Rope & Faggot/Chapter 8

It is with relief that one is able to turn to indications of betterment of the conditions portrayed in preceding chapters. For many reasons pointing out the faults of the South has been a popular sport—largely because the task is made easy by the gigantic proportions of these shortcomings and the clearness with which they manifest themselves. The more complex a society, the more difficult it is to isolate even in broad outlines the forces which work within that society for good or evil. The South offers to analysts of social conditions a more primitive and thus a more simple panorama for examination. It is always easier to find out what makes the wheels go round in a Thomas Heflin than in a Thomas Edison.

There is no better method by which one can see the changes that are going on in the South—changes that are sometimes so slow as to be almost imperceptible—than by comparing the general attitude, as reflected in the press, towards two lynchings, fifteen years apart. More, both examples of lawlessness occurred within the state of South Carolina, in many respects to be classed with the more hopeless states, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas.

​In 1911 a Negro by the name of Willis Jackson, accused of attacking a white girl, was lynched near Greenville and his fingers were cut off and distributed as souvenirs. Joshua W. Ashleigh, a member of the South Carolina legislature, led the mob, which numbered among its members some of the most prominent men of the community. Ashleigh's son, editor of the Intelligencer, the local paper, assisted his father in leading the mob and afterwards made capital of the murder by issuing a special edition, in which he declared: "The Intelligencer man went out to see the fun without the least objection to being a party to help lynch the brute." Cole Blease was Governor at the time. He refused to use any of the power of his office to punish the lynchers, declaring his willingness to leave the governor's chair and help in a lynching when a Negro was accused of rape.

In 1926 a mob at Aiken, with the connivance and aid of officers of the law, took a woman, her younger brother, and her seventeen-year-old cousin and lynched them. The then Governor did nothing, though he was supplied with affidavits naming certain members of the mob. His successor evinced a greater keenness in checking Sunday golf-playing than in checking lynching. Cole Blease, elevated in the interim to the United States Senate, ran true to form by playing to the galleries, offering to defend any man indicted for the lynching ​as soon as it was known that evidence had been gathered which implicated individuals in the mob.

At first glance the 1926 lynchings seem worse than the one in 1911. The great contrast lay in the attitude of the press. Led by the militant R. Charlton Wright of the Columbia Record, other South Carolina papers of the better type, such as the Columbia State and the Charleston News and Courier, united in an uncompromising demand for the apprehension and punishment of the lynchers. When investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was followed by a thirty-day featuring on the front page of the New York World of the stories of a special correspondent, the three South Carolina papers mentioned renewed their demand for arrest of the known lynchers. The Record scored mercilessly the typically cheap gesture of Cole Blease, indicating that he does not represent all the people of South Carolina. Though failing to bring indictments and trials, the Aiken case, through the efforts of the press of the state and country, stirred South Carolina and the South as have few similar events.

Back of this changed attitude, in which the lyncher finds himself less popular and comfortable with each passing year, lie a number of forces and the work of several organizations. Some of the latter have directly attacked the problems of lynching and the race question ​generally; others, with no special thought of the Negro or of lynching, have helped bring about changes that have materially influenced both thought and action on this grave question. It is impossible here to do more than give a brief survey of the more important forces at work. An effort is made simply to indicate those that seem to be causing most of the changes.

One of the most notable of these changes, the causes of which will be noted shortly, is that already referred to—the white press. The great majority of Southern newspapers are still many leagues removed from advocacy of full participation of the Negro in Southern life, and particularly in the use of the ballot. Yet, measured by the attitude of but a few years ago, encouraging progress can be seen. Then practically every paper in the South, and many northern ones as well, featured his race in flaming headlines whenever a crime was charged to a Negro; then, as compared with the vigorous and unqualified condemnation of lynch-law today, journals that dared oppose lynching were almost unknown. Today hardly any paper of the South, save in the most benighted and rural sections, will openly defend lynching for any cause whatever.

The most notable instance of courage in the new press of the South is the Columbus, Georgia, Enquirer-Sun. Edited by Julian Harris, son of the late Joel Chandler Harris, and his brilliant wife, Julia Collier Harris, this journal in the face of advertisers' boycotts, loss of great ​percentages of their readers, and other financial difficulties, to say nothing of actual threats against their lives, has militantly and brilliantly fought lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-evolutionists, and every other emblem or manifestation of racial or intellectual bigotry. It fought the Klan when that movement absolutely dominated the state of Georgia and when even the Governor was a Klansman.

If there are no others of the calibre of the Enquirer-Sun, the number of papers that have repeatedly taken an unqualified stand against lynching is significant and growing. Among these are the Atlanta, Georgia, Constitution, the Columbia, South Carolina, Record, and The State of the same city, the Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier, the Greensboro, North Carolina, Daily News, the Chattanooga, Tennessee, Times, the Birmingham, Alabama, News, the Houston, Texas, Post, the San Antonio, Texas, Express, and perhaps half a dozen others.

Of immense importance in helping to shape both white and Negro public opinion has been the growth of a considerable number of Negro newspapers and magazines. These range from inferior, cheaply printed local sheets of four pages to great national weeklies. The circulations of a few of these run as high as from fifty thousand to two hundred thousand. Most of the larger ones and many of the smaller are well edited. These papers exert an influence in the moulding of Negro ​opinion little realized by the white public. For Negroes have learned to read with considerable caution accounts in the white press of events involving white and coloured individuals. They go to their own press for such information. If these accounts are often as biased on one side as the press they distrust is on the other, they are no less potent in shaping Negro thought.

Especially united have these papers been on the subject of mob violence. They may differ on politics or religion, but on lynching and mob violence there is no division. In the prominence given stories of lynching, as well as in their editorial comment, the most unremitting emphasis on and opposition to mobbism is voiced continually in two hundred and fifty Negro newspapers against Judge Lynch. This terrific bombardment has helped create a stupendous racial consciousness on the question of lynching which has added mightily to the grim determination of Negroes to fight against mob-law. The Negro press has been of especial aid to such a movement as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Three monthly magazines, The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger, exert an extraordinary influence on Negro opinion. The first named is the official organ of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the second occupies the same relation to the National Urban League. All three are well written and frequently brilliant in their analyses of the ​underlying motives of race conflict or racial amity. They serve, with the Negro newspapers, to stiffen Negro resistance to oppression, to educate and develop a racial consciousness, and to inculcate pride in Negro achievement. In so doing they have notably changed and widened the scope of Negro thought and made it less wise and safe to attack Negroes.

Likewise of considerable importance have been the editorials of papers neither Southern nor Negro—the Northern white press, and notably the New York World—in opposition to and exposure of the details of lynchings. While most of the great metropolitan dailies have consistently written against lynching on the occasion of outbreaks, the World has a number of times, as in the Aiken triple lynching of 1926, sent correspondents to the scene, questioned the officials and editors of the state, and in other ways helped to focus public attention upon the problem.

Among the magazines The Nation, edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, has stood head and shoulders above its fellow journals and, in truth, above any other white publication of the United States in opening its columns to the facts and in editorial condemnation of mob violence.

Of the organizations that have laboured directly against lynching two stand out pre-eminently for the effectiveness of their work.

​The most persistent, systematic, and organized attack upon lynching has been waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This movement was organized in 1909 immediately after a disastrous race riot in Lincoln's old home, Springfield, Illinois, had given tragic emphasis to the growing seriousness of the race problem and the lack of organized effort towards lessening of friction between the races. The movement has its national headquarters in New York City and upwards of four hundred branches in all parts of the United States. It numbers among its national officers, board of directors, and branch officers some of the most distinguished men and women of both races in the United States. It has fought and won in state and federal courts, particularly in the United States Supreme Court, notable victories in defence of the citizenship rights of the Negro. Among these are victories against various forms of enforced residential segregation, restriction in the use of the ballot, attacks by mobs upon the homes of Negroes, and efforts to railroad Negroes to prison for defending themselves and their homes against such attacks, and in many cases where Negroes were through prejudice denied fair trials, as in the notable victory in the United States Supreme Court against peonage in Arkansas.

The outstanding accomplishment of the work of the N. A. A. C. P., as its rather long title is generally abbreviated, has been against lynching. It has investigated, ​through its officers and detectives, a great number of lynchings, for the Advancement Association realized that little confidence could be placed in the reports of such outbreaks in communities where officials and reporters were all too frequently in sympathy with the lynchers. The raw, unpleasant facts were unearthed by these investigators and in some instances the names of lynchers, in affidavits, were placed in the hands of law-enforcement officials. The failure of these officials to act in the great majority of cases has revealed as perhaps nothing else could the extent to which the habit of mobbism has fastened itself upon certain states, and the necessity of federal action.

The N. A. A. C. P. has made the facts about lynching familiar to the entire United States and to foreign countries through more than four thousand meetings; through the distribution of millions of pieces of literature, a number of them facsimile reproductions of stories of lynchings first printed in newspapers in the very communities in which they occurred; through The Crisis, edited by the distinguished Negro scholar, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois; and through an efficient press service, which goes weekly to each of the two hundred and fifty Negro newspapers and, when there is news of special interest to them, to white newspapers and news-distributing organizations throughout the world.

The N. A. A. C. P. also, in its campaign of education, compiled and published the only statistical study ​of lynching yet made, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, and each year it keeps this record current through publication of a supplement. It has aided in the framing of a federal anti-lynching bill through its voluntary legal committee, composed of such eminent lawyers as Moorfield Storey, Louis Marshall, Arthur B. Spingarn, Clarence Darrow, James A. Cobb, Charles H. Studin, and Herbert K. Stockton. It has furnished members of Congress with the facts about lynching, and the use made of them in Congress has done an immense good in acquainting the public with the need of action. Notable among these facts have been those refuting the charge that all or most lynchings were in punishment of the crime of rape—the N. A. A. C. P. showing that less than one-fifth of the victims were even accused of that charge by the very mobs which lynched them.

The methods of the N. A. A. C. P. have not been gentle, for it was realized that a century-old public indifference to mob murders would not be penetrated by blandishments or by sugar-coating the facts. Naturally lynchers and their defenders have resented the unmasking of their deeds and have furiously assailed the N. A. A. C. P. with calumny and even vicious personal assault upon one of its white secretaries in Texas. None of these have deterred the movement for, in the words of its president, Moorfield Storey, the distinguished ​ex-president of the American Bar Association, and eminent authority on constitutional law, it realized that "it is not only working for colored people but to help the United States against the violence which is inevitable and is sure to cause disastrous consequences unless the supremacy of our principles and our laws can be restored."^[1]

Through magazine articles, books, lectures, and personal contacts its officers, in addition to the means already detailed, have kept the issue of mobbism constantly before the public and thus helped to change apathy and hostility to interest and support of the campaign against Judge Lynch.

The second organization that has made great inroads upon the overwhelming ignorance and prejudice that surrounds the question of lynch-law is the Commission on Interracial Co-operation, with headquarters at Atlanta, home of the Ku Klux Klan and capital of the state with next to the greatest number of lynchings.

In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, James Weldon Johnson gives this picture of the three classes into which Negroes in the United States are divided. The first and most generally known through newspaper mention is of loafers, ex-convicts, and the criminal type ​generally, who "hate everything covered with a white skin, and in return . . . are loathed by the whites"; the second class comprises servants "and all who are connected with the whites by domestic service"; and the third class is made up of "independent workmen and tradesmen, and of the well-to-do and educated coloured people," who "live in a little world of their own. In fact, I concluded that if a coloured man wanted to separate himself from his white neighbours, he had but to acquire some money, education, and culture. . . . The proudest and fairest lady in the South could with propriety—and it is what she would most likely do—go to the cabin of Aunt Mary, her cook, if Aunt Mary was sick, and minister to her comfort with her own hands; but if Mary's daughter, Eliza, a girl who used to run around my lady's kitchen, but who has received an education and married a prosperous young coloured man, were at death's door, my lady would no more think of crossing the threshold of Eliza's cottage than she would think of going into a bar-room for a drink."

The picture drawn thus in 1912 is, unfortunately, still largely true. Emphasis upon the shortcomings of a race and ignorance of those of the best of that race could not help creating a stereotype which has caused endless antagonism and misunderstanding. The Interracial Commission is designed to bridge such a chasm where such bridging is most needed—in the South. It seeks to bring together for conferences and action upon ​local interracial matters the most intelligent and representative members of each race.

This work has obviously not been easy of accomplishment in the face of the complex Southern situation, the fruit of three centuries of exploitation, injustice, and suspicion. There have been numerous instances where, gathered together "to talk frankly to each other," the white members have spoken freely of Negro faults and resented equal frankness by Negro members. There have been, too, those prominent in the movement—a notable example being Edwin Mims of Vanderbilt University in his The Advancing South—who take some pains in published writings to sneer at Negroes who are too outspoken for their taste in their analysis of the interracial situation. There has been as well a feeling that the Interracial Commission has not been so advanced in its program as even Southern conditions would warrant.

Such criticisms have become less justified as the movement has gained strength. It was organized shortly after the end of the World War, and by the end of 1926 had organized committees in upwards of eight hundred communities in fifteen states. One may gain an idea of the nature and method of work of the Commission against mob-law by these excerpts from its report for 1926:

Certain notorious states, such as Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, and South Carolina, are noticeably absent from the list of those in which decent citizens are working against lynching, and the report quoted admits frankly lack of success in them. One might also object that the instances cited of lynchings prevented do not loom very large against the thirty-four lynchings which did occur in 1926. One may grant all this and yet see the value of the uphill but vital work which this movement is doing to change the thought-patterns of the South on this question.

Much more important than its work on immediate ​cases of mob violence is that which the Commission is doing among Southern college students. Courses in race relations and the organization of voluntary study groups under the direction of members of the staff of the Commission, the furnishing of literature and the answering of questions, and the presentation of distinguished Negro speakers to audiences composed of Southern white college students are some of the methods by which this is done. Its pamphlets on Negro Progress and Achievement, Popular Fallacies About Race Relations, and What the Bible Tells Me About Race Relations, simply and informatively written, indicate the nature of the publications that are being used widely in this work.

The Commission is working with another group besides college students where there is hope of change of opinion—white women. One of its pamphlets, Southern White Women on Lynching and Mob Violence, details the vigorous repudiation by women of lynching as necessary for their protection. In Alabama white women have declared: "We protest . . . against the claim that lynching is necessary for the protection of white womanhood"; in Arkansas, "Recognizing with sympathetic appreciation the high standards of virtue set by the best element of colored women, we pledge ourselves to an effort to emphasize the single standard of morals for both men and women, that racial integrity may be assured, not to one race, but to both"; in Georgia, "We find in our hearts no extenuation for ​crime, be it in violation of womanhood, mob-violence, or the illegal taking of human life . . . we believe that 'no falser appeal can be made to Southern manhood than that mob-violence is necessary for the protection of womanhood' or that the brutal practice of lynching and burning of human beings is an expression of chivalry"; and like expressions have come from women in Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

The dominant personality in the work of the Interracial Commission is Dr. Will W. Alexander, a former Methodist minister. Dr. Alexander has had associated with him some of the most liberal men of the South of both races—notably such men as the late John J. Eagan, the Rev. M. Ashby Jones, Dr. John Hope, Dr. Plato Durham, and Dr. Howard W. Odum.

There are other organizations that are indirectly attacking the problem of lynch-law which are helping to bring enlightenment. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ is conducting study groups, especially among women, on race relations. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, through the work of such a man as George L. Collins, is presenting to college students, North and South, sound, scientific information on race problems in general to replace the half-truths and myths on which many of these students have been fed in the past.

​Significant, too, is the change that is to be seen among college and university students, white and coloured, through influences other than those already mentioned. It is, beyond all question, most evident at the University of North Carolina, owing to the work of such men as Howard Odum, Guy Johnson, Gerald W. Johnson (now on the staff of the Baltimore Sun), Paul Green, and Frederick Koch. Immensely valuable and important work in gathering, interpreting, and publishing little-known Negro secular and religious music has been done by Odum and Guy Johnson. Koch and Paul Green have through the medium of the drama helped to present, not only to the South, but to the entire country, certain aspects of Negro life. The approach of all these men has been remarkably free on the one hand from bias and condescension and on the other from sentimental eulogy of the Negro. Such an attitude has helped enormously to change many of the false ideas concerning the Negro which have in the past been so productive of evil results.

Each of these men has played a part, along with others less prominent in other Southern universities, towards the shaping of a movement that is bringing a new interpretation of Negro life to the American public. This movement is the utilization of Negro themes and Negro life by white and Negro artists in various fields. Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, the late Florence Mills, Countee Cul​len, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Rudolph Fisher, Rosamond Johnson, Taylor Gordon, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, Eric Waldron, Aaron Douglas, Julius Bledsoe, Marion Anderson, Rose McClendon, Charles Gilpin, W. E. B. DuBois, Frank Wilson, and a number of other Negro singers, writers, painters, poets, and actors have achieved phenomenal success within recent years. That success has done much towards giving an entirely new picture of Negro life—one which already has helped to create an understanding and respect which could not have been created in a similar period in any other fashion. To the work of these have been added novels and short stories by T. S. Stribling, Julia Peterkin, Dubose Heyward, and Carl Van Vechten; plays by Eugene O'Neill, Paul Green, Ridgley Torrence; informative, sympathetic, and scholarly volumes on Negro music and folklore by Howard Odum and Guy Johnson. Many of these writers are of the South, and, though their work is naturally of varying merit, each of them is leagues ahead of workers in other fields who have the Negro as subject.

In The Mauve Decade Thomas Beer tells of a hot-headed young Georgian, son of a minister, who was a teacher at Vanderbilt University. One day he was horrified to find that certain of his fellow faculty-members not only believed in, but were actually teaching, biology according to Haeckel. At the height of an indignant protest to Lindon Cabell Garland, the chancellor of the ​university, against such heresy, he was interrupted by the older man with the quiet remark: "Men never amount to much until they outgrow their fathers' notions, sir." These writers, white and coloured, are helping towards the abandonment of their father's notions of race, science, religion, politics, and a great many other subjects. If this seed of ferment and honest scepticism can be kept alive in the South, there is some hope for a new day below the Mason and Dixon line.

Back of the changes already noted lie two factors which, more than any other, have tended towards revolutionizing Southern thought upon lynching and the Negro. These are the migration from the South of nearly a million and a half Negroes between 1916 and 1928; and the increasing resistance by Negroes to mob attacks.

When the World War began, in 1914, the United States was receiving from European countries each year upwards of a million immigrants. The war came, and, in the words of Charles S. Johnson, the brilliant young editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, now at Fisk University, "the cities of the North, stern, impersonal and enchanting, needed men of the brawny muscles, which Europe, suddenly flaming with war, had ceased to supply, when the black hordes came on from the South like a silent, encroaching shadow." The movement of this vast army of black workers to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and other industrial cen​tres to replace Poles and Lithuanians, Croatians and Austrians and other European races was at first greeted with joy in the South—"now that we're getting rid of the niggers we'll have nothing but peace," some said. Then came a not so comfortable, joyous feeling when it was found that a maid or a cook could not be hired with the old ease and at the old wages. This gave way to consternation when vast areas, especially after a lynching, were depopulated overnight. The South was learning for the first time the value of the asset it had in Negro labour.

The situation was met in two ways. The old South fell back on its old stand-by—violence. Labour agents were flogged, run out of town, confronted with a fantastically high licence-fee. Negroes were beaten and lynched, railroad tickets destroyed. These methods served not inconsiderably in speeding the parting Negroes and helping to make up the minds of those who were yet debating whether to leave. The more intelligent South, on the other hand, began to show signs of awakening to the gravity of the situation. They realized that, now that the Negroes had a place to which they could go for freedom from lynching and insult, for decent wages, living conditions, and school facilities, they would require more decent treatment in the South or they would leave. This realization led to the strengthening of the work of the Interracial Commission, to plans ​for better schools for Negroes in states like North Carolina and Louisiana, to much more outspoken condemnation of lynching by the press and the better element of the public. Whatever the conditions found and created in the North by the migrants, no considerable percentage of those who had left the South were returning. Thus the movement towards betterment of Southern conditions gained a permanency instead of expiring when the high point of the migratory movement had passed.

The effect upon the Negro, North and South, of this new opportunity was very significant. There came a stiffening of resistance to oppression with the hope of better conditions. Not only in Chicago and Washington, where Negroes met the mob resolved to die fighting, but in isolated sections of the South the same attitude was to be seen. In some instances the new type of Negro meant an increase in the size of the mob; in some a greater savagery in the excution of the victim. In others it meant that mobs were a shade more hesitant about taking summary vengeance—it was not so comfortable to reflect that someone might get hurt or even killed, and the individual in the mob did not relish the thought that this someone might be himself. In the North, for example, there had been a large number of bombings and other attacks upon homes of Negroes until the fall of 1925, when a member of the mob that was attacking ​the home of a Negro physician in Detroit was killed. The attacks ceased, not only in Detroit, but throughout the country.

Another factor is the changing condition being wrought in the South by business, the radio, the automobile, and good roads, which are breaking up the old South and creating new thought-patterns. Dr. Alexander of the Interracial Commission tersely sums up this new situation in these words: "Today the South reads Associated Press dispatches, national advertising, and listens each night to national radio programs. The heroes of southern boys today are General Pershing, Ford, Edison and Lindbergh. The Prince Albert coat and the goatee have entirely disappeared. The Rotarian, true to the national type, is the voice of the community. What the nation thinks the South is largely thinking; that America is God's country and Calvin Coolidge is a great president."

This new situation, born of changing industrial and economic conditions, and bringing with it whatever it may, is slowly changing, according to Dr. Alexander, the political philosophy of the South, breaking up the old isolation, and giving the South something else to think about in place of its traditional emotional fixation on the Negro. Having realized through the migration the economic asset that the Negro is to the South, and the disastrous economic effect of mob-law and the re​sulting disturbance of white and Negro labour, this new and powerful force of enlightened self-interest is working and will work for suppression of mobbism—that is, where mobbism works against pecuniary interest.

Ironically, the organization designed primarily to suppress Negro accomplishment, the Ku Klux Klan, has unwittingly helped to lower the lynching rate. This does not refer to the Klan's boast that it has checked lynchings, for there is no record of anything except to the contrary. It does refer to the agitation of the Klan for an "America for Americans" and laws for restriction of immigration. Their efforts in this direction, coupled with those of the American Federation of Labor and of the considerable element of Americans who are suspicious of foreign entanglements, have helped to solidify the Negro's place in American labour, by lessening the considerable competition of unrestricted immigration.

Somewhat further back in the anti-lynching movement come the churches. The distressingly high percentage of ignorant, prejudiced ministers in the white Southern church offers the most discouraging aspect of the entire problem of lynching and race relations, as well as in the task of enlightenment in general. The hold that such ministers have upon the great masses of Southern whites, especially in the rural regions, as has ​already been seen, explains in large measure such retrogressive movements as the Klan, Fundamentalism, anti-science and anti-Northern agitation. These preachers are shrewd enough to know that if their followers were reasonably enlightened, they themselves would be without jobs. They thus play on every fear, every passion, every stupidity of those they profess to lead. It is in such an atmosphere as these men create that a Texas preacher killed a man in cold blood on a Saturday afternoon and then faced his congregation the following morning, taking as his text: "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus."

Some of the leaders of the Interracial Commission are ministers and there are a few courageous ministers and bishops who have taken an active stand against lynching. Unfortunately they are all too rare. A prominent Southerner who was formerly connected with the church analyses the situation in these words: "The church, officially, nearly always follows economic and political trends rather than oppose them . . . over-emphasis on creeds and opinion" and "insistence on the importance of theological opinion," combined with prejudice, effectively checking courageous action against lynching precisely as the same forces checked church action against slavery. A pulpit and the mantle of authority that still robes the minister give exaggerated importance to prejudice and intolerance which these men hold in common with many of their congregations. ​Little may be hoped for from the present generation of ministers, it would appear, in the fight to end the rule of the mob. There does seem, however, to be ground for optimism in the attitude of the newer group of young ministers who are today learning in the seminaries something of the Negro and who are subject to the enlightening influences that are touching the South.

These, then, seem to be some of the more significant evidences of changes that are taking place today towards at least an abatement of the evil of lynching. One might object that all of them together represent but a fraction of American public opinion. That is true, yet they are of immense importance when one considers that two decades ago there was practically no opposition, organized or unorganized, against mob-law. Lecky, the English historian, once wrote of the American Revolution that it "was the work of an energetic minority who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctuating majority to courses for which they had little love and leading them step by step to a position from which it was impossible to recede." It is not, perhaps, a wholly malapropos analogy to the lynching situation. For the question now seems to be whether the energetic minority at work against lynch-law can overcome the serious handicap of a century of practically unchecked mob violence and end what is, without exaggeration, the most serious problem in American life.