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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 27. Violence and Intimidation - 4. Trends and Outlook - 5. Riots
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566 An American Dilemma
It is often said that the decrease of lynching is only nominal, or partly
so. There are several substitutes for lynching. One is the killing of Negro
criminals by the police officers.*® Similar to this is the precipitate and
predetermined trial given to an accused Negro when there is danger that
he will be lynched.® Another substitute is quiet murder without the forma-
tion of a mob.^® A third substitute, “legal lynchings” proper, is that in
which police and court officials promise to vigilante leaders that the accused
Negro will receive a quick trial and the death penalty if he is not lynched.^^
There is no way of finding out whether these substitute practices are
really increasing. The present author is rather inclined to believe that
they, too, have been declining. But there is no doubt that these substitutes
have not declined as rapidly as lynching. All the other forms of violence
against Negroes—striking, beating, robbing, destroying property, exiling,
threatening—still occur in the South with great, though perhaps slightly
decreasing, frequency. Such outrages do not get publicity in the white
press and are not actively opposed by white organizations or state govern-
ments. Yet it would be easier to prevent and punish them with an adequate
police and court system than it would be to curb lynching, for the white
perpetrators of these outrages are more often individuals than groups.
As in the case of lynching, an aroused Northern and Southern liberal
public opinion would be effective in preventing them. In the last analysis,
the true perspective of lynching as of these other forms of violence and
intimidation is the inherited pattern of white society in the South not to
respect the rights of Negroes on equal terms: the custom of tolerating the
cheating of Negroes in economic deals and, generally, the insistence that
he shall humbly pray for his dufe as a personal kindness, not proudly
demand it as a right.
5. Riots
In one sense, the riot is the most extreme form of extra-legal mob
violence used to prevent Negroes from getting justice. In another sense,
however, the riot is quite different from all other forms of mob violence:
it is not a one-way punishment but a two-way battle. The Negroes may be
hopelessly outnumbered and beaten, but they fight back. There is danger
to the white man participating in the riot as there usually is not when he
engages in other forms of violence against Negroes. Sometimes the killing
and beating of a large number of Negroes is called a riot: w’e prefer to
call this a terrorization or massacre and consider it as a magnified, or mass,
lynching. Its effects are those of a lynching. In this book we shall reserve
the term “riot” to refer to mass violence in which Negroes fight as unre-
servedly as whites.
* Even the death sentence given by the courts to an accused Negro will not always deter
a lynching mob.
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