Arthur F. Raper - The Tragedy of Lynching

THE TRAGEDY OF LYNCHING

W. W. ALEXANDER, Executive Secretary, Commission on
Interracial Coperation, ex-officio
W. C. JACKSON, President, ex-officio
ARTHUR F. RAPER, Research Secretary
W. R. CHIVERS, Associate

SEE THE LAST PAGES OF THIS BOOK FOR A COMPLETE LIST OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA SOCIAL STUDY SERIES

The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N. C.; The Baker and Taylor Co., New York; Oxford University Press, London; The Maruzen Company, Tokyo; Edward Evans Sons, Ltd., Shanghai; D. B. Centens Wetenschappelijke Boekhandel, Amsterdam.

COPYRIGHT 1933 BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY EDWARDS & BROUGHTON COMPANY, BALEIGH, N. C.; BOUND BY L. H. JENKINS, INC., RICHMOND, VA.

THE LYNCHING PROBLEM is of high national importance. Until America can discover and apply means to end these relapses to the law of the jungle, we have no assurance that ordered society will not at any moment be overthrown by the blind passion of a potentially ever-present mob.

But the quest for a preventive can be undertaken only after we have an understanding of what it is that is to be prevented. This necessary analysis of the lynching, its background, circumstances, and meaning, introduces many baffling elements. Is lynching a group response to general factors? Is there a sufficient common pattern to crimes committed a thousand miles apart to enable us to isolate definite contributory causes? What parts do poverty, ignorance, racial emotions play in these mob-deaths? What is the social pathology, the emotional history, of a lynching mob? Could these things be learned, or any moiety of them, a real beginning toward diagnosis would be made, and prescription would swiftly follow.

With the marked increase of lynchings early in 1930, the Commission on Interracial Coperation requested a number of men of both races to undertake a thorough study of the lynching phenomenon. Thus was created the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, which began its work in June 1930. This Commission was fortunate to secure, as its chief of research and investigation, Dr. Arthur F. Raper, of the staff of the Commission on Interracial Coperation. In our general field investigations and researches, Dr. Raper was ably assisted by Professor Walter R. Chivers, of the Sociology Department of Morehouse College, Atlanta, who also visited the scenes of each of 1930s lynchings and secured valuable data. These two investigators in turn are greatly indebted to Mr. R. B. Eleazer, for his study of the lynching at Walhalla, South Carolina; to Mr. N. C. Young, for a report of the lynching at Tarboro, North Carolina; to Dr. and Mrs. J. J. Rhyne for their assistance, and to Mr. Orland K. Armstrong, for an intimate picture of the lynching at Maryville, Missouri. The coperation of Dr. W. W. Alexander and Mr. R. B. Eleazer of the staff of the Commission on Interracial Coperation has been of inestimable value in this work. Miss Emily H. Clay and Miss Myrtis Johnson have been most helpful in the preparation of the manuscript for publication.

For two years, Dr. Raper has worked upon the problems, patiently, unflaggingly, in scientific spirit. He and his associates dissected the social anatomy of each of 1930s lynchings. Their observations and conclusions have been carefully debated, tested, and appraised by the members of the Commission. Two reports have already been published: Lynchings and What They Mean, an eighty-page pamphlet containing our general findings and recommendations, and The Mob Murder of S. S. Mincey, a twenty-five-page pamphlet presenting two of our case studies. In its first chapters, the present volume incorporates much of the data presented in our former publication; the remainder of the volume is devoted to case studies, two of which appeared in the smaller pamphlet.

The Commission feels that the presentation of these more detailed and embracing materials is warranted by the researches of Dr. Raper and his associates, and will afford students of social phenomena an opportunity to study the causation of these examples of group sadism and, finally, will be welcomed by the ever-increasing number of Southern men and women who abhor mob-murder and expectantly look forward to the day when it will be no more.

GEORGE F. MILTON, Chairman
Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching.

THE TOLL of the mob reckons not alone the victims but the lynchers themselves and the economic, social, and cultural meaning of their lawlessness. Three thousand seven hundred and twenty-four people were lynched in the United States from 1889 through 1930.1 Over four-fifths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape. Practically all of the lynchers were native whites. The lynching rates have been highest in the newer and more sparsely settled portions of the South, where cultural and economic institutions are least stable and officers of the law are farthest apart, poorest paid, and most dependent upon local sentiment.

Of the twenty-one persons lynched in 1930, many were captured after extended man-hunts organized by undeputized armed men who used bloodhounds and conducted some type of mock trial before the lynching. Though two of the victims were unaccused, and there is grave doubt as to the guilt of many more, the findings of these mob trials were the lynchers assurance that their victims were guilty of the crimes of which they were accused. The fact that a number of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned suggests the presence of sadistic tendencies among the lynchers; herein lies one of the most baffling phases of the mob situation. Though there were a few notable exceptions, most of the lynchers, chiefly young men between their late teens and twenty-five, were from that unattached group of people which exercised least public responsibility and was farthest removed from the institutions and agencies determining accepted standards of conduct. A number of middle-aged women figured prominently in some of the outbreaks; children, too, were present, making more difficult any effective resistance by officers.

Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers, the latter not guiltless, only forty-nine were indicted and only four have been sentenced. Chief among the factors rendering the courts ineffective was the prevalent indifference of peace officers and court officials and the apathy of the general white public concerning matters affecting Negroes. With but rare exceptions, leaders and members of the local religious and civic organizations were maneuvered by the pro-lynchers into a position of silent acquiescence.