Rope & Faggot/Chapter 2

A study of the figures of lynchings reveals immediately two contradictory facts. The first of these is encouraging—the rather steady decrease by decades of the total number of victims of Judge Lynch. From 1890 to 1900 there were 1665 persons lynched; from 1900 to 1910 there were 921; from 1910 to 1920 there were 840; and since 1920 through 1927 there were 304. The averages, therefore, for the four divisions of time, successively, are thus 166.5, 92.1, 84.0, and 38.0.

Against this gratifying decrease in number of victims is the greatly aggravated brutality, often extending to almost unbelievable torture of the victim, which has marked lynchings within recent years. This may be attributed partly to the effect of the war—the lust for blood and cruelty which the war did not wholly satiate doubtless stimulated the increase of burnings, mutilations, and other forms of mob sadism. On the other hand, it is entirely safe to assume that had not the war occurred, there would have been some increase in torture in lynching. Indications of this were seen long before the war in Europe began or was seriously thought possible. It came as the inevitable result of many years ​of lynching—the search of the mob for new thrills when relatively painless hanging or shooting no longer sufficed to appease it. As the user of drugs demands increasing quantities of the opiate upon which he relies for excitation, so does the lyncher demand savagery—always the story of physical cruelty in its effect upon those who practise it.

These harsher methods were seldom practised until the new century had begun. Isolated burnings at the stake, it is true, were known as far back as 1835, but these were so unusual that they created nation-wide discussion and indignation when they occurred. The public conscience had not then become inured to such things. In the Forum Walter Hines Page accurately foretold and warmed of the danger to the South of unchecked lynching when, in 1893, he said that "the great danger is not in the first violation of the law, nor in the crime itself, but in the danger that Southern public sentiment under the stress of this phase of the race problem will lose the true perspective of civilization."

How true this has been, not only for the South, but for all of the United States, can be seen by examination of the history of lynching during recent years, remembering at the same time the almost unbroken calm with which such conditions have been accepted by all save a few. In the ten years from January 1, 1918, through 1927, American mobs lynched 454 persons. Of these, 38 were white, and 416 were coloured. Eleven of the ​Negro victims were women, three of them at the time of lynching with child.

Forty-two of the victims were burned alive. The bodies of sixteen others were burned after death. Eight of the victims were beaten to death or cut to pieces. Sixty-six of 454 lynchings, therefore, were executed with a bestiality unknown even in the most remote and uncivilized parts of the world. Of the sixty-six cases—instances of drowning or of tying the body to an automobile and dragging it through the streets are not included—four were of white victims, three burnings and one beating to death. The remaining sixty-two victims were Negroes. Thus of 416 Negroes lynched within the past ten years sixty-two, or 14.9 per cent—a little less than one out of each seven—were done to death with abnormal savagery. Four of thirty-eight white victims, or 10.5 per cent, suffered the same fate.

The states in which these exhibitions of sadism have occurred are given below in the numerical order of such events.

As would be expected, the same states which lead in number of lynchings occupy front rank in brutality of execution. Texas mobs lynched fifty-five persons during these ten years; sixteen, or 29.0 per cent, with sadistic cruelty. Of thirty-four victims Arkansas mobs put five of them to death with similar abnormal viciousness; Florida abused eight of the fifty-six lynched in that state; Mississippi burned alive eight of her sixty-nine victims; thirteen of Georgia's eighty-four victims were lynched otherwise than by the conventional hanging or shooting.

Figures alone could not possibly tell the entire story, however. Let us consider a few authentic and thoroughly corroborated instances of the present-day methods of American mobs. Some of the stories are taken from reliable newspapers, frequently from journals published in the state where the events occurred. These obviously can be relied upon not to overstate the facts. In others the facts are from the reports of competent investiga​tors; in a number from officials of the states in which the lynchings occurred.

Henry Lowry, a Negro of Nodena, had been held in virtual peonage for more than two years by a white landowner. When Lowry, on Christmas Day, 1920, demanded payment of wages due him, he was cursed and struck by the landlord and shot by the landlord's son. Lowry thereupon drew his own gun and killed the landlord and his daughter, who stood near him. Escaping to Texas, he was arrested. The Governor of Arkansas assured him protection from mob violence and a fair trial; so Lowry waived whatever rights he possessed involving interstate rendition. The two Arkansas officers sent to bring him back from Texas ignored the Governor's orders to take Lowry by the shortest route to Little Rock for safe keeping and took him by way of New Orleans and Mississippi. At Sardis, Mississippi, a mob, waiting and obviously advised of the route, "overpowered" the officers. Lowry in their possession, word was sent to other members of the mob who were dining comfortably at the fashionable Peabody Hotel at Memphis. The newspapers were advised in time to issue early afternoon "extras" giving full details as to time, place, and other arrangements for the forthcoming lynching.

Ralph Roddy, a reporter for the Memphis Press, a daily newspaper, was sent to cover the event. His story, ​appearing in the Press of January 27, 1921, bore the head: "KILL NEGRO BY INCHES." Here is what Roddy saw and wrote:

William Pickens, in the Nation of March 23, 1921, told of one additional note of consideration shown Lowry by his murderers: " . . . the Negro said never a word ​except when the mob brought his wife and little daughter to see him burning." Despite the fact that the plans for the execution had been widely published hours before the actual burning, not only was no attempt made to prevent the lynching, but Sheriff Dwight H. Blackwood of Mississippi County, in which Nodena is located, was quoted by the Press to the effect that "Nearly every man, woman and child in our county wanted the Negro lynched. When public sentiment is that way, there isn't much chance left for the officers. . . ."

"She was not sure, but thought he looked like the one who had attacked her," the Memphis News-Scimitar said of the attempted identification by a white girl in hospital when J. P. Ivy, a Negro, was shown to her in September 1925. That slender connexion was sufficient for a mob of Mississippians who, on Sunday, September 20, thus disported themselves. J. L. Roulhac, a reporter for the News-Scimitar, tells the story:

In the same issue of the News-Scimitar was printed another story which reveals the truth of Walter Hines Page's warning of three decades before the burning:

Appropriately enough, Bradshaw's statement is captioned: "MOB MEMBER LAUGHS AT PROBE."

Had the Governor of Mississippi or any other officials wanted really to take action against the perpetrators of this horrible affair, they need not have depended upon the officers of whom Bradshaw spoke. The News-Scimitar published three "exclusive" photographs of the lynching, in which the faces of at least a hundred members of the mob are easily distinguishable. Yet the coroner's jury returned the expected verdict that Ivy had come to his death "at the hands of a mob, the members of which are unknown."

"Southern chivalry" draws no line of sex. An unscrupulous farmer in south Georgia refused to pay a Negro hand wages due him. A few days later the farmer was shot and killed. Not finding the Negro suspected of the murder, mobs began to kill every Negro who could even ​remotely be connected with the victim and the alleged slayer. One of these was a man named Hayes Turner, whose offence was that he knew the alleged slayer, a not altogether remarkable circumstance, since both men worked for the dead farmer. To Turner's wife, within one month of accouchement, was brought the news of her husband's death. She cried out in her sorrow, pouring maledictions upon the heads of those who had thrust widowhood upon her so abruptly and cruelly.

Word of her threat to swear out warrants for the arrest of her husband's murderers came to them. "We'll teach the damn' nigger wench some sense," was their answer, as they began to seek her. Fearful, her friends secreted the sorrowing woman on an obscure farm, miles away. Sunday morning, with a hot May sun beating down, they found her. Securely they bound her ankles together and, by them, hanged her to a tree. Gasoline and motor oil were thrown upon her dangling clothes; a match wrapped her in sudden flames. Mocking, ribald laughter from her tormentors answered the helpless woman's screams of pain and terror. "Mister, you ought to've heard the nigger wench howl!" a member of the mob boasted to me a few days later as we stood at the place of Mary Turner's death.

The clothes burned from her crisply toasted body, in which, unfortunately, life still lingered, a man stepped towards the woman and, with his knife, ripped open the abdomen in a crude Cæsarean operation. Out tum​bled the prematurely born child. Two feeble cries it gave—and received for answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form. Under the tree of death was scooped a shallow hole. The rope about Mary Turner's charred ankles was cut, and swiftly her body tumbled into its grave. Not without a sense of humour or of appropriateness was some member of the mob. An empty whisky-bottle, quart size, was given for headstone. Into its neck was stuck a half-smoked cigar—which had saved the delicate nostrils of one member of the mob from the stench of burning human flesh.

On a spring morning of 1925 a sheriff and three deputies set forth from Aiken, South Carolina, to arrest a Negro thirteen miles from town who was suspected of selling whisky. The four reached the house and found Sam Lowman away at the mill having corn ground into meal. Bertha Lowman, his twenty-seven-year-old daughter, and her mother, seeing the white men approach, started to enter the house. Coloured women in the South never feel at ease when white men prowl about their homes. The four white men, dressed in plain clothes and wearing no insignia of their official positions, ran to surround the house. The sheriff struck Bertha Lowman in the mouth with his fist. Her mother started to her daughter's rescue—and was shot through the heart by ​one of the deputy sheriffs. A son and a nephew, ploughing in a field near by, heard the screams and shot, and rushed to the rescue of the two women and several young children who were within the house. In the firing which followed, the sheriff was killed, and Bertha Lowman, her brother, and her cousin were dangerously wounded. According to their own testimony, the three deputies swore that none of the Negroes was in a position to shoot the sheriff—it seemed more than likely that he met death from the gun of one of his own men.

The dead sheriff and his deputies were all members of the Ku Klux Klan. Under its guidance the mob spirit flamed high, and the trial of the three Negroes was farcical—the two boys were sentenced to death and Bertha Lowman to life imprisonment. A Negro lawyer of Columbia, dismayed at the scant chance given the three for life, successfully appealed their cases to the Supreme Court of South Carolina. That tribunal promptly reversed the lower court, ordered a new trial, and rebuked the trial judge, who, among other things, had apologized for the lawyers assigned by the court to defend the Negroes, explaining that they had been obliged by the court to defend them, and not by their own wishes.

A white lawyer of courage and decency from Spartanburg aided the Negro lawyer from Columbia at the new trial. So excellently was their case prepared and so flimsy the evidence against the three defendants that ​the judge was forced, fearing reversal, to grant a motion for a directed verdict of not guilty for one of the defendants. He was promptly re-arrested on a charge of minor importance and once again lodged in jail.

To the office of an Aiken attorney, recently elected to the state legislature, hurried a number of men. The result of that conference was seen when many men within the hour began hurrying towards Aiken, winter home of wealthy and socially prominent Northerners, from points even as far distant as Columbia, ninety miles away. About three o'clock in the morning a mob "overpowered" the jailer and the sheriff, who explained that he, wholly unaware of anything unusual in the air, had "just happened" to get up from a comfortable bed and walk to the jail. The three Negroes were taken to a tourist camp on the outskirts of Aiken, where some two thousand men and women were gathered. Sudden hope sprang into the breasts of the three victims as they were lined up, freed from their bonds, and told to run. Off they started—and a volley of bullets was pumped into their backs. The mob laughed loudly at the clever joke.

The two boys, one twenty-one and the other seventeen, fell dead. Bertha Lowman had many wounds, but none fatal. She squirmed in her pain over the cleared space of the tourist camp, upon which with faint brilliance the moon shone through the trees. The shifting target and the half-light cost the mob many bullets. "We had to ​fire more than fifty shots at her before one of them stopped her," was the story of one of the lynchers. A spasmodic quiver—and the crowd, its work done, went home to their beds.

". . . Death at the hands of parties unknown," said the coroner's jury. Investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People disclosed that the charge against Sam Lowman of whisky-selling was without foundation; that it had been made in an effort to embarrass the owner of the land Lowman rented; that the sheriff and the jailer had not only not resisted the mob, but had assisted in the lynching, as had members of the South Carolina legislature, relatives of the then Governor, lawyers, farmers, business men, and politicians, and particularly members of the Ku Klux Klan. To the Governor was furnished a full statement of the facts, with names and addresses of the lynchers. The New York World, furnished also with the information, sent one of its best reporters, Oliver H. P. Garrett, to the scene and for thirty days featured the story on its front page. Other newspapers, notably several in South Carolina led by R. Charlton Wright of the Columbia Record, waged an insistent campaign for indictments and convictions. The incoming Governor, John G. Richards, promised action. In January 1927 the grand jury refused, despite the evidence, to return indictments. Governor Richards denounced the verdict ​as "a travesty upon justice" and launched a vigorous campaign—against golf-playing on Sunday!

In September 1925 a mob of Georgians, not content with murdering sane Negroes, actually broke into the state insane asylum at Milledgeville and lynched a violently insane Negro who, in one of his periodic fits of dementia, had killed one of the nurses. Julian Harris, the most courageous editor of the South in attacking evil, said of the lynching of Dixon with characteristic directness in his Columbus, Georgia, Enquirer-Sun: "We first explain to the world that the Negro is a child, and then, when he commits a heinous crime, we lynch him as if he were a Harvard professor."

Expectant mothers, children, hopelessly insane, mental defectives, innocent or guilty—American mobs of recent years have drawn the line neither in the choice of their victims nor in the sadism of their deeds of death. One can easily comprehend the truth and depth of James Weldon Johnson's observation to the effect that "lynching in the United States has resolved itself into a problem of saving black America's body and white America's soul."

Yet, however, ghastly and depressing these pictures are, there were many signs that they are exactly what might eventually be expected. Towards the end of the ​nineteenth century, when, almost imperceptibly, the number of deaths with torture became increasingly frequent, there was little concern expressed at this sinister change. Public indifference grew until such barbarities were received with but momentary comment—barbarities which would have aroused far greater condemnation had they occurred, not in the United States, but in Mexico, Soviet Russia, or China.

The roots of this sadism were long since planted in American life. James Elbert Cutler in his Lynch-Law cites only three burnings between 1830 and 1840. During the tense years between 1850 and 1860 there were nine burnings, one of them of a woman accused of poisoning her master. The number gradually increased after the Civil War, though the number recorded during the Reconstruction Period was not high in proportion to the number of victims. Cutler found burnings as follows during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth: 1884, Texas, one; 1891, Texas and Louisiana, one each; 1892, Arkansas, one; 1893, Texas, one; 1894, Kentucky, one; 1895, Texas, one; 1897, North Carolina, one; 1899, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky, one each; 1901, Kansas, one; 1902, Mississippi, three, and Arkansas, Texas, and Colorado, one each; 1903, Illinois and Delaware, one each; 1904, Georgia and Mississippi, two each.

One of the last-named cases reveals the increasing sadism which began to manifest itself more frequently ​about that time. The New York Tribune of February 8, 1904 tells of a double burning in Mississippi:

Benjamin Brawley, in A Social History of the American Negro, quotes the Vicksburg, Mississippi, Evening Post—which, obviously, can be relied upon not to add anything to the account of what actually happened—as to a new refinement introduced into the killing of Holbert and his wife—the use of corkscrews. This is the story:

One may well imagine that death, even in the form of burning at the stake, must have been welcomed gladly by the man and woman as relief from such bestiality. This is what Mississippians did, not only to Holbert, who, at most, was guilty of killing his opponent in a quarrel, but to Mrs. Holbert, who was innocent of any connexion with the murder.

Georgia staged a double burning in the same year, which aroused widespread discussion at the time. Paul Reed and Will Cato, charged with the brutal murder of a white family, had been duly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death when the mob broke into the court room, seized the prisoners, and burned them.

Here and there such episodes were repeated, mobs apparently vying with each other in devising more fiendish methods of torture. By the end of the first decade of the new century such orgies spread even as far north as Pennsylvania. At Coatesville in that state in 1911 Zach Walker, a Negro, killed a constable in a fight in which he also was severely wounded. Chained to a bed in a hospital, Walker was taken out by a mob, bed and all. Albert Jay Nock, in the American Magazine for February 1913, told how the bedstead broke; how Walker, wounded and helpless, chained to the lower half of the hospital cot, was thrown on a pile of wood, ​drenched with oil, and burned alive. "When Walker with superhuman strength," wrote Nock, "broke his bonds and tried to escape, they drove him back with pitchforks and fence rails and held him there until his body was burnt to ashes." And when a grand jury refused to indict the members of the mob, the lynchers were given an ovation.

During the same year a successful Negro farmer in Tennessee, who had by his prosperity aroused the jealousy and enmity of poor whites, was ambushed as he drove to town with his daughters to sell a load of cotton. The three were killed, the two girls by hanging and the father by shooting; the wagon was driven under the tree on which the girls' bodies hung, and fire was set to it, burning the bodies to a crisp.

Texas followed in 1912 with another burning. Dan Davis, a Negro charged with rape, was thus executed at Tyler. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch told how Davis calmly asked the mob: "I wish some of you gentlemen would be Christian enough to cut my throat." His request was in vain. Instead there was bitter disappointment, first because those entrusted with the task of starting the fire were deemed too slow, and second because not enough fuel had been provided. A few who dashed away to fetch more wood were rewarded with front-row positions.

Louisiana in December 1914 lynched three Negroes, ​one of them, an aged Negro of excellent reputation, by slow burning. Even under extreme torture he refused to confess to the murder with which he was charged. Shortly afterwards the Houston, Texas, Post reported that all three victims had been found wholly innocent of the crime.

Fifteen thousand people including the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and many women and schoolchildren, witnessed the burning of a defective charged with the murder of the wife of his employer at Waco, Texas, in 1916. Tennessee furnished two particularly loathsome burnings in 1918—one at Memphis and the other at Estill Springs.

So the ghastly story runs. The number of lynchings was decreasing, but it may well be assumed that these terrible burnings, mutilations, and deeds too horrible for further detailing even in a study of lynching are doing more moral and psychological damage to their perpetrators than a greater number of victims executed by the more humane methods of hanging or shooting. When one notes the insidious growth of brutality which has made possible such abnormal, perverted crimes during the present century, one can see that the war cannot be blamed for the record of the past ten years, when, of 454 victims of Judge Lynch, sixty-six of them were killed with some form of torture. When, further, one connects with these the floggings, tarrings and featherings, mutilations, and other forms of mob violence other ​than lynchings which have plagued the South especially, and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the United States, within recent years in the wake of the Klan, one feels justifiable apprehension for the future.