
Springfield, O., is one of the most prosperous of the smaller cities of the state. It is a beautiful town having, in 1904, some 41,000 people. It has fine streets, fine buildings, busy factories, churches, an imposing library. Some of the older families have resided there for nearly a century. It is the seat of government of one of the most fertile and attractive counties in the state: an altogether progressive, enlightened city. Of its population in 1904 over 6,000 were Negroes (about one-seventh), a considerable proportion of whom are recent settlers. Large numbers of Negroes, as I have shown in former chapters, have been migrating from the South, and crowding into Northern towns located along the Ohio or in those portions of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and other states, which border on the Old South. Many of the Negroes in Springfield came from Kentucky. We discover in these Northern towns exactly as in the South, the two classes of Negroes: the steady, resident class, more or less known to the whites, and a restless, unstable, ignorant class, coming to one neighbourhood to-day to help build a bridge, and going elsewhere to-morrow to dig a canal. For years no such thing as race prejudice existed in Springfield; but with the growth of Negro population it increased with rapidity. For instance, a druggist in Springfield refused to sell soda-water to a Negro college professor, the typesetters in a publishing house compelled the discharge of Negro workmen, a Negro physician visited the high-school, found the half-dozen Negro pupils sitting by themselves and, angrily charging discrimination, ordered his child to sit among the white children. This feeling of race repulsion was especially noticeable between the working class of white men and the Negroes who come more or less into industrial competition with them. The use of Negroes for breaking strikes in the coalfields and elsewhere has been a fertile source of discord, kindling the fire of race prejudice in places where it never before existed.
How the Negroes Sold Their Votes
In Springfield there were about 1,500 Negro voters, many of whom were bought at every election. The Democrats and the Republicans were so evenly divided that the city administration was Democratic and the county administration Republican. The venal Negro vote went to the highest bidder, carried the elections, and, with the whiskey influence, governed the town. Springfield, enlightened, educated, progressive, highly American, had 145 saloons—or one to every 285 people. Before the lynching, nine of these were Negro saloons—some of them indescribably vile. A row of houses along the railroad tracks, not three blocks from the heart of the city, was known as the Levee. It was a Negro row composed of saloons and disorderly houses, where the lowest of the low, Negro men and both Negro and white women, made a general rendezvous. Just back of it was one of the foremost Catholic churches in town; hardly a block away were the post-office, the public library, and the foremost club of the city, and within three or four hundred yards were the back doors of some of the city’s most aristocratic residences. For years, the ineffective good citizen had protested against these abominable resorts, but when the Republicans wanted to win they needed the votes from these places, and when the Democrats wanted to win they needed them. Burnett, the Democratic boss, said in a tone of real injury to a gentleman—a Democrat—who protested against the protection of the Levee:
“Don’t you want the party to win? We’ve got to have those sixty or eighty votes from Hurley”—Hurley being the notorious Negro proprietor of a dive called the Honky Tonk.