RACES: Precision at Lewisburg

With three weeks to spare, West Virginia slipped under the wire last week in time to add its name to the list of lynching States for 1931. Last month two Negroes—Tom Jackson, 26, and George Banks, 27—were arrested at Leslie, taken to Lewisburg. They were suspected of shooting two peace officers called to quiet a blackamoor dance.

The Lewisburg lynchings were executed with the drilled precision of a first-class football backfield. With dimmed headlights and without license plates, a string of automobiles quietly circled the Greenbrier County jail, came to a halt. A group of 60 masked men filed up to the jail door. The keeper was summoned, seized, forced to give up his keys. Shivering in their underclothes, Jackson & Banks were taken to the edge of town, strung up to the cross arm of a telephone pole, side by side. Someone gave an order. Stepping back from the pole, the mob raised guns to shoulders, riddled its victims with a roaring volley which awakened the sleeping town.