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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 27. Violence and Intimidation - 2. Lynching
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Chapter 27. Violence and Intimidation 561
of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately
border the South: Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and
Kansas. Since the eafly 1890’s, the trend has been toward fewer and fewer
lynchings. The annual average in the ’nineties was near 200 j
in the
’thirties it dropped to slightly over 10. In 1941 it was down to 4, but
there are already more than this in 1942 (July). The decrease has been
faster outside the South, and the lynching of whites has dropped much
more than that of Negroes. Lynching has become, therefore, more and
more a Southern phenomenon and a racial one. Against the decrease in
number of victims there has been a marked trend toward greatly aggra-
vated brutality, extending to torture, mutilation and other sadistic ex-
cesses.®
Lynching is a rural and small town custom and occurs most commonly
in poor districts.® There are some indications that lynchings go in waves
and tend to recur in the same districts.^® The accusations against persons
lynched during the period for which there are records were: in 38 per cent
of the cases for homicide, 6 per cent for felonious assault, 16 per cent for
rape, 7 per cent for attempted rape, 7 per cent for theft, 2 per cent for
insult to white persons and 24 per cent for miscellaneous offenses or no
offense at all.^^ In the last category are all sorts of irritations: testifying
at court against a white man or bringing suit against him, refusal to pay
a note, seeking employment out of place, offensive language or boastful
remarks.^“ Regarding the accusations for crime, Raper testifies: “Case
studies of nearly one hundred lynchings since 1929 convince the writer
that around a third of the victims were falsely accused.”® The meaning
of these facts is that, in principle, a lynching is not merely a punishment
against an individual but a disciplinary device against the Negro group
The danger of Negroes’ desire to rape white women has acquired a
special and strategic position in the defense of the lynching practice.®
Actually, only 23 per cent of the victims were accused of raping or attempt-
ing to rape. There is much reason to believe that this figure has been
‘Arthur Raper, ‘‘Race and Class Pressures,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this
study (1940), p. 274. Raper adds that it is his . . opinion that a great contribution could
be made by some arrangement for immediate factual newspaper reports on each lynching and
other race and class violence by trained newspaper men. At present the local representative
of the news-gathering agencies sends in the story and usually says about what the community
wants said. Expert reporters who could be sent wherever a mob threatened would be free
to present the facts in the case.” pp. 274-275.)
Raper’s idea is that such a service, to be really useful, should be sponsored and under-
written by an impartial agency.
**
See Section 3 pf this chapter.
’According to Sir Harry H. Johnston {The Negro in the New World [1910], p. 464)1
“Allusions to the rape or attempted rape of white women or girls, by negroes or mulattoes,
are rare in the literature of the United States prior to 1870.”
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