National Affairs: No. 7

The folks of Wiggins, Miss., a quiet sawmill town, have no unusual thirst for Negro blood. They simply know what must be done when a Negro rapes. They knew four years ago when R. D. McGehee raped 13-year-old Catherine Ramsey: they strung him up by the neck, shot his body full of holes. They knew last week when old (74) Mrs. N——,* mother of a doctor, declared that a young Negro had come at night to her house, robbed her kitchen, then taken her out to the roadside and raped her.

At daybreak Sheriff H. C. Hinton and a posse of eight with bloodhounds started looking for Negro Wilder McGowan, 24. A crowd of Wiggins men watched them start. Toward noon, while Sheriff Hinton and his men were looking for McGowan at the Ten-Mile sawmill where he used to work, the Wiggins town siren sounded. Sheriff Hinton knew what that meant. The mob had found McGowan sleeping under a truck at his grandmother’s house. Afterold Mrs. N identified him, they just strung him up in the woods. They didn’t shoot or burn his body.

It was Mississippi’s fourth lynching this year, the nation’s seventh.

*Name deleted in conformity with Southern newspaper practice in rape-lynch cases.—ED.