AMERICA’S LYNCH LAW

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 832, 28 November 1929, Page 11

AMERICA’S LYNCH LAW

4.951 CASES IN 45 YEARS

NEGROES PERSECUTED

The number of people lynched in the United States between ISS2, the first year for which full figures are available, and 1927, was 4,951. Of these 3,53 3 were negroes, and 3,672 of the lyncliings took place in the 10 southernmost States of America, says the “Daily Express.” These figures are revealed in an authoritative and well-documented study of the subject, which is published under the title of “Rope ami Faggot, a Biography of Judge Lynch,” by Walter White (Knopf). Mr. White is assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, and is himself a Southerner. His facts are either the results of personal observation and investigation, or are quoted from contemporary reports in the anti-negro Press. They may be assumed, therefore, to be correct.

The systematic persecution of negroes began with the freeing of the slaves, after the American Civil War. The Southern planters, enraged at losing their cheap labour and frightened of the blacks wreaking vengeance on them for their past tyranny, tried, through th-s Ku-Klux-Klan and similar societies, to terrorise their old slaves into submission. The negroes began to prosper as time went on, and in some cases they gained positions of importance in their home towns. In the great war black soldiers fought side by side with white men in the American Army, and the result has been still further to enrage the “poor whites” of the Southern States.

In 1919, 10 black soldiers, who had just returned from the front, were lynched, some of them still wearing their American uniforms, and two of them were burned alive. The fiendish and obscene cruelty shown by the lynching mobs is indescribable. and would be incredible in h civilised race unless they were supported by first-hand evidence.

Many of the cases quoted by Mr. White are so disgusting that they cannot be printed, and in particular the lynchings and torture of black women.