RACES: Lynch & Anti-Lynch

In Washington, before a gallery crowded with Negroes, the U. S. House of Representatives was beginning to debate a drastic anti-lynching bill introduced by Congressman Gavagan from New York’s black Harlem. In Jackson, Miss., before delegates to a farm conference, Governor Hugh Lawson White was boasting that Mississippi had not had a lynching in 15 months. In Winona, Miss., in a jampacked courtroom in Montgomery County’s white brick courthouse, Roosevelt Townes and Bootjack McDaniels, 26-year-old Negroes, were pleading not guilty to a charge of murdering a crossroads country grocer during a robbery last December at nearby Duck Hill. One day last week these simultaneous events were the prolog of a bloody melodrama, peculiarly Southern.

As the debate at Washington droned on, furnishing a strange far-off accompaniment, Negroes Townes and McDaniels were led handcuffed from the courtroom. If their minds registered anything as the sheriff and two deputies escorted them down the back stairs to return them to jail, it was relief. The Court had assigned counsel to defend them, set a date for trial by jury. Everything was according to law. But when they stepped out of a side door of the courthouse, they found themselves face to face with what so often handles cases like theirs in the South. An angry mob surged forward, took them from the custody of their guardians without a struggle, threw them into a school bus.

Followed by 40 automobiles, the bus sped down the highway toward Duck Hill. Two miles from the scene of last December’s murder, 500 country folk, including women and children, waited expectantly in a patch of pinewood. When the motorcade from Winona arrived, the mob closed in to watch as the terrified Negroes were dragged from the bus. People in the back rows could hear heavy chains clink as the two blackamoors were made fast to trees.

Bootjack McDaniels, a lanky Negro with powerful shoulders, was asked to confess first. He gibbered that he was innocent. A mobster stepped forward with a plumber’s blow torch, lighted it. Another ripped McDaniels’ shirt off. Again he refused to confess. Then the blue-white flame of the torch stabbed into his black chest. He screamed with agony. The torch was withdrawn. He reiterated his innocence. Again the torch was turned on him and the smell of burned flesh floated through the woods. Again he screamed, and when it was withdrawn this time he was ready to confess. He was with Townes, he sobbed, when Townes poked a shotgun through the grocery window, fired into the grocer’s back. When his confession was delivered in sufficient detail, the lynchers fell back and a volley of bullets crashed into Bootjack McDaniels, 1937’s lynching victim No. 2.

Despite what he had just witnessed, Negro Townes was not yet ready to repeat the confession which county officers had said he signed with his X after he was arrested last fortnight. But the blow torch soon burned the story out of him. As he hung limp in his chains, some of the mob went off to get another Negro he named as an accomplice. Back they came with one Shorty Dorroh. After he satisfied them that he had had nothing to do with the murder, they horsewhipped him, ordered him to get out of the State. Then they piled brush high about sobbing Negro Townes, drenched it with gasoline, touched him off—1937’s lynching victim No. 3.

Back in Winona, the judge who had heard the Negroes’ pleas of not guilty promised a Grand Jury investigation, but the sheriff and his men said they had not recognized any of the mobsters who seized their prisoners. Said Deputy Sheriff Hugh Curtis: “It was all done very quickly, quietly and orderly.”

In Washington the House debate rose to a furious crescendo after Michigan’s Michener read a press report of what had just happened at Duck Hill. Negroes in the gallery, who had cheered and applauded intermittently throughout the day when one of their champions made a good point on the floor, were shocked into silence. Two days later, with all but 17 Southern Representatives out of 123 voting against it, the Gavagan anti-lynching bill, which would make mobsters and law officers who yield up their prisoners liable to stiff Federal prosecution, was passed by the House.

Few proposals have caused more excited debate in the halls of Congress than Federal anti-lynching bills. At least one is offered every session. This session there were 59. The first anti-lynching bill, introduced in the house in 1902, was inspired not by lynchings of Southern Negroes but by the large number of lynchings in the 1880s and 1890s in which white aliens were the victims. These crimes caused the Government no end of embarrassment, resulted in payments of $475,500 in indemnities to foreign governments. When the South continued to lynch Negroes after alien lynchings ceased, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was organized to do something about it and anti-lynching legislation became a permanent sectional issue. The first bill to get through the House did so in 1922. Southern Senators killed it with a 21-day filibuster. In 1935 the Southern bloc in the Senate filibustered six days to smother a similar bill.

Few Washington observers would concede last week’s bill an outside chance in the Senate. Many doubted that it would ever get out of committee. The fact that the Administration needs the support of Southern Senators to get the President’s Court Plan passed, caused considerable speculation when the anti-lynching bill got through the House. A filibuster, which seemed almost certain, could jam up the legislative mill and thus delay or prevent passage of the Court legislation. Administration leaders feared that Southern Senators who oppose the Court Plan might welcome a filibuster on this other issue of such powerful interest to the folks back home as a disguise for their opposition to the White House.