THE CONGRESS: Black’s White

To Negro Lee Jones, a 31-year-old mill-hand of Greensboro, Ala., last week’s doings in the U. S. Senate were good news. Negro Jones had been arrested, charged with jumping on the running board of a car to kidnap Mrs. Robert Knox Greene, wife of a white planter. When Mrs. Greene’s friends began to gather he did not need to be told what familiar, ugly thought they had in mind. At the crucial moment when Sheriff Calvin Hollis was trying to calm the crowd, up stepped Planter Robert Knox Greene himself. How Planter Greene, a cousin of Alabama’s Representative Sam Hobbs, persuaded the mob to disperse he was soon explaining to the Associated Press. “I told them I was the aggrieved person,” said he, with some self-satisfaction, “and I ought to have the final say. I also reminded them our Southern Senators were fighting an anti-lynching bill in Washington and violence might hamper them. . . .”

“Skunk Meat.” Had it not been for Planter Greene’s timely intervention, Millhand Jones might have been the first person to be lynched in the U. S. in 1938. There were eight lynchings in 1937, 13 in 1936. There have been some 5,000 in the U. S. since complete records began in 1882. There have been lynchings in every State in the Union save four—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. But if the practice has been general, the opposition to laws intended to suppress it has centred in the South. For two generations Southern Representatives and Senators have greeted every lynching bill that came up for debate with a reaction as sharp and unfailing as would be produced by a polecat. Snorted Georgia’s Richard Russell last week of the latest and one of the most threatening Federal attempts to prosecute and punish lynchers: “Skunk meat.”

Week previous to this pronouncement Kentuckian Alben Barkley had settled down to the bitterest of the many unpleasant tasks that he has had since he succeeded the late Joseph Taylor Robinson as Majority Leader of the Senate. Leader Barkley was paying for a serious mistake. Last August in the closing days of Congress, when every minute of the Senate’s time was plotted out, he fell asleep at the switch. Senator King who was supposed to rise at a certain moment to present the District of Columbia Airport Bill, missed his cue and before Senator Barkley woke New York’s Senator Wagner had the floor. Senator Wagner brought up the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. Although Alben Barkley has cast a good Southern vote against anti-lynching bills in the past, he was caught in a legislative trap. To prevent a new filibuster from wrecking the closing hours of the session, he promised Senator Wagner if he would withdraw it for the time, that it would be considered, second only to the Farm Bill, next session.

When the special session opened last November with no Farm Bill in sight, Alben Barkley, like a Confederate general trapped into acting as a front for a group of carpetbaggers, unhappily unloosed the Wagner-Van Nuys Bill and its inevitable filibuster. It was temporarily laid aside when the Farm Bill appeared, but nothing is more important to a legislative leader than to keep his promises to the letter. So no sooner was the President’s message out of the way last fortnight than Alben Barkley, still smarting from the abuses of the last filibuster, fulfilled his pledge, produced the Anti-Lynching Bill for what he hoped would be the last time.

Last spring under the spur of the two blowtorch lynchings at Duck Hill, Miss. (TIME, April 26), the Gavagan Bill, a similar anti-lynching measure, passed the House. Passage by the Senate therefore meant that the bill would become law barring the unlikely event of a Presidential veto. So as predicted, Texas’ Tom Connally promptly organized a filibuster. Not as predicted, that filibuster last week rounded out ten days and had gathered so much momentum that Tom Connally jubilantly announced he would keep it going if necessary until Christmas.

Filibuster. The actual contents of the Wagner-Van Nuys Bill, as simple as they were familiar, would scarcely keep the U. S. Senate busy for that period. Like its predecessors, it provided for Federal prosecution, and a $5,000 fine or up to five years’ imprisonment, or both, for sheriffs & peace officers who did not afford criminals and suspected criminals reasonable protection from mobs (any gatherings of more than three persons). Its other principal provision, the payment of an indemnity up to $10,000 to the family of a victim of mob violence by the county whose officials are responsible, is already in the statue books, of twelve States. But filibustered rarely have to talk about bills. As Tom Connally’s loyal little band—Georgia’s Russell, North Carolina’s Bailey, South Carolina’s James Byrnes, Tennessee’s Kenneth McKellar, Louisiana’s Ellender, and Pat Harrison—began their operations they had one stroke of luck. Illinois’ porky, cautious William Dieterich had persuaded the Judiciary Committee to tack on an amendment exempting counties (i. e., Illinois’ Cook) from liabilities arising from gang murders and labor violence. This gave Kenneth McKellar an opportunity to bait Illinois’. Ham Lewis into a voluble debate on Chicago jurisprudence. North Carolina’s Robert Reynolds helped out by discussing Europe, the Orient, the British Isles, South America, Africa, the Malay States.

“Whenever the Republican Party, the Democratic Party or the New Deal Party or any other party,” rumbled North Carolina’s Josiah Bailey, “caters to the Negro vote, it is going to elect to office common fellows of the baser sort.” But when Kenneth McKellar began scornfully quoting from the bill in an effort to establish its unconstitutionality, Senator Wagner pointed out that the passage in question was a quotation from the Fourteenth Amendment. “Yes,” stammered Senator McKellar, “it is.”

Dropping Things-Josiah Bailey rose in Baptist wrath to read from Ferdinand Lundberg’s America’s 60 Families, the New Deal’s current antimonopoly handbook, a passage in which Author Lundberg maintained that those who bathe frequently experience a subconscious feeling of guilt.

“I’ve heard about the private bathroom in blue marble in Mr. Ickes’ office,” snorted Joe Bailey, “but I’ve never seen it and I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Mr. Ickes takes a bath.” With an angry gesture he raised his arm and wham, flung the book to the floor. In a twinkling, Oklahoma Democrat Elmer Thomas scrambled over to pick it up, lay it gently on a desk. At this point tobacco-chewing Cotton Ed Smith, who had no doubt been restrained by his colleagues from giving his standard anti-lynching argument on behalf of Southern womanhood, relieved his feelings by grabbing America’s 60 Families, slamming the book to the floor, stamping his big feet on it.

But Jimmy Byrnes dropped the first real bomb. Pointing straight at a small man seated quietly in the gallery, his voice tense with passion, the wiry South Carolinian cried: “The South may just as well know , . . that it has been deserted by the Democrats of the North. . . . One Negro . . . has ordered this bill to pass and if a majority can pass it, it will pass. . . . If Walter White,” and Jimmy Byrnes was fairly shouting his angry tribute, “should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.”

Paleface-The Negro who did not acknowledge this extraordinary attention was Secretary Walter Francis White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Not the least reason for Southern hatred of antilynching bills is that for the past decade they have been inextricably associated with Walter White, and that the gradual growth of the anti-lynching movement had by last week made spunky, dapper, 44-year-old Negro White the most potent leader of his race in the U. S.

Son of a fair-skinned Georgia postman and his fair-skinned wife, Walter White is blond and palefaced. He himself does not know how much Negro blood runs in his veins; Harvard’s far-ranging Anthropologist Earnest Alfred Hooton computes it at 1/64. But despite a skin that last week fooled fellow guests at Washington’s Hay-Adams House, Walter White has always regarded himself as a Negro. He remembers that his father’s house was almost burned down during an Atlanta race riot in his childhood. He recalls too that his father died in agony when the surgeons of the white ward of an Atlanta hospital, to which he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, balked upon learning his race and insisted on shipping him in the rain to the Negro ward across the street.

Ironically, Walter White’s pale skin got him into the Negro movement. In 1918 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wanted an investigator who looked white enough to circulate among crowds at lynchings, and young White, recently graduated from the Negro Atlanta University, was well qualified for the job. Founded nine years before as the result of a disastrous race riot in Abraham Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, 111. the N. A. A. C. P. was then a smallish but idealistic organization with a masthead of big names, among them liberal Editor Oswald Garrison Villard and famed Boston Lawyer Moorfield Storey.

The Association published The Crisis, later to reach its peak of influence under the editorship of Atlanta University’s scholarly VV. E. Burghardt Du Bois.* It circulated a news service to the Negro press, which now numbers over 200 papers and magazines. It lobbied for Negro legislation, and, when a post-War wave of lynchings carried off ten returned Negro soldiers in 1919 (two of them burned alive), it began to spend an increasing amount of its energy promoting State and then Federal anti-lynching laws. Palefaced Negro White did his job well. He talked to members of mobs that executed some 40 lynchings. Occasionally he had to evade such triumphant questions as “Well, how would you like to have your daughter marry a nigger?” Once, while investigating a race riot, in Arkansas, he narrowly escaped a mob who had heard he was a Negro investigator, breathlessly boarded a train only to have the conductor say: “You’re leaving too soon—they’re locking for a yellow nigger.” He helped the N. A. A. C. P. publish the first case history of lynching, covering 3,224 cases between 1889 and 1918. And as assistant to N. A. A. C. P. Secretary James Weldon Johnson, he sat in the Senate gallery and heard the Dver Bill talked to death in 1922.

In Rope & Faggot, which he wrote in France on a Guggenheim Fellowshipin 1927-28, Author White maintained that the long tradition of U. S. vigilantism has finally narrowed down to the Southern Negro, not to protect Southern womanhood as was usually claimed (he found rape charged in less than one lynching in five*), but to shackle and harry a growing economic competitor. Rope & Faggot also maintained that lynch law dated back to Colonial days when a Quaker named Charles Lynch sat as magistrate in an extra-legal court at what is now Lynchburg, Va., to try horse thieves, to the 18305 when a St. Louis judge, aptly named Lawless, advised a jury that mob murder was “beyond the reach of law.” The N. A. A. C. P. record still is that after 99.4% of U. S. lynchings, sheriffs had reported with melancholy unanimity: no arrests, no indictments, no convictions.

Lobbying-When James Weldon Johnson retired to teach literature at Fisk University in 1930, Walter White succeeded to his $5,000 job and a Federal anti-lynching law officially became Item No. 1 on the N. A. A. C. P. schedule. The White argument, ceaselessly drummed into Negroes and white legislators alike, was that while talk is long, the rope is short —that in the 13 years between the Dyer filibuster and the filibuster that wrecked the Wagner-Costigan bill, mobs had lynched with practical impunity more than 290 U. S. Negroes.

In 1935, Walter White was able to get the ear of Franklin Roosevelt. Secretary Marvin Mclntyre refused him an appointment with the President, but the President’s Negro Valet Irvin H. McDuffie†who sometimes leaves notes on his employer’s pillow and tactfully gets unofficial callers in through the White House kitchen, was able to arrange a private meeting. What effect Walter White’s address to the President may have had Washington last week was not sure.

Paper Victory. As Walter White sat peering curiously down at the Senate from his gallery seat, he had already won a paper victory. He claimed, and neutral observers were disposed to accept his estimate, 73 votes for his bill in the turbulent chamber below. But these were promissory notes, useless until a final roll call forced collection. And just as there were Representatives willing to bring the Administration’s Wages-&-Hours Bill out of an obstructive rules committee but unwilling to vote for it when they got the chance, so too there were Senators last week willing to vote for an anti-lynching bill but unwilling to take the forcible measures necessary to bring it to a vote.

On paper the 73 supporters of the Anti-Lynching Bill controlled nine more votes than the two-thirds required to invoke cloture and end the filibuster, but the filibuster nevertheless went on. Alert Walter White made increasingly anxious trips downstairs to confer with Senators in the reception room. One of his departures from the gallery was noted by Jimmy Byrnes with sotto voce sarcasm: “Barkley can’t do anything without talking to that nigger first.”

The odds in favor of the White-Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill decreased steadily last week, for time works with a filibuster. One serious blow was the refusal of Republican Leader Charles McNary, a master of minority strategy, to vote for night sessions or cloture so long as he could hamstring the Barkley leadership by refusing to do so. Another blow was the warning by oldtime Liberal George Norris that a prolonged, bitter filibuster in the face of important legislation might be too high a price even for an anti-lynching bill. Said he: “Perhaps this is not the time to open wounds that may not heal.” A reporter asked Tom Connally whether he still thought he and his friends could talk until Christmas. The old Texan snorted: “Why not?”

*With a circulation of 160,000 per month. *Other reasons: murder, miscegenation, “incendiary language,” jilting a girl, being too prosperous, giving evidence against a white man, “introducing smallpox,” talking back to a white man.

†Wife Elizabeth McDuffie, longtime Roosevelt cook, was three weeks ago hired by publicity-wise Selznick International Pictures to act in their forthcoming Gone With The Wind.