The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 54

This is so far from being the case that, as the records show, Negroes have sometimes been lynched after receiving death sentences merely to satisfy the sadistic frenzy of the mob. They have also been lynched sometimes after being acquitted, not because the law was lax in their cases but because the preponderance of evidence pointed to their innocence. Such was the fact in the Aiken cases in 1926, in which the victims included a Negro woman and a 15-year-old Negro boy. They were taken to be lynched from the Jail where they were awaiting a second trial after having successfully appealed from a conviction for "conspiracy to murder." This was true also in the case of Cordie Cheek, the Tennessee Negro boy lynched in De- ieven, tinder some circumstances, Wholesome; that they are due primarily to the failure of courts to punish criminals and that the remedy lies less in anti-lynching agitation and legislation than in a stricter enforcement of criminal law. No less a person than the late Governor Rolfe of California sought to excuse in this way a lynching which had disgraced his State.

As the Southern Commission recently pointed out in its pamphlet "The Mob Still Rides," an increasingly large number of the lynched are Negroes. No one familiar with Southern Justice will seriously contend that the enforcement or criminal law against Negroes In the South is lax and that greater severity Is needed in dealing with them. BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE cember, 1933. Cheek was accused of attempted rape but was discharged because the grand Jury investigating the case found no ground for indicting him. He was kidnaped and lynched within an hour of his release from the Nashville jail where he had been held for safekeeping.

But it is still said, and sometimes, no doubt believed just because it has been repeated so often, that lynching of Negroes is almost always for crimes against women. Here again the facts collected by the National Association and the Southern Commission fail to support such a statement. The study "Thirty Years of Lynching," published by the association in 1919, covered the years 1889-1918. It showed that only a fourth of the Negroes lynched were even accused of such crimes. The Southern Commission's analysis of the 84 Iynchings committed from 1930 to 1935 shows that scarcely one-fourth of those lynched were accused of rape and attempted rape combined.

Eleven percent of the mob victims, the report goes on, were not accused of any crime. An additional 30 percent were accused only ef minor offenses. Of the remaining 59 percent many were not guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. By way of illustration, they state further: "There is reason to suspect that the Negro lynched at Caledonia, accused of insulting white women, had been falsely accused by persons desiring his good cotton crop. Perhaps the most preposterous accusation of the whole five years was that against Dennis Cross, helpless Negro paralytic who was lynched in Tuscaloosa, in September, 1933, on the charge of attempted rape." One might also appropriately recall in this connection the case of Lacy Mitchell.

Mitchell, a Thomas County, Georgia, Negro, was shot to death by a group of white men in September, 1930, because he was the State's star witness against two white men accused of raping a Negro woman. But the Commission's findings go further and deeper than this. They have not only compiled data correcting popular misconceptions about lynching. They have drawn significant social conclusions from this material. While the members of the Commission are on record as favoring Federal legislation, they know that for the causes of lynching more fundamental remedies are needed.

Thus the publications of the Commission, based on many years of intensive study by trained investigators, show not only that Iynchings occur most frequently in the South and that Negroes are lynched of tener than white people. They also show that these Iynchings occur most frequently in sparsely settled rural counties in the South; that is, in its poorest and most backward sections. "The bases of lynch law," Arthur Raper has written, "reside in these same attitudes which find expression in the cultural, political and economic exploitation of the Negro." It is not surprising, therefore, that lynching occurs most frequently in those Southern States where, according to this authority, "from three to sixty times as much public money is spent on the education of the white child as of the Negro where the Negro cannot vote, hold office, sit on a jury or have a voice in the disposal of public funds, and where the underprivileged poor white's only and Jealously guarded superiority lies in his whiteness. Lynching, the Commission's report recognizes, is an economic as well as an ethical and a legal problem. The frenzied sadism and lawlessness of lynching mobs are merely the extreme outward signs of the attitudes Mr.

Raper mentions. Legislation intelligently devised and honestly administered may curb these excesses. It may even considerably reduce the number of Iynchings, but lynching, in the words of the Commission's conclusion, "will be eliminated in proportion as all elements in the population are given opportunity for development and are accorded fundamental human rights." ZF Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia. In Sherman, Texas, George Hughes, a Negro farmhand, was arrested in 1930 on the charge ot assaulting a white woman. On May 9, 1930, a mob of white men, women and children fired the Sherman courthouse where his trial was being held, dispersing county officials, Texas Rangers and two small units jot the National Guard.

Eventually this mob succeeded in blasting a two-story fireproof vault in which Hughes was confined but accidentally killed him in so doing. They then dragged his body through the streets (while white officers directed traffic) hung it to a tree in the Negro section and burned it. They then set fire to the Negro business district and slashed the fire hose. Fourteen members of the mob were Indicted, and two were convicted of arson and received prison sentences of two years each. This punishment was unusually severe.

On July 4, 1933, Norris Dendy was lynched in Clinton, S. C. His crime Was striking a white man in a quarrel after both of them had apparently been drinking. Dendy left the scene of the quarrel in his automobile truck, was arrested on a charge of "reckless driving" and placed in the Clinton Jail. That night a mob, which eye-witnesses have sworn included three members of the town's police force, broke into the jail, dragged him out and into a waiting automobile which drove away at high speed.

Next day Dendy's body was found some miles away. He had been beaten, shot and strangled to death. After years of persistent effort on the part of the dead man's brother, a South Carolina grand jury lacetlousiv returned Indictments against tiie rope and gun through which he came to his death and which could not, of course, be prosecuted. At last report no member of the mob had been indicted and at least two of the police officers named in eye-witness affidavits as participants were still on the town's police force. At Tampa, in December, 1935, three white men alleged to be "Reds" were kidnaped by a mob, which included several of the town's police officers, and flogged so severely that one of them, Joseph Shoemaker, died of his injuries.

No one has to date been punished for Shoemaker's murder. For the lesser crime of kidnaping his companion, Poulnot, a number of the police officers were tried largely because of the threat made by William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, to cancel the Federation's Tampa convention this Fall If they were not. Five of these police officers were found guilty of this lesser crime and sentenced to serve four years each. They appealed the conviction and are at the moment but on bail awaiting the decision of the Florida Supreme Court on their appeal. And there are on record even worse cases than these, cases where the victims were plainly innocent of any crime, or not even accused of any.

Sometimes an innocent victim has been lynched because no crime had In fact been committed, and sometimes because the mob got the man. Sometimes it even got the wrong woman for, despite the allegation sometimes heard that lynching Is necessary to protect Southern womanhood (an allegatldYf which is indignantly repudiated by the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching), women and children have also on occasion been among the victims. In the particularly horrible Iynchings in Brooks and Lowes Counties, Georgia, in 1918 Mary Turner, a Negro woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy, was burned, to death. Her offense was asesrtlng the inocence of her husband who was in fact Innocent of the murder for which he was lynched. The details of this lynching are too gruesome to repeat, but the case, like so many, is an overwhelming refutation of the state-went still sometimes heard that Vnchings may be necessary and Then and Now New Field and a New Profession by Clara Gruening Stillman WITHIN less than a decade a remarkable development in knowledge, skills and activities has been taking place in many fields of social work that have to do with the welfare of individuals and families from every possible angle, physical, mental, emotional and economic.

The most striking thing about this development In every field i3 the fact thbt when it reaches a certain point it inevitably crosses another field. Families have been calling on specialized centers of various kinds for advice, the pre-natal clinic, the birth control clinic, the Child Guidance Bureau, the Parent Education Association, the social or mental hygiene center, or in a general way they got help by talking things over with the doctor, the teacher, the social worker or the minister. Yet more and more these agencies have found themselves inadequate to deal satisfactorily with problems that grow constantly more complex under their hands, often with remote origins or associated in conditions they may recognize but are not equipped to deal with. Take, for instance, the problem of the unadjusted child. Very often, this is really the problem of the unadjusted parent, of one or both.

This may involve the parents' attitudes toward each other as well as toward their children. It may involve family habits, traditions, peculiarities, the family budget, some special situation. To help the child a reorientation of the whole complex of family relationships may be necessary. You are dealing with adults, not only with a child. They are harder to influence, less submissive.

Their maladjustments go back to their childhoods, are firmly entrenched in their characters and ways. Often these are unconsciously their chief source of pleasure. Sometimes the parents are merely limited, stupid or selfish. How are they to be handled so that the child can be reached through them? A psychologist said recently in a public lecture that the mother's mental health is even more important than her physical health for the child's well being. Some one should have talked to these parents long ago when they were young, only thinking of marriage, given then some insight into the problems of marriage and parenthood, some guidance for marital adjustment, for planning and spacing their families and managing them successfully.

In this connection the recent sweeping decision of the U. S. Court of Appeals that physicians may prescribe contraceptives for the health and well-being of their patients has removed the last obstacle to the democratization of birth control, now considered one? of the most important aspects of family and social hygiene by an increasing number of physicians, psychologists and sociologists. The Birth Control Clinic often leads to the Family Consultation Center, a new development just becoming discernible to the general public. And vice versa, of course.

With Increased knowledge and new and greatly extended concepts of health all individual and social problems are seen to be related. You can hardly deal with one without bumping into some of the others. In a recent number of "Parent Education," Dr. Mary Fisher writes: "Since 1928 approximately 100 organized family consultation services have developed in response to the pressure for help and guidance on the part of families and the desire of specialists to facilitate co-operation and carry on research." These bureaus emerged out of programs of eugenics, birth control, child development, parent education, religion and social welfare. They are a natural outgrowth and extension of services already existing.

They aim to collect and distribute scientific information that makes for success in marriage and parenthood, to advise young people about to be married or already married, to study preventive approaches to family difficulties. They make available a variety of services covering every aspect of family life. As yet this movement is in its infancy but it is growing rapidly. Begun almost as a sideline in more or less accidental and amateur fashion, marriage and family counseling is on its way to becoming a full time profession. The demand for more scientific training is becoming insistent and courses in the study of marriage and the family are beginning to be given in a few colleges, notably at Sarah Laurence by Dr.

Fisher and at Colgate by Dr. Norman Himes, and the necessity for more bureaus, better techniques and more extended services is increasingly recognized. At last intelligence, scientific standards, freedom of research, speech and action can be applied to family life, and the most fundamental human relations which were hitherto considered too sacred to be understood are now considered so sacred that it is our duty to understand them as fully as possible and use every resource to mold them for individual and social welfare and happiness. The total disappearance of the family has often been prophesied, but though the family continues to change it does not die. Dr.

Fisher has pointed out that whatever functions the family may have lost it retains universally the child-bearing, affection giving, status-giving (and one might add character-forming) functions that are the base of all individual and social life..