Rope & Faggot/Chapter 5

Discussion of lynching began and continued with, and is today made up almost wholly of arguments that the practice is necessary to save white women from rape. A mere casual examination of the circumstances which attended the birth of lynch-law and of those which have run concurrently with its career will demonstrate beyond all doubt that the charge of sex crimes is a red herring for the obfuscation of those who would ordinarily think clearly upon and be opposed to such barbarism.

Lynching has always been the means for protection, not of white women, but of profits. That this is true can be seen by scrutiny of the facts from the time lynching began to become an integral part of our national folkways to the present day. For the sake of clarity the history of lynch-law can roughly be divided into four periods. The first of these begins about 1830 and ends with the outbreak of the Civil War; the second begins with Appomattox and covers the period of Reconstruction; the third starts about 1890, when imperialism centring in Africa became a fixed policy of white European ​nations and the United States, and ends with the outbreak of the World War; and the fourth covers the years from the beginning of hostilities in Europe to the present time.

To understand the economic roots of lynching it is necessary that the difference be made clear between lynching prior to 1830 (and in certain parts of the far West after that date) and lynching as it is today. This difference is most clearly seen in the circumstances under which the practice, as far as we know, began. The generally accepted and most credible version of the inception of lynch-law attributes the doubtful honour to Charles Lynch, a Quaker, born in 1736 in what is now Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynch was a man of considerable importance in his community and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. In the years immediately preceding the Revolutionary War the activities of the American patriots in their struggle for freedom from England were greatly hampered by the Tories. This was especially true of that section of Virginia where Lynch lived; and he and his fellow patriots were further harassed by notorious characters who utilized the unsettled state of affairs to indulge in proclivities for horse-stealing and other crimes. The nearest trial court was two hundred miles away and reached only by means of frequently impassable and dangerous roads. Conferences between Lynch and men of his class resulted in the formation of an extra-legal court of which Lynch ​was chief magistrate. Two of his neighbours sat with him. The accused was faced with his accusers, permitted to give testimony on his behalf, and allowed to summon witnesses, and in every possible way his rights were safeguarded. If acquitted, he was allowed to go free, with apologies and often with reparation. If found guilty, he was given "thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, and if he did not then shout 'Liberty Forever!'" hung up by the thumbs until he did so. Only rarely was an accused person sentenced to death.

So also was ready justice dispensed by the Vigilantes and other similar extra-legal bodies in the period when Western states were first being settled. Here, too, courts of law and the machinery for the apprehension and punishment of criminals were either few or non-existent.

Out of this form of extra-legal punishment of criminals has grown the practice of modern mobs of seizing, condemning without even a semblance of a trial, and executing persons accused of crimes in communities where the excuse cannot be offered that there are no courts of law. As has been pointed out, this type of lynching began simultaneously with the industrial revolution. How and why this should have been so can be seen by viewing the effect of that revolution on the institution of Negro slavery.

For more than two centuries the success of slavery had been dependent almost wholly upon the extent ​of the supply of free, fertile, and level land. The planting aristocracy had rapidly exhausted the soil, not bothering to replace through fertilizers and intelligent tillage its pristine fertility. Instead the slave power had spread its territory by moving on to new land. Such a short-sighted and rapacious policy had led inevitably to an increasingly insistent demand for new land, and Texas and the Floridas were acquired by the United States in highly questionable fashion as a result of the demands of the slave states. Meanwhile the less fertile land of the Northern states had caused the early abandonment of slavery for the more profitable pursuits of trade and manufacturing.

But despite the acquisition of new land slavery was beginning to prove a highly unprofitable business, and in many parts of the South slave-owners were freeing their slaves, not because the system was morally wrong, but simply because it no longer paid. Then—Eli Whitney invented the cottin-gin and, in the words of Charles and Mary Beard, "smashed an old economy created in the childhood of the race—challenging the spinners at their wheels in New England and the cotton planters with their armies of slaves far away under the burning sun of Mississippi and Louisiana." Arkwright's spinning-frame, Watt's condensing steam-engine, the fly shuttle, the carding-machine, the power-loom, came into being, and, by means of them all, cotton became ​overnight, as it were, one of the premier crops of the world as the demand for it leaped ever higher and higher.

As cotton mounted in value, belief in the justice and necessity of Negro slavery revived in the cotton-growing states. The inventions of Whitney and the others took the cotton from the moment it was picked and swiftly turned it into marketable and valuable material; no invention appeared to eliminate physical labour in the actual raising of the crop, nor has much yet been done in that direction. Cotton was then, and is today, a crop which to a large extent can only be raised by hand, and a bountiful supply of cheap labour was necessary if the demands for cotton were to be met.

All notions of abolition of slavery were quickly abandoned and every possible effort was exerted to end the spreading of abolitionist sentiment and especially of slave revolts. It was at this point that the lyncher entered upon the scene as a stalwart defender of the slave-owners' profits. The Liberator of October 1, 1831, for example, tells of a man named Robinson who was lashed on the bare back at Petersburg, Virginia, for saying that "black men have, in the abstract, a right to their freedom," and who was ordered to quit the town and never return lest he be treated "worser." Winfield Collins, a passionate defender of slavery and lynching, says in The Truth About Lynching of the period beginning in 1830 that "the excited state of the ​public mind in some instances may have suspected plots of insurrection when none existed. However that may be, wherever and whenever such a plot was discovered, investigation nearly always pointed to the abolitionists as instigators. Indeed, even when Negroes were insubordinate and refractory on a plantation, it was often found that they had been tampered with by abolitionists. Occasionally, when such things were proved against an abolitionist beyond the possibility of a doubt, he would be immediately hanged to the limb of some convenient tree. Several were so dealt with in connection with the insurrection in Texas. As a rule, however, when the proof was not so conclusive, a severe whipping, or a coat of tar and feathers, would be given him, and then he would be forcefully admonished to leave the South." Collins naïvely adds: "One cannot but reach the conclusion that the anti-slavery agitation was detrimental to the happiness and welfare of the slaves, and to the free Negroes as well."

Each year that passed saw the practice of lynching (the term now tending more and more to mean the death of the victim) spreading to all parts of the slave states. The number of victims increased in direct proportion to the growth of the demand for cotton and to the growing sentiment in other parts of the country that slavery was not only morally wrong, but economically unsound. The false bloom of health that inventions had given the system—causing the annual cotton crop to ​mount from a mere two million pounds when Washington was president to more than two billion pounds in 1860, an increase which brought the cotton-raising states during the latter year alone some two hundred million dollars—blinded those who had given no attention to anti-slavery enthusiasts when slavery had not paid. It was this very circumstance which led to every available means of repression of those who sought to end slavery and which accounts for the rising tide of mob murders during the three decades which began in 1830 and ended with the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion.

So, too, did it lead to the introduction of calumny against a race in the efforts to justify the wanton mob-murders which were being committed. It is worthy of careful reflection that the Negro's alleged propensity for sex crimes was unheard of in the United States prior to 1830, although the first Negroes were brought to America in 1619. In 1710 there were 50,000 Negroes in the country; 220,000 in 1750; 740,000 at the time of the Revolutionary War, of which 700,000 were scattered on isolated plantations in the South; and 1,500,000 in 1820. During all of these two centuries charges of rape against Negroes were unknown, although there was ample opportunity for commission of such crimes. Such accusations were made only after a defective economic system had been upturned and made enormously profitable through inventions and in doing so had caused ​slave-labour to become enormously more valuable. Charges of rape were made with increasing frequency as a greater number of lynchings and more brutal methods of execution of the victims brought vehement condemnation of lynching from other parts of the country.

Collins thus explodes in a burst of lyric frenzy in defending lynch-law: "The Negro, son of a wild and tropical race, content for thousands of years to roam the jungles of Africa, supplied by a bountiful nature with all his heart's desires, failing thus to develop any controlling trait of character, or mental stamina, and although civilizations rose and fell beside him, it meant nothing to him . . . and even now in the midst of American civilization he is moved to action, mainly, by gusts of primitive emotion and passion."

Passing over the "gusts of primitive emotion and passion" which find expression in the Ku Klux Klan and mobs that mutilate and burn human beings alive, one notes that Collins is speaking of the Negro of today, three hundred years removed from "the jungles of Africa." One wonders why champions of lynching never attempt to account for the fact that for two hundred years, nearer by a century to Africa than now, Negroes neither showed nor were accused of showing a propensity for sex crimes to any greater extent than any other of the races in the population of the United States. Cutler in his notable Lynch-Law seems not to have noticed the emergence of charges of rape at this time. Though ​a meticulous student, he merely remarks that after 1830 lynching became more frequent in the South "for the purpose of putting down abolitionism." He thus no more than skims the surface of the underlying changes in the economic order which made the doctrine of abolitionism so dangerous to those who practised lynching.

One need only glance at the figures to see how determined was the effort to prevent at all costs any freeing of the slaves. Morally indefensible and economically unsound, the system of slavery forced its champions to resort to brute force—always the last refuge of those who can defend their positions in no other fashion. Cutler tells of three cases between 1830 and 1840 of burnings. Two of the victims were burned at Mobile, Alabama, after a court had sentenced them to death for the murder of two children. Collins puts it: "The gentlemen of Mobile . . . seized the Negroes . . . and burned them." A third victim during this decade was a free Negro at St. Louis who, in helping another Negro to escape being carried back into slavery, shot and killed one officer and wounded another. When the matter came before the grand jury of St. Louis County, Judge Lawless—by name and by interpretation of law, fittingly named—instructed the jury to return indictments if the burned Negro was killed by "the few . . . and, compared to the population of St. Louis, a small number of individuals"; but to take no action if the victim was found to have met his death at the hands of ​many. "If," this amazing charge ended, "the victim came to his end at the hands of the multitude, in the ordinary sense of those words—not the act of numerable and ascertainable malefactors, but of congregated thousands, seized upon and impelled by that mysterious, metaphysical, and almost electric phrenzy, which, in all nations and ages had hurried on the infuriated multitude to deeds of death and destruction—then, I say, act not at all in the matter—the case then transcends your jurisdiction—it is beyond the reach of law." For denouncing this infamous plea for non-action against the lynchers the printing-press of the famous abolitionist, the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, was destroyed by the mob and he himself later killed at Alton, Illinois.

William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and Niles' Register were the only journals of the period that attempted to keep even fairly accurate and complete records of the deaths at the hands of mobs during this period. The former in its issue of December 19, 1856 recorded the lynching during the preceding twenty years of "over three hundred white persons." Cutler is of the opinion that during the period "there were no doubt many cases of the administration of summary justice in the remote districts during the thirties and early forties which never came to the notice of either The Liberator or Niles' Register. . . . There is, however, abundant evidence to make the conclusion a safe one that lynch-law was more and more resorted to during this period."

​The reason for the rise of mobbism is obvious—the tide rose in an exactly parallel curve to the wave of economic forces against slavery and of Northern sentiment which was at work to put an end to slavery. As the slave-holders saw the fight going against them, despite their desperate struggle to check these forces, they more and more resorted to the rope and the faggot. During the decade beginning in 1850 the obviously incomplete records cite the lynching of twenty-six Negroes for killing their masters. Nine of the twenty-six, one of the nine a woman, were burned at the stake. During the same period twelve Negroes were lynched for rape, four of them being burned alive. There were other Negro victims charged with lesser crimes, but the total of all Negroes lynched seems by all records to be well below that of white victims.

Here, too, economic forces were at work, this time to the advantage of the Negro. As a slave the Negro's body had a definite, ascertainable cash value, precisely as had an acre of land, a bale of cotton, or a horse. Being merchantable, Negroes when accused or suspected of crime were given the benefit of careful scrutiny of the evidence of their guilt before execution by a court or by a lynching mob. There are on record numerous instances where the owners of lynched slaves sued for and received damages for the loss of their property. White bodies, on the contrary, had no market value, and thus it was natural that prior to the Civil War ​more white victims than Negroes came to their death at the hands of lynchers.

Economic interest not only acted as a deterrent in saving Negroes from lynch-law during pre-Civil-War days; it likewise saved Negroes from doing the more dangerous tasks. In Southern seaport towns and along the Mississippi white men were often used to load and unload ships. Barrels and other heavy objects sometimes came hurtling down, crushing the hapless who chanced to be in their path. Black men were too valuable to be risked in such fashion.

Frederick Law Olmstead in his A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854 tells of an interesting case of this nature. A Virginia planter had an Irish gang draining swamp lands for him, though he was certain that Negroes would have done twice as much work. "He was sure they [the Irishmen] must have 'trifled' a great deal," Olmstead writes, "or they would have accomplished more than they had. He complained much, also, of their sprees and quarrels. I asked why he should employ Irishmen, in preference to doing the work with his own hands. 'It's dangerous work (unhealthy?) and a negro's life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it's a considerable loss, you know.'"

We now come to the second phase of lynching—the years of the so-called Reconstruction Period. The ​lynching industry was revolutionized by the Emancipation Proclamation, which wiped out the cash value of a Negro. The balance swung so sharply that it was not long after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox before Negroes formed the great majority of the lynched. So wanton and widespread were the murders, particularly after the Ku Klux Klan was organized, that the misconception arose that lynching did not begin until after the Civil War. Surprisingly enough, even such a student as T. J. Woofter, Jr., makes such an assertion in his The Basis of Racial Adjustment.

However, in a hasty glance at the panorama of lynch-law, the fury of mobbism during the Reconstruction era almost justifies this belief. Numerous factors contributed to this gory epoch. There was, of course, the psychological effect always created by wars. The loosing of murderous passions always ends in the glorification of the most proficient killer. There was, too, the fact that the South, though beaten, was far from convinced of the unrighteousness of her cause. There soon sprang up a host of legends of a largely fictitious antebellum South composed of courtly, goateed, mint-julep-imbibing gentlemen, of ravishingly beautiful and virginal women, of stately, porticoed mansions, and faithful, contented, singing "darkies," unspoiled by wicked abolitionist notions of any special merits of freedom over slavery. Such apparently harmless myths soon created a sense of inordinate suffering and a natural ​bitterness towards those who had ended so idyllic an existence, however non-existent in reality that life had been. Instead of listening to the sound advice of such men as General Robert E. Lee to accept the verdict of Appomattox and set about rebuilding the South in accordance with the demands of a changed and changing world, the opiate of dreams of "the lost cause" and the direct action of the Ku Klux Klan were adopted. Though there was much talk of restoring white supremacy and protecting womanhood, here, too, the motive back of the terrible reign of lynch-law was economic. For the vast majority of the whites of the late Confederacy—even of those who had owned no slaves—were united in a single cause—to re-enslave the Negro as far as was humanly possible.

The Report of the Congressional Commission of 1872 appointed to investigate the activities of the Ku Klux Klan gives a ghastly picture of the extremes to which resort was had to gain this end. The results of the inquiry fill thirteen volumes, each containing about six hundred pages. It would be difficult in all history to parallel the bloody record thus set forth. In Alabama alone there were 107 lynchings in less than two years. Within a few weeks in 1868 more than two thousand persons were murdered, assassinated, or "handled" by mobs in Louisiana, the bodies of 120 Negroes being found in Bossier Parish of that state following a "nigger hunt." The then Governor of Mississippi was cited as ​authority for the statement that in his state within two years beginning in April 1869 there were 124 lynchings. For an eighteen-month period beginning in January 1866 there were in North and South Carolina 197 lynchings. In nine counties of South Carolina within six months the Klan lynched thirty-five persons besides whipping, mutilating, or otherwise outraging men and women, white and black, who had incurred the Klan's ill will. "Partial returns" from Texas for a period from the end of the war to 1868 disclosed 1035 lynchings. Tennessee mobs staged 168 lynchings in the year ending July 1, 1868. Many of these lynchings were conducted with a bestiality unfit for publication.

I make no effort to minimize the difficulties which the white South and the black South faced after the Civil War. Yet it is only within very recent years that fair-minded historians, many of them Southerners, such as John Wade of Georgia (as in his life of Longstreet), are determining even approximately the truth of the Reconstruction era. The idea is slowly being abandoned that the post-Civil-War Negro governments, with all their mistakes and crimes, were so bad as such virulent Negro-haters as Thomas Dixon and his type have declared through printed and spoken word and the cinema. And it will probably be many more years before the South will cease deluding itself and face the fundamen​tal economic motive of the reign of lynchings and mobbings and the efforts to justify such murders through stories of Negro crimes and incompetency. For, as DuBois states, "the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency."

In its efforts to re-enslave the Negro and make him economically impotent the South of the Klan destroyed one of its greatest assets and for economic reasons whipped up violent passions which have not yet died down. This asset was the healthy, life-giving antagonism between the so-called poor white and the master class. Prior to the Civil War the poor whites had suffered from slavery but little less than the slaves. They had been forced to till mountainous or otherwise unfertile soil, all the level, well-watered, and fertile land being taken by the slave-owners. These, in turn, feared the poor white and were as apprehensive of the rise of a white peasantry as "a peril to property, liberty, and the Constitution" as they were of slave revolts. The poor whites were denied the ballot, were denied education for their children, and in many places were not allowed to enter churches for worship until the slave-owners and their families had taken their seats. It was no accident that one of the strongest blasts against slavery should have been written by Hinton Rowan Helper, himself a poor white. For Helper along with many, ​many others in the same condition saw that as long as there was Negro slavery, so long could whites too poor to own slaves be shunted off into poverty, ignorance, disease, and death.

The Emancipation Proclamation changed all this and placed master and poor white upon the same economic level. From that state came unification of a far more vicious sort—union in a common hatred and fear of the Negro. Belying their boasted racial superiority, both classes, panic-stricken, rushed into movements like the Klan, the White Camelias, and others organized for the same purpose—to "put the Negro in his place." Gone was the old dissent. Douglas Freeman, editor of the Richmond News-Leader, speaking of the present South, says: "Forced to think alike politically, many ceased to think at all." His statement might apply as well to every other phase of post-Civil-War life in the South, for there was a common complex against the Negro which coloured all thought and gave birth to bitter passions that fed the flame of mobbism and led to victims by the hundreds of rope and faggot.

The allegations for which Negroes were lynched rapidly widened in scope. Not only were they murdered by mobs on charges of murder and rape, but for miscegenation, "incendiary language," jilting a girl, unpopularity, refusing to turn State's evidence, being too prosperous for a Negro, "introducing smallpox," to prevent evidence, for testifying against a white man, ​talking back to a white man, and for every sort of petty offence.

The overthrow of the Negro governments and the removal of federal troops in no wise changed this order of things, but instead intensified the bitterness. Practically every Southern state passed labour and vagrancy laws; "the former masters, working through state legislatures, restored a kind of servitude by means of apprentice, vagrancy, and poor laws." Other discriminatory laws aimed at the Negro and his suppression appeared as the years passed—disfranchisement laws, "Jim Crow" car laws, statutes to prohibit common assemblage in school and even in church. As the forerunner of such efforts to humiliate, oppress, and re-enslave the freedmen, the lyncher's rope and torch appeared.

Other economic forces at work outside of the South contributed to the success of these efforts. There had been far from a united North against slavery and for the war between North and South, as the draft riots in New York showed. The war over, the North was well content to leave the Negro to his fate at the hands of his former masters and the poor whites. The notorious failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank, through which Negroes were robbed of some three million dollars, is an excellent example of indifference in the North to the Negro's future.

This indifference was only in part due to hostility to ​the Negro. Congress had passed in 1862 the Homestead Act, which opened vast areas of fertile land in the West; it also had given land, subsidies, and other aid towards the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, which linked the Atlantic and the Pacific. This action of Congress, together with discovery of silver, copper, lead, and coal in the West, had turned the attention of the North away from the South, and worked more largely towards relegation of the South to the national background than had the defeat of Southern arms. New inventions in the fields of electricity, aeronautics, railroad construction and operation, telephonic and telegraphic communication, farm machinery, and the automobile had contributed to a dynamically changeful and profitable era—an era of corporations rather than the old individual efforts, and the building of the huge Vanderbilt, Astor, Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, Gould, and Frick fortunes, which would have astounded and dismayed Thomas Jefferson, less than a century before. All this contributed to a preoccupation in the North which shunted the Negro and the South into the limbo of unpleasant and forgotten things, and there were few who knew or cared what the lyncher's rope and torch betokened or masked.

If lynch-law fixed its roots in American soil in the thirties, forties, and fifties, and plunged those roots to ​the very lowest layer of the national and especially the Southern soil during Reconstruction, its full flower was destined to be seen as the nineteenth century entered its last decade. Not only was economic exploitation based upon colour of skin to be seen in the United States, but its spread was rapid throughout the world.

As though it had not already enough burdens to contribute to its ignorance and moral decay, there entered into the life of the South demagogues such as Cole Blease of South Carolina, Hoke Smith of Georgia, Vardaman of Mississippi, and "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, who made as their sole platform hatred and vilification of the Negro. Lynching spread as far north as Omaha; in the South it sank to levels of barbarity unequalled since the days of the Klan. In 1892 there were 235 lynchings, of which 156 of the victims were Negroes; the following year there were an even two hundred; in the decade between 1890 and 1900 there were 1780 known lynchings.

No excess seemed too terrible for the mob. In Louisiana a fifteen-year-old girl was hanged after horrible deeds upon her; in Arkansas a Negro charged with rape was burned, the victim of his alleged attack being forced against her will to light the funeral pyre; Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and other states of the South witnessed bestialities that shocked the entire country and the world. The Populist Party had just waged a shortlived but prosperous campaign in the ​South, which threw terror into the Democratic Party. The lyncher and the legislator, the latter through disfranchisement laws, joined hands to eliminate the Negro from politics and thus prevent the possibility of the Negro's holding the balance of power. This was the death-blow to the hope of salutary political life in the South.

Coupled with fear of the Negro politically was fear of the Negro's economic progress. Three decades after Appomattox a new generation of Negroes was beginning to make itself heard. The ex-slave, whom the South professed to love so tenderly, was passing. Uncle Tom's sons and daughters were attaining manhood in more than the sense of years lived. Education and economic progress were bringing a new racial attitude into the Southern situation which was most distasteful to those who had owned slaves or who believed in the highly idealized fiction of a mythical pre-Civil-War South. Poor whites, fed by years of oily flattery after the Civil War had emancipated them and given them power and the vote, liked the emerging Negro no better than did the former slave-owners. As the machine age tended towards greater and greater standardization of houses, clothes, motor cars, editorials, and thought, the Southern white in his attitude on the race problem easily took the lead in becoming an automaton. Gerald W. Johnson, the brilliant Southern writer, summed up in a phrase the Southern political attitude that permeated all Southern thought. In the Virginia Quarterly Review ​of July 1925, he wrote of the slavish, unthinking allegiance of Southern whites to the Democratic Party and summed up the situation thus: "Had Beelzebub been the Democratic nominee, the clergy would have been deprived automatically of the privilege of the franchise, and no doubt many of the laity also would have laid down the ballot unused; but I have a strong belief that the stalwarts would have rallied by tens of thousands and gallantly gone to hell."

Perhaps the net effect of such sectional narrowness upon the whites, and one of the causes of increased bitterness against Negroes which found expression in the mob, can best be seen in the matter of farm ownership. Poverty, the ravages of the boll-weevil, disastrous rainy seasons, unintelligent farming resulting in exhaustion of the soil, combined with the great demand for cotton, led to the stultifying one-crop system and to the wasteful and often viciously abused sharecropping and tenant-farming systems out of which peonage developed. Negroes were lynched, or intimidated and cowed when not killed, for daring to question this exploitation or seeking to elude the clutches of rapacious landlords, merchants, and bankers. A notable instance of this was the famous race riot of 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas, in which upwards of two hundred Negroes were slain by mobs, and a number of the survivors were saved from legal lynching only through a five-year legal struggle waged by the National ​Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In his Darker Phases of the South, Frank Tannenbaum told of the effect upon whites and Negroes of this economic system and revealed one of the reasons for the increase of bitterness between poor-white and black peasants. Quoting from bulletins of the Universities of North and South Carolina, Tannenbaum showed that whites were retrograding into the class of tenants far more rapidly than Negroes, among whom, despite migration, farm ownership was rapidly increasing. Two-thirds of the tenants are whites who have become "propertyless, homeless migrants"; in the cotton and tobacco area one-half of all the farms are occupied by white tenants. In the thirteen cotton-producing states, the University of South Carolina points out, "61.5 per cent. of all tenants are white, and only 38.5 per cent. are colored." In brief, despite the prosperity and bustling activity of the cities such as Birmingham and Atlanta, the majority of Southern whites in the rural South were and are sinking into an economic morass which makes them the prey of Klan organizers, anti-evolution mountebanks, mob hysteria, and every manner of charlatanry. Negroes, on the contrary, despite all the handicaps of ignorance, poverty, and oppression, have steadily added to their wealth and education and have become in many respects superior to the whites. At the close of the Civil War, Negroes operated twenty thousand farms; by 1922 the number had grown to upwards of one mil​lion, of which slightly more than half were owned or were being bought by those who operated them. This progress of a supposedly inferior race was one of the most fruitful sources of mob violence as acquisitions in this and other fields became noticeable towards the close of the nineteenth century. The total of 1780 lynchings during the last decade of the century was, in large measure, the mob's effort to check this rising tide of economic independence.

The already complicated Southern and national situation with regard to the race problem was further influenced, directly and indirectly, by a new world-attitude towards coloured peoples and especially towards Negroes. World imperialism centring in Africa led to a persistent, organized campaign of disparagement of those with dark skins, which rapidly changed the old attitude of indifference. A propaganda as subtle as it was vicious was utilized among white nations to prove the superiority of all things white and thus to justify a rapacious exploitation of non-whites. Only the cynical-minded noted that the souls worth saving and the minds capable of absorbing "white" civilization were those races which possessed lands or other things of great value. At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, only one-tenth of Africa was under nominal European control; at the turn of the century only Liberia and Abyssinia, comprising approximately 390,000 square miles, were free, while Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, ​Italy, Portgual, and Belgium between them controlled a total of 11,106,011 square miles. Coloured races in other parts of the world also felt the iron hand, not always velvet-gloved, of imperialism—dark peoples in India and China and the Caribbean Sea. This exploitation, in the words of DuBois, "transferred the reign of commercial privilege and extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class to the exploitation of backward races under the political dominance of Europe. For the purpose of carrying out this idea the European and American working class was practically invited to share in this new exploitation, and particularly were flattered by popular appeals to their inherent superiority to 'Dagoes,' 'Chinks,' 'Japs,' and 'Niggers.'"

This was done through a number of methods—through the appeals of missionary societies for funds to bring Jesus to the poor, benighted heathen; through newspaper editorials and magazine articles and books. Of them all none was so potent or so successful as the sudden popularity of the theories of a mythical being called an Aryan, which Comte Arthur de Gobineau had given the world some years before the age of exploitation gave point to his theories. From Aryanism and its offspring—Anglo-Saxonism, Teutonism, Celticism, Nordicism—nations and white races found comfort and warrant for their imperialistic designs. Frank H. Hankins in his The Racial Basis of Civilization tells in these ​words how it was done: "In recent times doctrines of racial superiority have played an almost unsurpassed rôle in the larger politics of states. They have justified cruelty and inhumanity; they have constituted a basic assumption in the expansion of Europe and the growth of modern imperialism; they have stirred race hatred, aroused the sentiment of patriotism and fanned the flames of war. The astounding megalomania of the Germans of recent tragic memory has found its counterpart in certain elements of the national egotism of all other world powers."

Sir Phillip Gibbs's summary of the Versailles Conference gives another aspect of the fruit of this dangerous race hatred: "The old politicians who had played the game of politics before the war, gambling with the lives of men for territories, privileged markets, oil fields, native races, coaling stations, and imperial prestige, grabbed the pool which the German gamblers had lost when their last bluff was called and quarrelled over its distribution."

Thus the two went hand in hand—exaltation of all things white and the shameless robbery of those who were not white—and the end is not yet in sight, despite the terrible war that but lately ended. For the megalomania that finds expression in national and racial egotism was nowhere more evident than in the United States, where the Ku Klux Klan, the Nordics, and the lynchers are but the more obvious examples of that ​egotism. The lyncher during this epoch learned, with gratitude, that his efforts to exploit and oppress the Negro not only were not wrong but were, instead, a part of the task assigned to him by reason of his whiteness of skin. More, he found that criticism of his acts was dying down—for certainly those whose hands were not spotless could hardly afford to be too critical of others. The terrific impact of this whole propaganda against coloured races has penetrated far deeper than is visible on the surface. Not even a great world war, growing out of the prejudice and greed which this propaganda was so largely instrumental in creating could arouse the world to the gravity of continuing such a course.

Too busy developing its own vast resources, the United States did not join in the scramble for land in Africa. But the new century had not long been ushered in before American imperialism practised on coloured races began—through loans by the house of Morgan and other New York banking houses to Great Britain at the time of the Boer War, which helped extend British supremacy in Africa, and to the Japanese for furthering their supremacy over Manchuria; in Santo Domingo, Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, the Philippines, Samoa, Hawaii, Panama, Nicaragua, and China.

This shameless and, in the main, discreditable page of American history has been told of at length by Charles and Mary Beard in their monumental The Rise ​of American Civilization. Not only did profits from such enterprises keep those silent who might have protested against barbarities perpetrated within the United States by lynching mobs; such barbarities were contributed to and condoned by a theory of inferiority of darker peoples which grew out of and was contributed to by the needs of American and world imperialism. The two situations—internal and external alike—were and are closely interwoven. Thus what may at first seem to be developments which have no influence whatever upon lynching and the race problem generally within the United States becomes, in the light of world imperialism and the concentrated campaign of disparagement of coloured races, of both direct and indirect bearing upon the American race problem and the question of lynch-law.

All these diverse factors contributed, therefore, to an annual average of 166.5 lynchings between 1890 and 1900; to one of 92.1 between 1900 and 1910; to one of 84.0 in the decade following; and to one of 38.0 since 1920 and extending through 1927. Certain interesting changes are to be noted by examination of the annual averages between 1910 and 1920. It was during this decade that organized, intensive, intelligent, and persistent efforts against lynching were made for the first time. The sharp drop during this ten-year period and the seven years since is beyond all doubt due largely to the energetic efforts of the National Association for the Ad​vancement of Colored People, organized in 1909 and chartered in 1911, and to the Commission on Interracial Co-operation, with headquarters in Atlanta, which was organized after the war.

Largely through the work of these organizations and the growing articulateness of the press in condemning lynching, in which several Southern papers did notable service, there was a slight decrease during the first half of the second decade of the new century. In 1915 the annual toll jumped sharply to 145, of which ninety-nine were Negroes and forty-six white; among the latter, however, the total was affected materially by the lynching of twenty-six Mexicans, hatred against whom was accentuated by the campaign against Villa during that year.

After an encouraging drop to fifty-four lynchings in 1917, there was a rise to sixty-seven in 1918, to eighty-three in 1919, and to sixty-five, sixty-four, and sixty-one in 1920, 1921, and 1922 respectively. Here again economic factors motivated a set-back in the battle against the hosts of Judge Lynch. The European war shut off abruptly the flood of immigrants who for years had amply supplied the demands for unskilled labour to dig in the mines, tend the furnaces, and do the other manifold tasks of American industrial plants. So acute had the situation become that even had not these industries been swamped with orders for various supplies for the warring nations, they would have been hard ​put for labour to handle normal conditions. There came then, starting in 1916, one of the greatest internal migratory movements of history and certainly the greatest movement of huge masses of people within the history of the United States—the migration within a decade of nearly two million Negroes from the South. By the following year even those Southerners who had at first greeted the departure of Negroes with relief and joy as the eventual solution of the race problem became apprehensive concerning the immense economic loss to the South from hundreds of thousands of acres uncultivated because the labourers to cultivate them had fled. Resort was had to the old stand-by of a considerable majority of Southerners in dealing with Negroes—reliance upon terrorism and persuasion by brute force. Also, in addition to the passions let loose by war was one of particularly virulent effect in the South at this time—fear that Negro soldiers would not be so willing to submit to the old indignities when they returned from European battlefields.

Almost before the first Negro soldier left the United States to fight for his country, plans were set in motion to convince him when he returned that his war service and experience would not affect his own status after the war had ended. A broken-down itinerant Methodist preacher was instrumental in reviving the absurd ritual and uniform of the old Ku Klux Klan of infamous memory; later a shrewd "publicity man" crystallized ​the rather vague notions of the preacher by modern business methods into a huge and, for a time, compact body of illiberalism and mobbism. The far South tangibly demonstrated its gratitude to Negro soldiers for helping make the world safe for democracy by lynching ten of them, some in the uniform of the United States Army, during the year 1919; two of the ten were burned alive. Mississippi and Georgia mobs murdered three returned Negro soldiers each; in Arkansas two were lynched, in Alabama and Florida one each.

The year 1923 witnessed some abatement of the post-war brutality, and as well the results of the campaign against lynching, particularly among the more liberal element of the South, which was beginning to shake off the bondage of the Klan. No factor was of greater importance in causing a material decrease in the number of victims of mobs in 1923 than realization by the more intelligent South that mobbing Negroes was not the best method of retaining Negro labour. With a place of refuge to which he could flee, even the most tractable Negro who naïvely had believed that "the Southern white man is the best friend of the Negro" was leaving the South whenever a lynching or a Klan outrage of some other variety was staged near him. Enlightened selfishness led the South to renewed efforts to put down lynching and ensure a larger measure of immunity from attack to Negroes. Thus 1923 saw twenty-eight ​lynchings; in 1924 and 1925 there was a further drop to sixteen and eighteen respectively; in 1926 there was a sharp rise to thirty-four, and in 1927 the number went down again to twenty-one.

The potency of these forces was seen in the introduction in Congress of a federal anti-lynching bill which passed the lower House in 1922 and was defeated only by a Senate filibuster.

All through the tangled, many-angled problem of lynch-law there stands out in bolder relief than any other the economic factor in determining the rise and fall of the annual number of victims of lynching. Until there is a clearer and wider recognition of this fact and a refusal to permit deliberate misleading of public opinion through introduction of extraneous, untrue, and vicious statements for the purpose of obscuring the real issues involved, there is great likelihood that lynching will never be eliminated from American life. The attempt to use charges of rape as the real and only cause of lynching is an instance of American hypocrisy of the most vicious sort. With all its "colour bar" laws and its shameless exploitation of blacks in South Africa, Kenya Colony, and the West Indies, Great Britain has never yet descended to so low and vicious an expedient to justify its exploitation. Perhaps in time even the states of the far South will raise themselves to the point where hypocrisy at least will be eliminated from the list of its crimes against the Negro.