Rope & Faggot/Appendix

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There have been lynched in the United States 4951 persons in the forty-six years beginning in 1882 and extending through 1927. Of the victims 3513 were Negroes and 1438 whites. Ninety-two were women—sixteen of them white and seventy-six coloured. Mississippi leads in this exhibition of masculine chivalry, with sixteen women victims; Texas is second with twelve; Alabama and Arkansas are tied for third place with nine each; Georgia follows with eight; Tennessee and South Carolina mobs have bravely murdered seven women each; Kentucky and Louisiana five each, Florida and Oklahoma three each; Missouri and North Carolina two each; and Nebraska, Virginia, and Wyoming one each. Three of the twelve Texas victims were a mother and her two young daughters killed by a mob, in 1918, when they "threatened a white man." Thus was white civilization maintained!

Lynchings were not considered sufficiently important for recording prior to 1882, when the Chicago Tribune included in its summary of the year's crimes, disasters, and other phenomena the mob murders of that year. The first scientific and exhaustive study of lynching was ​that made by Professor James Elbert Cutler of Yale University and Wellesley College. Lynch-Law was published in 1905 and covered the years from 1882 through 1903. Unfortunately the book has long been out of print and is practically unobtainable.

Cutler sought "as a student of society and social phenomena" to determine "from the history the causes for the prevalence of the practice, to determine what the social conditions are under which lynch-law operates, and to test the validity of the arguments which have been advanced in justification of lynching." He took the figures as compiled by the Chicago Tribune as a basis for his study. With great care he verified and corrected the Tribune data through correspondence, and by comparison with the files of other newspapers, such as the New York Times and the New York Tribune, and through study of all available magazine articles which had been written upon the subject. Because of the care and thoroughness with which he sifted the facts Cutler's study stands as the most thorough examination yet made of the years 1882–1903.

In 1919 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People published its exceedingly valuable statistical study, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. Competent research-workers employed by the Association spent more than six months in the Congressional Library at Washington searching newspaper files; a vast amount of material ​gathered over a period of ten years by the Association was examined; and, in brief, every source where authoritative evidence could be gained was consulted. Personal investigations of a number of lynchings had been made by members of the Association's staff, and of others by detectives.

Relying upon under- instead of over-statement, the foreword to Thirty Years states that "it is believed that more persons have been lynched than those whose names are given. . . . Only such cases have been included as were authenticated by such evidence as was given credence by a recognized newspaper or confirmed by a responsible investigator."

This great caution causes discrepancies between the figures of Cutler and those of the Association. Cutler for the years beginning in 1889 and extending through 1903 gives a higher total in eleven of the fifteen years, and in three others his figures are the same as those of the Association. As Cutler's study was made twenty years nearer to the period, 1889–1903, and because of the care he exercised, his figures for that period are accepted in the present study. This is especially safe inasmuch as the Association's figures are the minimum ones.

As further means of checking the above figures, they were compared with the figures of lynchings in the World Almanac (1927), prepared by Monroe N. Work of Tuskegee Institute. These figures, covering the period 1885–1925, are in several instances considerably higher ​than those of Cutler or the Association, especially during the earlier years. For very recent years they are generally slightly lower than those of the Association.

The tables which follow have been prepared, therefore, by combining Cutler's and the Association's figures and carefully checking them with the World Almanac figures to insure maximum accuracy.

Table I gives totals of lynchings by years and by race for the years beginning with 1882 and extending through 1927. The figures for the years up to and including 1903 are taken from Cutler. Unfortunately, he indicated the division by race only on a graph, but he gave the totals by years and by race for the fifteen years he studied. For 1904 and the years following, the figures are taken from Thirty Years.

Table II lists the lynchings by states and by race. Only four states of the Union have never been stained by a lynching—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Table III gives the states in numerical order of lynchings. It will be noted at once that the first ten states in which have occurred 3672 or 74.166 per cent of the total of 4951 lynchings for all states are in the far ​South. As there were two Souths prior to the Civil War on the question of slavery, so since the war there have been two Souths on lynching and its allied evils. The layer of states of the northern South between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, which include North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and a part of Kentucky, while geographically Southern, are vastly different from the states of the far South, both in number of lynchings and in the brutality with which lynching is practised. Nearer to the more progressive North, these states have a far less bloody record than those farther south. Georgia and her sister states are concrete examples of Booker Washington's truism that one can keep another in the ditch only by lying down beside him and holding him there. The number of lynchings serves as an excellent index of the backwardness of the far South.

Table IV will give little satisfaction to "hundred per cent Americans" who attribute all lawlessness to "foreigners." It will be observed from this table that lynchings occur in almost an exact inverse ratio to the number of persons of foreign birth within the states. Only North and South Carolina have a lower percentage of foreign-born than Georgia and Mississippi, but these two latter states have lynched 1110 or 22.4 per cent of the total for the entire country. New York, numbering in its population 26.82 per cent of persons of foreign birth, has had only three lynchings in forty-six years, against 561 in Mississippi during the same period, only four-tenths of one per cent of the inhabitants of the latter state having been born outside of the United States. Connecticut, where 27.29 per cent of those residing within the state are foreign born, has had only one lynching in forty-six years. These examples and others indicate considerable justification for the charge that lynching is wholly an American custom and that the propensity for mob murder is in an exact ratio to the "one hundred percentism" of the regions in which they occur. ​

Table V, giving the homicide rate of the twenty-five American cities with the worst records for 1926, illustrates the disrespect for law and the cheapness of human life in the states where lynchings are most frequent. It will be noted that the first five cities in the table are located in the lower South; that the first twelve are Southern or border cities; that twenty of the twenty-five cities with the highest rates are in or on the border of the South. The homicide rate for the whole country in 1926 was 10.1—thus each city listed in the table staged from one and a half to seven and a half times as many homicides as did the country as a whole.

​It may be argued by some of these cities that it is unfair to indict a city on the figures for a single year. The answer lies in the reports of the United States Census Bureau. Thirteen of the fifteen cities with the highest homicide rates in 1923 were Southern or border cities—Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Nashville, Kansas City, Mo., New Orleans, Dallas, Louisville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Kan., Houston, Cincinnati, and Norfolk. In 1924 twelve of the fifteen highest were in the same territory—Memphis, Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, Kansas City, Mo., New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Louisville, Kansas City, Kan., St. Louis, and Cincinnati. In 1925 sixteen of the eighteen cities with the highest homicide rates were Southern or border cities—and for that year no figures were made public for Atlanta, Kansas City, (Missouri), Little Rock, Charleston, and Louisville, at least three of which from the records of other years would probably have been among the leaders.

The relation of lynchings to such homicidal tendencies in these Southern cities may be seen by examining their records for a longer period—the thirteen years from 1913 through 1926. Memphis, leader in the murder rate for many years, is located in Tennessee, but geographically belongs to Arkansas and Mississippi also. Since 1881 there have been 268 lynchings in Tennessee, 313 in Arkansas, and 561 in Mississippi—a ​total of 1142 or a yearly average of more than twenty-five. In Memphis the homicide rate per 100,000 population has been: 1914, 73.8; 1915, 88.2: 1916, not given; 1917, 50.8; 1918, 47.4; 1919, 62.1; 1920, 63.0; 1921, 59.2; 1922, 69.1; 1923, 69.4; 1924, 69.7; 1925, 59.0; 1926, 42.4—a yearly average of 62.4. Even the (for Memphis) apparently modest record in 1926 of only 42.4 persons of each 100,000 killed by other persons seems to be an understatement of the facts, according to Hoffman, for, he says, "the time rate for Memphis was probably higher, if the facts were completely reported. The figures represent only deaths from murders actually taking place in the city of Memphis and not as is customary with all other cities combining the murder deaths of both residents and non-residents."

Alabama has staged 356 lynchings since 1881; Birmingham, its chief city, has had over a period of thirteen years an average homicide rate of 53.4. Atlanta, capital of the Ku Klux Klan and of the state with the second worst lynching record (549 in forty-six years), has had an average murder rate for twelve years of 35.73. (No rate is included for Atlanta for 1926.) Texas (with 534 lynchings in forty-six years) has had two of its principal cities, Dallas and Houston, ranking high for years among the homicide cities. Louisiana ranks fourth among the lynching states, and New Orleans has occupied approximately the same place in the list of cities with high homicide rates. Hoffman lists ​no Mississippi cities in his annual tables of homicides, the figures evidently not being given for them.

So the story runs. Even some of the cities which are not Southern, but which have high homicide rates have been influenced by the lawlessness that lynchings engender. Hoffman says of Detroit's high rate and those of Memphis, Dallas, and Houston, that "in all these localities, the rates are complicated . . . by a large Negro element, which nearly everywhere shows a higher murder death rate than the white population." Concerning Detroit, the facts show that its high rate is partly due to the circumstance that it was a centre not only of Negro migration, but of Southern white migration as well, over two hundred thousand Southern whites going to Detroit within recent years. At one time, during a period of two years, some ninety per cent of the new policemen added to the Detroit force were from the South. Until checked somewhat, they were about to cause a serious clash through their wanton shooting of Negroes. Another factor that affected Detroit in the years 1925 and 1926 was the considerable strength of the Ku Klux Klan, the Klansmen almost electing their candidate for mayor in 1925.

There is a measure of justification for Hoffman's surmise that the presence of a large number of Negroes may affect the homicide rate of certain cities, for lynching brutalizes all classes. It leads as well to a feeling of desperation and hopelessness, which causes certain ​types of Negroes to "shoot it out" when clashes come with whites, since they are convinced that there is little likelihood of justice or a fair trial later.

The seriousness of the situation in the cities listed in Table V can be seen by comparison of their records with that of Chicago, popularly supposed to be more given to murder than any other city. In 1925 ten cities, nine of them Southern or border ones, outranked Chicago; in 1926 twenty-two cities, nineteen of them Southern or border ones, had a higher homicide rate. In proportion to population there were four and a half murders in Jacksonville to one in Chicago; almost four to one in Birmingham, and nearly three to one in Memphis. For thirteen years the average murder rate in Chicago has been 11.8. "Bloody, murderous" Chicago—where gangsters use machine-guns instead of revolvers—begins to take on the air of a peaceful village when its homicide rate is compared with the average of 62.8 in Memphis, 53.4 in Birmingham, and 35.73 in Atlanta.

Since industrial centres and ports attract elements that are more given to crimes of violence, another interesting comparison is that of cities in Table V with others with similar conditions in states where lynchings are not common. Here, for example, are the 1926 homicide rates of a few Northern and Western cities, some with ports, some with many factories: Bridgeport, Conn., 5.2; Buffalo, N. Y., 5.9; Fall River, Mass., 2.3; Grand ​Rapids, Mich., 1.3; Hartford, Conn., 4.3; Jersey City, N. J., 1.6; Paterson, N. J., 4.2; Philadelphia, 8.6; Boston, 3.9; San Francisco, 8.6; Brockton, Mass., 1.4. Not only have these cities the element attracted by industries and ports (and some have large Negro populations), but almost all of them have large numbers of foreign-born among their population, who, according to the beliefs of the average American, are more given to crimes of violence than "pure" Americans.

Table V presents, therefore, a situation worthy of sober reflection, not only by the cities concerned, but by the country at large. Even those who hold violent prejudices against the Negro need to realize that there is no contagious disease known to medical science which is more easily transferred than unrestrained lawlessness. Wilful, frequent, and unchecked violence directed against Negroes, the taking of the law into its own hands by the mob, the disregard of the human and civil rights and of the safety of person of any element of the population, spread with alarming speed to similar action against other elements. Alabama is a clear-cut example of this truth. Ruled by the Klan, its governor being a member, there were hundreds of floggings, kidnappings, tarring and featherings, and other outrages in that state in 1927, most of them not of Negroes, but of white men and women. So serious did the situation become that the Birmingham News on September 6 declared: "Unless the governor is determined that the ​whole state shall be turned into a walking arsenal he will act in the matter and act at once. If he fails to act then each citizen of Alabama will be encouraged to go armed to the teeth ready and determined to shoot down these masked and hooded cowards who in the name of 'law-enforcement' mock all law and mock also the peace and dignity of this commonwealth." Alabama's experience, recent events have taught, is not an isolated one. One can better understand from this statement why Birmingham and Mobile have ranked so high among the cities with disgraceful homicide records. Unrestrained brutality by lynchers against black victims inevitably creates a situation where no man, high or low, black or white, is free from the possibility of paying with his life for promiscuous mobbism. It would seem as though so evident a fact would have wrought a change and ended lynching—not to save black victims from lynching, but to save white men and women.

Table VI illustrates as clearly, perhaps, as is possible the effect of emotional, primitive religion upon lynching figures. The connexion between lynching and religion has been discussed. Careful scrutiny of this table will doubtless be an astonishing revelation of the almost exactly parallel curve upwards of lynchings and of the Methodist-Baptist percentage of the total of church members in those states where lynchings have occurred. Where the percentage of Roman Catholics, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Unitarians, and ​other less emotional denominations rises, and of those professing no church allegiance, the number of lynchings decreases.

It is particularly desired that the presentation of such facts may not be construed as attacks upon any one denomination or as absolution from responsibility of any other. The figures are given for their remarkable revelatory character in bearing down upon the problem of lynch-law. To some readers such figures may indicate only a tenuous connexion between primitivism in religion and mobbism. To others the dominance of the Protestant clergy and especially a poorly paid, ignorant, and uneducated clergy such as afflicts most of the rural South will appear responsible in considerable measure, not only for much of the spirit of bigotry which gives birth to lynching, but to many other forms of intolerance as well.

Louisiana and Texas, at first glance, with a lower percentage of Methodists and Baptists than the states round them and with the highest number of persons lynched, would seem to offer contradictory testimony. A little more careful scrutiny reveals that the seeming contradiction does not exist.

Texas had, according to Table VI, 402,874 Roman Catholics. In 1920, however, the United States Census shows that there were in Texas 249,652 Mexicans, most of whom, it may be assumed with reasonable safety, are Catholics. Eliminating these Mexicans, one discovers that ​Methodists and Baptists number 69.3 per cent of Texas church membership.

Louisiana, with the lowest percentage of Methodists and Baptists in relation to her total church membership of any of the states with high lynching records, offers an even more striking example. The World Almanac for 1927, quoting the figures from the Official Catholic Directory for 1926, reveals that there were 331,921 Catholics in the diocese of New Orleans alone. If we subtract this number from the total of Catholics in all of Louisiana shown in the table, 509,910, and by the result thus obtained divide the combined number of Louisiana Methodists and Baptists, we find that Louisiana outside of New Orleans is 55.4 per cent Methodist or Baptist. And scrutiny of the lynching figures discloses that of 168 lynchings in Louisiana since 190 only one has taken place in New Orleans. Other factors of necessity enter into the equation, but it cannot be questioned that an illiterate ministry working with the tools of a primitive, emotional religion does play a not inconsiderable part in the problem of the continued reign of Judge Lynch. It seems entirely safe to assert that much greater headway in the efforts to end lynching would be made if there were considerable augmentation of the number of educated, intelligent Methodist and Baptist ministers of both races now at work in the South.

The population figures in Table VI are from the

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State	Total Population 1920 Census	Church Members All Denominations	Roman Catholic	Methodist	Baptist	Other Protestants[1]	Percentage of Methodists and Baptists in Total Church Population	Total Number of Persons Lynched, 1882–1927
Mississippi	01,790,618	0,762,977	0,032,160	226,356	441,293	0,026,261	87.50	561
Georgia	02,895,832	1,234,132	0,018,214	387,775	721,140	0,042,398	89.80	549
Texas	04,663,228	1,784,620	0,402,874	418,121	646,494	0,107,323	59.70	534
Louisiana	01,798,509	0,863,067	0,509,910	081,273	213,018	0,023,033	34.09	409
Alabama	02,348,174	1,099,465	0,037,482	323,400	518,706	0,035,319	76.59	356
Arkansas	01,752,204	0,583,209	0,021,120	176,806	287,349	0,023,384	79.50	313
Florida	00,968,470	0,324,856	0,024,650	114,821	131,107	0,023,631	75.70	275
Tennessee	02,337,885	0,840,133	0,023,015	286,143	320,442	0,084,414	72.20	268
Kentucky	02,416,630	0,967,702	0,160,185	155,129	367,731	0,060,576	54.03	233
South Carolina	01,683,724	0,794,126	0,072,113	278,854	413,630	0,064,696	87.20	174
Oklahoma	02,028,283	0,424,492	0,047,427	113,202	129,436	0,034,988	57.10	141
Missouri	03,404,055	1,370,551	0,445,352	241,751	252,107	0,139,834	36.03	117
Virginia	02,309,187	0,949,136	0,036,671	147,954	456,095	0,100,424	63.60	109
North Carolina	02,559,123	1,080,723	0,004,989	338,979	535,299	0,118,121	80.89	100
Montana	00,548,889	0,137,566	0,078,113	013,873	004,073	0,024,880	13.04	089
Colorado	00,939,629	0,257,977	0,104,982	038,584	018,548	0,049,483	22.10	068
Nebraska	01,296,372	0,440,791	0,135,537	081,879	019,643	0,124,739	23.02	058
Kansas	01,769,257	0,610,347	0,128,948	151,348	060,383	0,100,190	34.69	055
West Virginia	01,463,701	0,427,865	0,060,337	154,519	078,679	0,035,776	54.50	054 ​
Indiana	02,930,390	1,777,341	0,272,288	271,596	085,786	0,132,722	20.10	052
California	03,426,861	0,893,366	0,494,539	096,818	039,570	0,129,582	15.20	050
Wyoming	00,194,402	0,039,505	0,012,801	004,293	001,841	0,009,259	15.50	041
New Mexico	00,360,350	0,209,809	0,177,727	011,505	006,721	0,005,976	08.68	038
Dakotas	01,283,419	0,424,894	0,167,972	034,908	015,120	0,172,944	11.70	035
Illinois	06,485,280	2,522,373	1,171,381	287,931	170,452	0,412,043	18.17	032
Arizona	00,334,162	0,117,014	0,084,742	005,651	002,972	0,007,210	07.36	031
Washington	01,356,621	0,283,709	0,097,418	040,020	017,738	0,077,497	20.30	028
Maryland	01,449,661	0,602,587	0,219,530	161,287	044,055	0,108,303	34.07	027
Ohio	05,759,394	2,291,793	0,843,856	399,045	105,753	0,404,187	22.02	026
Idaho	00,431,866	0,135,386	0,017,947	011,373	005,682	0,012,257	12.59	021
Oregon	00,783,389	0,179,468	0,049,728	030,381	015,635	0,034,557	25.60	020
Iowa	02,404,021	0,937,334	0,262,513	199,036	044,939	0,209,053	26.02	018
Minnesota	02,387,125	0,931,388	0,415,664	059,576	028,156	0,346,577	09.40	009
Michigan	03,668,412	1,181,431	0,572,117	144,094	049,766	0,235,984	16.40	008
Pennsylvania	08,720,017	4,114,527	1,830,532	427,509	194,262	1,125,104	15.10	008
Utah	00,449,396	0,280,848	0,010,000	001,848	001,305	0,005,339	01.10	008
Nevada	00,077,407	0,016,145	0,008,742	000,777	000,356	0,002,413	07.01	006
Wisconsin	02,632,067	1,162,032	0,594,836	063,331	020,425	0,380,689	07.20	006
New York	10,385,227	4,315,404	2,745,552	328,250	182,443	0,669,454	11.80	003
Connecticut	01,380,631	0,724,692	0,483,834	036,181	026,243	0,140,072	08.60	001
Delaware	00,223,003	0,086,524	0,030,183	037,521	003,651	0,011,793	47.50	001
Maine	00,768,014	0,258,293	0,118,530	022,551	035,492	0,030,077	22.70	001
New Jersey	03,155,900	1,337,983	0,790,764	131,211	080,918	0,240,888	15.80	001

​United States Census of 1920; the figures of church membership are taken from the 1927 World Almanac.

Table VI should also be studied in connexion with Table VII, which gives by race, by states, and by five-year periods the number of persons lynched from 1881 through 1927. A number of states with a low Methodist-Baptist percentage which occupy relatively high positions among the lynching states are located in the West and but recently have passed through the pioneer stage where there were few courts of law. Montana is an example of this class of states. It occupies in Table VI fifteenth place among the lynching states, with a total of eighty-nine. Table VII reveals, however, that eighty-five of the eighty-nine lynchings occurred in the period between 1882 and 1903, when the state was first being generally opened up, and that only four lynchings have taken place in Montana during the past twenty-four years.

Colorado is another case in point. Sixty-eight lynchings give it sixteenth place among the lynching states—but sixty-four of these lynchings occurred prior to 1904 and only four since 1903. Fifty-six of the fifty-eight lynchings in Nebraska were staged prior to 1904; fifty-one of the fifty-five in Kansas; forty-one of the forty-nine in California; thirty-seven of the forty-one in Wyoming; thirty-four of the thirty-eight in New Mexico; all of the thirty-five in the Dakotas; all of the ​thirty-one in Arizona; twenty-six of the twenty-eight in Washington; nineteen of the twenty-one in Idaho; six of the nine in Minnesota; seven of the eight in Utah; five of the six in Nevada; and all six in Wisconsin. When these figures are compared with the records of such states as Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, and other states with continuously bad records for lynching, it seems that the connexion between lynching and religion in the Southern and border states is closer than would appear on the surface.

Table VII indicates the sore spots of lynching in the United States, where lynching has continued despite the puncturing of the myth that this crime is necessary for the protection of white womanhood and where there is no possible justification such as existed in the early days of frontier life. The picture presented in this fashion is clear enough to necessitate no verbal elaboration.

There was once a general conviction that most if not all lynchings were in expiation of sex crimes committed by Negroes upon white women. Within the past decade, however, that belief has been so thoroughly shown to be without foundation in fact that no reasonably well-informed or intelligent person is longer led astray by ​it. As we have already seen, charges of rape or attempted rape have been industriously circulated by lynchers not only for the purpose of avoiding punishment for their crime but to gain approval of their action. Cutler, a careful student, found that during the period of twenty-two years which he studied, 1882–1903, of 2060 Negroes lynched only 707 were charged with "the crime of rape, either attempted, alleged, or actually committed."^[1] Charges of murder ranked first, with 783 lynchings; rape was second; "minor offenses" caused the lynching of 208 Negroes; arson took fourth place among alleged causes with 104 victims; theft came fifth with 101; and among other alleged causes ninety Negroes were lynched during that period for "unknown reasons."

Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reveals that of 2522 Negroes lynched during that period 900, or 35.8 per cent were charged with murder; 477, or 19.0 per cent, with rape; 303, or 12.0 per cent, died at the hands of mobs for "miscellaneous crimes"; 253, or 9.5 per cent, were charged with "crimes against the person"; which included such "offences" as striking or talking back to a white man; 237, or 9.4 per cent, were charged with attacks upon women, among which were placed ​"all cases in which press accounts state that attacks upon women were made, but in which it was not clear whether rape was alleged to have been consummated or attempted." Of the remaining 352 Negro victims, 210, or 8.3 per cent, were charged with crimes against property, and 142, or 5.6 per cent, were placed in the classification of "absence of crime," which included such things as "testifying against whites," "suing whites," "wrong man lynched," "race prejudice," and such "offences."

It may be assumed with full safety that in every case where there was the slightest intimation or suspicion of rape or attempted rape upon a white woman newspaper accounts would mention the fact. For the purpose of giving the lynchers every benefit of the doubt, let us include the 237 Negroes (9.4 per cent) lynched for "attacks upon women" with the 477 lynched for alleged rape. The greatest possible total is therefore 714 Negroes who can be charged with rape, alleged rape, attempted rape, suspicion of rape, or of offences of any other nature, no matter how slight, against a white woman, out of a total of 2522 lynched for all offences. The maximum therefore would be 28.3 per cent, or less than one in three victims. If we confine ourselves to cases where Negroes were specifically charged with rape, the number of such accusations falls to slightly less than one in five. ​

It would, however, be most unsafe to assume that lynchers, though murderers, are and always have been of unquestioned veracity. James Weldon Johnson in Current History (January 1924) succinctly warns students of the question on this point: "It should be borne in mind that a mob's accusation is not by any means equivalent to conviction, or even to an indictment for crime by a regularly constituted jury. In fact, in a number of cases in which investigators were sent to the scene of lynchings by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, their reports showed that the victim's guilt had not only not been proved, but that he was actually innocent of the crime charged." The writer goes on to dispose of the industriously circulated impression that the Negro is addicted to sex ​crimes more than any other race. He points out that in the five-year period between 1914 and 1918 of 264 Negroes lynched only twenty-eight were charged with rape. He contrasts this record with that of New York County, which is only a part of New York City, and finds "that in the single year 1917 there were 230 persons indicted for rape, of whom thirty-seven were indicted for rape in the first degree. That is, in just a part of New York City, nine more persons were indicted for rape in the first degree than there were Negroes lynched on the charge of rape throughout the entire United States in a five-year period. Not one of the thirty-seven persons indicted in New York County was a Negro."

Johnson adds the obvious but all too often ignored fact "that the evidence required by the Grand Jury of New York County to indict a person on the charge of rape must be more conclusive than the evidence required by or submitted to a lynching mob. The New York Grand Jury requires corroboration, direct or circumstantial; the unsupported word of a woman is not sufficient. The mob does not even require, in most cases, that the woman be certain as to the identity of the accused man."

Another effective answer to those who invariably connect lynchings with charges of rape is that ninety-two women have been lynched by American mobs since 1881, a number of them done to death with extreme cruelty.

​Study of the lynchings and alleged causes given for those during the period from 1918 through 1927 discloses an interesting situation as lynchers meet the growing sentiment, North and South, against lynching. Southern communities, even when isolated, have grown increasingly sensitive to criticism and condemnation under the continued outcry against the barbarity. Explosion of the myth that rape causes lynching, and the tendency to investigation of the facts, both by organizations interested in the subject, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has done the most notable and extensive work in this field, and by newspapers, have tended to cause less frequent and brazen assignment of petty offences as reasons for mob murders.

There has been noted, too, a growing scepticism regarding charges by women of rape or attempted rape. Within recent years there have been several cases where investigation proved that women have raised charges of rape by Negroes to cover their own misdeeds or when hysterical, or excited by newspaper or other reports of alleged attacks upon other women. In New Jersey in 1927, for example, a man was killed while riding in his automobile with his wife, who declared to the police that two Negro hold-up men had murdered him as he sought to protect her. Shortly afterwards the woman and her lover were indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison for the murder.

​In June 1927, at Hickory Grove, South Carolina, a young married woman of twenty claimed that "a tall, yellow Negro" had attempted to assault her as she was picking blackberries. The Columbia, South Carolina Record reported that York County "was stirred to a boiling point again today . . . a crowd of several hundred men . . . are searching the countryside in an effort to find the Negro . . . feeling running high." The Columbia State supplied the sequel the following day: "After spending yesterday in the grip of a feverish excitement that spread to all parts of York County, resulting from the assertion of a young married woman that an attempt at criminal assault had been made on her by a strange Negro, the Hickory Grove community today returned to its accustomed calm. . . . The opinion, beginning yesterday morning and gaining headway in the afternoon, that there was absolutely nothing to the assault story, had today crystallized into settled conviction, the general opinion appears to be that the assault story had as its excuse . . . no hallucination or an hysterical imagination. It must be accounted for on other grounds . . . ! The Hickory Grove Hoax . . . has passed into history." A prominent South Carolina attorney adds significantly in a letter to the writer: "One has to read between the lines to gather why it is so referred to."

Ray Stannard Baker in Following the Color Line relates how the notorious Atlanta riot of 1906 was ​largely caused by yellow journalism in the reporting in lurid head-lines of cases of alleged criminal assault—most of which were found later to be wholly without foundation in fact. The Washington race riot of 1919 was, similarly, caused in large measure by the newspaper featuring of seven cases of alleged assault. Subsequent investigation revealed that four of the seven had been attacks on colored women by white men, and that one of the remaining three cases was that of a woman who, behind in her payments on a fur coat, sought to gain public sympathy and thus prevent impending seizure of the coat.

Revelations such as these have done much within recent years towards creation of greater scepticism on the part of intelligent newspaper editors and the general public. With this has come a growing courage and articulateness, notably among Southern white women, in repudiating the imputation that lynching is necessary for the protection of white women. These and other salutary developments have come in the wake of organized, persistent, and scientific campaigns against Judge Lynch, notably by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Interracial Commission. The most significant results of such efforts have been a gratifying growth of public sentiment against lynching and a downward trend of the number of victims. Against these encouraging signs are balanced greater efforts to conceal lynchings in remote ​districts of the South, and a tendency falsely to allege grave offences instead of brazenly proclaiming lynching for exceedingly petty offences.

A survey of lynching and the causes assigned for lynchings since 1918 will indicate this changing psychology. In 1919 eighty-three persons were lynched, of which number twenty-seven, or 32.5 per cent, were accused of murder. Fourteen, or 16.8 per cent, of the victims were charged with rape, while five others were accused of attempted rape. Combining the two latter groups, nineteen, or but 22.8 per cent, of the total of eighty-three were charged with sex offences. Two other Negroes were lynched in 1919 for "intimacy with white women," but these victims, even if guilty, could hardly be charged with rape or attempted rape.

Twenty-four of the sixty-five persons lynched in 1920, or 36.9 per cent, were charged with murder; fifteen, or 23.0 per cent, were accused of attacks on women. There were six victims in Florida when a prosperous, respected Negro physician, a duly qualified voter, sought to vote in the presidential election of that year. Among other causes assigned for the murder of the remaining twenty victims of 1920 were "jumping labour contract," "insanity," and "assaulting white man."

In 1921 charges of attacks upon women as justification of lynchings exceeded in number those for murder. Nineteen or 29.6 per cent of the year's total of sixty-​four were charged with attacks, one was accused of attempted assault, and eighteen, or 28.1 per cent, were charged with murder.

Judge Lynch claimed sixty-one victims in 1922, of whom twenty (32.7 per cent) were charged with assault); three (4.9 per cent) with attempted assault; nine (14.7 per cent) with murder; and the remainder with charges ranging from "improper relations with white woman" to "a Fourth of July celebration."

Seven of twenty-eight persons lynched in 1923, or exactly 25.0 per cent, were charged with sex offences. Three were killed by mobs for murder, one for "associating with white women," another for "accusing white men of stealing," another for "frightening children," and one for "remaining in town where Negroes were not allowed"; and a colored woman in Mississippi was lynched by a mob "in search of another."

In 1924 the annual toll of victims dropped sharply to sixteen, of whom five (31.2 per cent) were charged with rape; four (25.0 per cent) with attempted rape; and three (18.7 per cent) with murder.

Eighteen persons were lynched in 1925, five (27.7 per cent) being accused of rape, and eight (44.4 per cent) of murder. Of the latter, one was seized at Clarksdale, Mississippi, and lynched as he left the court-house where a jury had acquitted him of the murder with which he was charged; two others were insane.

The tendency noted during the years 1921 onward ​to ascribe rape and more serious offences was most noticeable during the time that the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was pending in the national Congress.

Out of thirty-four victims in 1926 eight (23.5 per cent) were charged with rape; sixteen (47.0 per cent) with murder, of whom one had been acquitted and three others seemed likely to be freed; one was accused of "suspicion in connection with an attack upon a white woman."

Four (27.2 per cent) of eighteen victims in 1927 were accused of attacks upon women; one (5.5 per cent) with attempted attack; seven (38.8 per cent) with murder.

To summarize, within the last nine years, 1919–27, there was a total of 387 lynchings, an average per year of forty-three. One hundred and fifteen of the victims, or 29.7 per cent, were charged with murder; ninety-seven, or 25.06 per cent, were accused of rape; and fifteen, or 3.87 per cent, with attempted rape. Even though the two latter classes are combined to include every case where a crime was connected with sex, the result is only 29.93 per cent. Thus even when the statements of the mobs, who have acted as judge, jury, and executioner and destroyed most of the evidence, are accepted, less than one in three of nearly four hundred victims have even been accused of sex crimes.

The most prejudice-ridden lyncher would not contend that a Negro accused of murder would not be fairly ​tried and executed by the law if he was guilty. Yet it is seen that between 1889 and 1918 exactly 900, or 35.8 per cent, of 2522 Negroes lynched were charged with murder; 115 or 387 victims since 1918 were accused of the same crime. Accusations of murder, like those of rape, have been fairly constant in proportion to the total number of lynchings during all the recorded history of lynching. Thus, on the sole ground of efficiency, the figures demonstrate the failure of lynching to end the very crimes against which its apologists declare it to be aimed. The United States, boastful of its modernity and ruthless discarding of archaic systems, has clung to this system which, irrespective of its sadism, its slaughter of women and innocent victims, its dehumanizing brutality, has consistently failed in the very objects for which it has been perpetuated and defended.

1. Four thousand nine hundred and fifty-one persons, an annual average of 107.6, were lynched during the forty-six years 1882–1927, in forty-four states and Alaska. Of that number 1438 were white and 3513 colored. Seventy-six Negro women and sixteen white women were included among the victims.

2. There has been a notable annual decrease in the number of persons lynched, with occasional exceptions, since the turn of the century. The average per year dur​ing the past ten years, 1918–27, dropped to 45.4, against an average of 87.9 during 1908–17, and of 96.6 for 1898–1907.

3. One border state, Kentucky, and nine states of the far South—Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina—have between them staged slightly less than three-fourths—74.166 per cent—of all lynchings within the past forty-six years.

4. The curve of lynchings has followed almost exactly a trend diametrically opposite to the percentage of foreign-born in the total populations of various states.

5. The homicide rate per hundred thousand inhabitants of cities in states where most lynchings have occurred follows roughly the same curves as lynching in these states and sections.

6. Lynchings generally are numerous or few in proportion to the percentage of Methodists and Baptists in the total church membership of the various states; less exactly there appears a relationship between the percentage of church members in the total population and that of lynchings. Lynchings appear to decrease in somewhat inverse proportion to the number of communicants of the less emotional and primitive denominations.

7. The once generally held belief that most if not all lynchings were connected with sex crimes is not borne ​out by the facts, or even by the causes of lynchings alleged by the mobs themselves.

8. Northern and Western states have almost completely abandoned lynching with the passing of frontier conditions. Only the Southern states, and especially those of the far South, more or less regularly resort to the practice.