Rope & Faggot/Chapter 1

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In Florida some years ago several lynchings and the burning of the Negro section of the town followed the attempt of a Negro pharmacist to vote in a national election. One morning shortly afterwards I walked along the road which led from the beautiful little town to the spot where five Negroes had been burned. Three shining-eyed, healthy, cleanly children, headed for school, approached me. As I neared them, the eldest, a ruddy-cheeked girl of nine or ten, asked if I was going to the place where "the niggers" had been killed. I told her I might stop and see the spot. Animatedly, almost as joyously as though the memory were of Christmas morning or the circus, she told me, her slightly younger companions interjecting a word here and there or nodding vigorous assent, of "the fun we had burning the niggers."

One need not be a sentimentalist to feel that such warping of the minds of Southern children is by far the worst aspect of lynching. All parents appreciate the difficulty of avoiding in home and in school the inculcation of tendencies towards falsehood, deception, and dishonesty in the minds of their children. A careless ​word of approbation or reproof may find root in the mind of a child, wholly without the knowledge or intent of mother or father or teacher, and bear unwholesome fruit many years later. Psychologists have established that from birth the human mind passes through all racial experience—from savagery through barbarism and upwards to what we term civilization precisely as the human body from conception to birth passes through the reptile, fish, and animal stages.

Imagine, then, the mind of a normal child in a Southern community. Its parents throw about him all the protection and give to him all the guidance and tender care which parents are accustomed to give. A crime is committed or it is alleged that one has been committed. In law-abiding communities it is bad enough to have the crime and the trial of the accused discussed in homes and in the press, worse if there is added the effect of an execution. But in a community where a lynching or perhaps a burning occurs, where thousands of participants and spectators include mothers and children of tender age among them, where there is morbid scrambling for charred bones or links of the chain which held the victim to his funeral pyre, where leaders of the mob are exalted as men of courage and action—the effect upon young minds is almost too appalling to be contemplated. It is entirely within the range of possibilities that such experiences may result in arrestation. In the unconscious of these immature minds are thus ​sown the seeds of lynching as a panacea which will correct all ills and especially those emanating from Negro sources. Primitive impulses to vengeance of violent character upon those whom the possessors of such minds do not like are thus nourished and form one step to further mob murder. Lynchings justified and extolled, lynchers exalted as men of bravery and forthrightness, efforts at punishment of the lynchers blocked and derided—such frequently repeated acts cannot fail to shape young minds in moulds which seem destined later to demand more victims.

Nearly a century of lynching and nearly five thousand mob murders within less than half a century have done an incalculable harm to American minds and particularly in those states where lynchings have been most frequent. Some of the effect can be seen in the frequency with which the phrase is heard—often from the lips of normal, law-abiding people even in the North and West—"he ought to be strung up to a tree."

Pavlov, the Russian psychologist, found that each succeeding generation of the rats he was observing went with fewer lessons at the sound of a bell to a fixed feeding place. Culturally, something of the same reaction to the use of mobbism affects certain Americans as, genetically, affected Pavlov's rats. Approximately similar conditioned responses actuate the human beings and the animals—the bell acted as an excitant for the ​latter; for the former a crime, real or fancied, by a Negro against a white person served and yet serves as a stimulus to lynching.

Generation after generation of Southern whites have been handicapped and stunted in their mental and moral growth by such a situation. They have had it constantly dinned into their ears from pulpit and press, in the home and school and on the street, that Negroes are given to sex crimes, that only lynching can protect white women, that unmentionably horrible deeds can be prevented only through the use of extreme brutality. Added to this is the belief that any white man, no matter how inept, criminal, or depraved, is infinitely superior to the "best Negro who ever lived." It is a well-known fact that any idea, no matter how unsound, if repeated often enough and in a sufficiently assured manner, is eventually adopted by the mob as its own. One can estimate the long and difficult climb the Southern white child, living in an atmosphere where dissenting opinion is ruthlessly suppressed, must make to attain even a reasonably intelligent attitude towards lynching and the Negro.

William Graham Sumner in his Folkways described succinctly the brutalizing effect which lynchings and burnings have had:

Even though there be some who feel that Sumner was over-optimistic in his certainty that torture had been wholly abandoned, one can agree readily with his picture of the self-inflicted injury to the lyncher. With the exception of the larger centres, and even in some of those, there exists in practically the entire South the possibility of a lynching at any time as a result of generation after generation of mob violence. Here are to be found the most depressing examples of the crowd as defined by Professor Ross, of the University of Wisconsin—"essentially atavistic and sterile . . . the lowest form of human associations." Reaction, ignorance, unrestrained passions, resistance to progress, wild beast ​joy in causing pain, disease, poverty—these are but a few of the items which lynching has caused to those who practised them. The description of the effect of slavery which Winwood Reade used in The Martyrdom of Man applies with equal force to the effect of oppression as represented by mob-law—"the Fathers of the country ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge."

Certain factors which have been largely contributory to the low mental estate of the parts of the country where lynching has flourished are treated in later chapters. These include the influence of evangelical religions, the use by unscrupulous politicians of mythical fear of "Negro domination," the important role of sex, and the strenuous efforts to keep the Negro ignorant and intimidated that he may the more easily be exploited. The present chapter is devoted to an attempt to point out some of the factors which have created and are perpetuating the psychology of the lyncher, actual or potential.

Obviously, the lynching states have suffered most from derelict officials. Until very recent times, and in most of the South, even today, no lyncher has ever needed to feel the slightest apprehension regarding punishment or even the annoyance of an investigation. Even in the few instances where there were arrests and trials, the accused usually had friends on the jury, if not fellow lynchers; in others he knew that jurors and court officials ​were in sympathy with him or else dared not press the case too vigorously.

Some years ago I reported for a New York newspaper a trial in Alabama of a number of men charged with the lynching of two Negroes. Several court officials freely admitted the guilt of the defendants, but accurately foretold early acquittals. "Nobody around here is ever going to vote for convicting a white man for killing a nigger," one of them told me. "Why go to the expense, then, of holding a trial?" I asked, and received the reply: "What with all the talk up North about lynching, we've got to make some show—we're expecting a lot of money to be invested in business down here when they finish the Muscle Shoals dam."

A second ingredient in lynching-psychology is the human love of excitement. Sinclair Lewis and countless of his imitators have painted in leaden colours the Gopher Prairies of the West, but most of these towns are highly diverting when compared with the average small town in the South. The endless routine of drab working-hours and more drab home life, dominated by a relentlessly vitriolic and ignorant ministry, has little of excitement in it. There is much more than levity in the statement of H. L. Mencken that lynching often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra, and other diversions common to large communities. It is not at all unlikely that, whatever their other shortcomings, the radio and the cheap motor car ​have been and will be not inconsiderable factors in diverting attention from the Negro and in lessening the use of the rope and the torch.

Third among the factors in lynch-law is the human unwillingness to form new ideas, no matter how much evidence is offered regarding the soundness of the new ideas or the falsity of the old. Its general backwardness makes the rural South more susceptible to this malady than any other part of the country. The average Southerner boasts that no one else "knows" the Negro as he does. Yet there are few white people in the South who on hearing the word "Negro" can avoid thinking of but one of three types—or a combination of them. One of these is the happy-go-lucky, improvident, shiftless Negro; the second, a habitual criminal of unrestrained appetites, kept within bounds only by extreme brutality; the third is a humble, "befo' de wah" type, who knows "how to stay in his place." Towards these there are a variety of attitudes, ranging all the way from affection or amused superiority to loathing and extreme fear. Negroes who do not fit snugly and instantly into this limited number of pigeon-holes simply are beyond the comprehension of the average Southern white and they invariably excite resentment or are dismissed as being "unusual" and therefore not worthy of classification. Tenaciously do these older stereotypes cling to life. Continuously do they furnish material for writers of the Octavus Roy Cohen and Irvin Cobb brand of humour. ​They serve as insulation to understanding of the Negro and his aims, perpetuate stereotyped thinking and utterances on the most perplexing of American problems, and lead to closed minds, with violence all too often the answer to even the most temperate statements of obvious truths.

But these are the more evident aspects of the lyncher's mind. There are others more subtle and more dangerous. It is little realized that lynching is much more an expression of Southern fear of Negro progress than of Negro crime. No sane man would doubt for a moment that there would be far less lynching if all Negroes could neatly be pigeon-holed into one of the three classifications mentioned, as a buffoon, a criminal, or a menial. One of the most active stimulants of race hatred is the advance—particularly economic—which the Negro has made during the years since the Civil War. There are, of course, many whites in the South who are glad to see this progress, but, unfortunately for the South and for the Negro, there are many whites who bitterly resent his emergence as an individual or as a group from the lowest economic, educational, and cultural position. To quote Mr. Mencken again: "Ku Kluxry is the Southern poor white's answer to the progress of the emerging Negro, once his equal and now threatening to become his superior."

It is not difficult to imagine the inner thoughts of the poor white as he sees members of a race he has been ​taught by tradition, and by practically every force of public opinion with which he comes into contact, to believe inferior making progress greater than his own. Here, for example, we have a group of poverty-burdened cotton-mill workers or equally poor farmers. In the same town lives a Negro doctor or business man or farmer with a comfortable home, an automobile, a bank account, a radio of the latest model, and well-dressed wife and children. The poor white lives in a shabby house, he has a difficult time in paying for a most meagre living, his wife and children are poorly clad. Physical vio lence upon the person of the member of the "inferior" race who has dared prove himself not so inferior is the sole balm for the poor white's wounded self-esteem. Out of no more startling circumstances than these have arisen lynchings, not necessarily against the prosperous Ne groes, though against them often enough, particularly since the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. That resentment has motivated many men to join a lynching mob. The tendency to direct mob violence against successful Negroes has been especially noticeable during the past ten years of lynching.

There is, however, an even more potent reason for the resort to physical violence in the South. This factor has not often been considered, but upon reflection it will perhaps explain in part, not only lynching mobs, but the general truculence and belligerency of the South. Briefly, it is that the South, from the very beginning of ​the Negro problem, has been on the defensive and has been defending an indefensible position. Even while the Constitution was being framed, the representatives of Southern planters waged a bitter fight for the retention of slavery, though Jefferson and Madison and Paine saw the inescapable dangers of temporizing with the evil. From the adoption of the Constitution to the Civil War the energy of Southern leaders, headed by the brilliant Calhoun, was almost solely devoted to the losing battle for the maintenance of human bondage. The Bible was frequently called upon in defence of the system, Abraham's ownership of slaves, and the proscription of covetousness toward a neighbour's manservant or maidservant, his ox or his ass, being cited as approval from Heaven of slavery. Press, pulpit, the schoolroom, and every organ of public opinion were made servile and contributory to retention of the system, which was economically unsound, morally indefensible, at odds with the spirit of the age and of the country, and certain to do irremediable harm to those who profited most from it. Yet the more the tide turned against slavery, the more the articulate South defended it.

Charles and Mary Beard in The Rise of American Civilization give an interesting picture of this energetic defence by the planting South:

Winwood Reade in The Martyrdom of Man characterizes the South's attitude of defence in these words:

​Later we shall see how the slave states met the failure of their verbal defence of slavery with lynching, defended by charges of sex crimes. To understand the psychology back of this answer of force where logic and ethics failed, one needs only to consider a familiar superstition—the notion that all red-headed people are possessed of fiery tempers and are always ready to engage in physical combat. Neither biologists nor anyone else has found in the physical or mental constitution of red-headed human beings any substances which make them invariably different in temper and combativeness from those of more ordinary hair-colour; but psychologists have rightly assumed that the temper and the pugnacity are a defence mechanism against such derogatory appellations as "carrot—" or "brick-top." The assertiveness, the refusal to listen to arguments opposed to their own beliefs, the pugnaciousness of Southern congressmen, the indulgence in lynching and other forms of mob violence and intolerance spring beyond all doubt in large measure from the same sort of emotions.

The Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves increased rather than diminished the need for such defence. Defeated both in logic and in the test of armed strength the South obviously could not find sufficient solace in sentimental moping over "the lost cause." Despite preoccupation with expansion and the gathering of wealth, there was a large body of Northern opinion which severely criticized the South's bloody Recon​struction Period, its lynching, its refusal to accept the verdict of Appomattox. The Ku Klux Klan, both of the seventies and of recent years, is a concrete example of the working of the defence mechanism in its resort to physical violence. Aware that all peaceful efforts to suppress the Negro are proving increasingly unsuccessful, the lyncher hopes by increased savagery to achieve the desired goal. It is this attitude which creates what Frank Tannenbaum in Darker Phases of the South terms "the South's emotional fixation on the Negro." Having created the mental picture of the Negro as inferior, dangerously addicted to sex crimes, and likely to burst into unbelievably horrible activities if pressure upon him is slackened in the least, the South has become the quailed victim of its own selfishly created fear, which is rooted in this defence mechanism. The result clearly has worked for the almost complete closing of many Southern minds to facts or reason. One can argue until one is blue in the face that the figures do not substantiate the charge that most lynchings are for protection of white women; that even if they were, lynching has been ineffective, as the percentage of lynchings for alleged rape has remained practically constant throughout the past half-century; that white women of the South have vigorously repudiated lynching as necessary for their protection; that lynching, among its other faults, has brutalized the lyncher and probably added to cases where rape or attempted rape actually oc​curred, by spreading widely stories of such cases and stirring abnormal persons to attempt the same thing. One can do all this, but for a depressingly high percentage of Southern whites, and even of those who are not Southern, the efforts will be fruitless. Too tightly have their minds been bound by the old prejudices and crowd-mindedness.

In his excellent The Behavior of Crowds Everett Dean Martin points out that only through liberation from prejudices can come release from crowd-mindedness. Lynching, disfranchisement, "Jim Crow" cars, disgraceful school facilities for Negroes, blindly bitter press and pulpit, court injustice, and a multitude of other methods of keeping the Negro "in his place" have done incalculable harm to the white South in more rigidly fastening upon it a moral, spiritual, and intellectual sterility and blindness. In creating a psychology of oppression of the Negro it has hamstrung itself. Not for the salvation of the Negro, but for its own sake must the South break away from its deadening mental inertia, acquire a vigorous intellectual curiosity which will smash or at least crack the shell of its crowd-mindedness. Fortunately for the white South, for the Negro, and for the United States, there are signs at the University of North Carolina, to a lesser degree at other educational centres, and here and there among individuals, of this new intellectual curiosity, which may save even the most hopelessly backward of the Southern communities. It ​seems to be a race between light and darkness, a battle between prejudice and intelligence, to see whether the lyncher, the opponent of enlightenment, and the narrow-minded sectionalist can resist the forces from without and from within which may break up the older thought-patterns and save the South from itself. Lynching is but one of the symptoms of intellectual and moral decay resulting from the closed mind which the South has assumed on many subjects. There is found the apotheosis—and the virus colours most of American thought on the race question of—James Harvey Robinson's characterization that ". . . most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do." Judge Lynch's absolutism will end completely only when open minds and scientific and health-giving scepticism replace not only the South's but America's and the white world's present attitude of snobbism, bigotry, and greed on the questions of colour and race.