Following the Color Line Part 27

In the intense, excited crowd gathered around the court-house on this Tuesday, the 16th of August, other influences were also at work, influences operating in a greater or less degree in every lynching mob. We are accustomed to look upon a mob as an ent.i.ty, the expression of a single concrete feeling; it is not; it is itself torn with dissensions and compunctions, swayed by conflicting emotions. Similarly, we look upon a militia company as a sort of machine, which, set in operation, automatically performs a certain definite service. But it is not. It is made up of young men, each with his own intense feelings, prejudices, ideals; and it requires unusual discipline to inculcate such a sense of duty that the individual soldier will rise superior to the emotions of the hour. Most of these young men of Statesboro and Savannah really sympathised with the mob; among the crowd the Statesboro men saw their relatives and friends. Some of the officers were ambitious men, hoping to stand for political office. What would happen if they ordered the troops to fire on their neighbours?

And "the n.i.g.g.e.r deserved hanging," and "why should good white blood be shed for n.i.g.g.e.r brutes?" At a moment of this sort the clear perception of solemn abstract principles and great civic duties fades away in tumultuous excitement. Yet these soldier boys were not cowards; they have a fighting history; their fathers made good soldiers; they themselves would serve bravely against a foreign enemy, but when called upon for mob service they failed utterly, as they have failed repeatedly, both North and South.

Up to the last moment, although the crowd believed in lynching and wanted to lynch, there seemed to be no real and general determination to forestall the law. The mob had no centre, no fixed purpose, no real plan of action. One determined man, knowing his duty (as I shall show in another story), and doing it with common sense, could have prevented trouble, but there was no such man. Captain Hitch, of the Savannah Company, a vacillating commander, allowed the crowd to pack the court-house, to stream in and out among his soldiers; he laid the responsibility (afterward) on the sheriff, and the sheriff shouldered it back upon him. In nearly all the cases I investigated, I found the same attempt to s.h.i.+ft responsibility, the same lack of a responsible head. Our system too often fails when mob stress is laid upon it--unless it happens that some strong man stands out, a.s.sumes responsibility, and becomes a momentary despot.

_How the Soldiers Were Overpowered_

A mob, no matter how deeply inflamed, is always cowardly. This mob was no exception. It crowded up, crowded up, testing authority. It joked with the soldiers, and when it found that the jokes were appreciated, it took further liberties; it jostled the soldiers--good-humouredly. "You don't dare fire," it said, and the soldiers made no reply. "Your guns aren't loaded," it said, and some soldier confessed that they were not. In tender consideration for the feelings of the mob, the officers had ordered the men not to load their rifles. The next step was easy enough; the mob playfully wrenched away a few of the guns, those behind pushed forward--those behind always do push forward, knowing they will not be hurt--and in a moment the whole mob was swarming up the stairs, yelling and cheering.

In the court-room, sentence had been pa.s.sed on Reed and Cato, and the judge had just congratulated the people on "their splendid regard for the law under very trying conditions." Then the mob broke in. A brother of the murdered Hodges, a minister from Texas, rose magnificently to the occasion. With tears streaming down his face, he begged the mob to let the law take its course.

"We don't want religion, we want blood," yelled a voice.

The mob was now thoroughly stirred; it ceased to hesitate; it was controlled wholly by its emotions. The leaders plunged down the court-room and into the witness chamber, where the Negroes sat with their wives, Reed's wife with a young baby. The officers of the law accommodatingly indicated the right Negroes, and the mob dragged them out. Hanging was at first proposed, and a man even climbed a telegraph-pole just outside the court-house, but the mob, growing more ferocious as it gathered volume and excitement, yelled its determination:

"Burn them! burn them!"

They rushed up the road, intending to take the Negroes to the scene of the crime. But it was midday in August, with a broiling hot sun overhead and a dusty road underfoot. A mile from town the mob swerved into a turpentine forest, pausing first to let the Negroes kneel and confess. Calmer spirits again counselled hanging, but some one began to recite in a high-keyed voice the awful details of the crime, dwelling especially on the death of the little girl. It worked the mob into a frenzy of ferocity.

"They burned the Hodges and gave them no choice; burn the n.i.g.g.e.rs!"

"Please don't burn me," pleaded Cato. And again: "Hang me or shoot me; please don't burn me!"

_Burning of the Negroes_

Some one referred the question to the father-in-law of Hodges. He said Hodges's mother wished the men burned. That settled it. Men were sent into town for kerosene oil and chains, and finally the Negroes were bound to an old stump, f.a.gots were heaped around them, and each was drenched with oil.

Then the crowd stood back accommodatingly, while a photographer, standing there in the bright suns.h.i.+ne, took pictures of the chained Negroes.

Citizens crowded up behind the stump and got their faces into the photograph. When the f.a.gots were lighted, the crowd yelled wildly. Cato, the less stolid of the two Negroes, partly of white blood, screamed with agony; but Reed, black and stolid, bore it like a block of wood. They threw knots and sticks at the writhing creatures, but always left room for the photographer to take more pictures.

And when it was all over, they began, in common with all mobs, to fight for souvenirs. They scrambled for the chains before they were cold, and the precious links were divided among the populace. Pieces of the stump were hacked off, and finally one young man--it must be told--gathered up a few charred remnants of bone, carried them uptown, and actually tried to give them to the judge who presided at the trial of the Negroes, to the utter disgust of that official.

_After Effects of Mob-law_

This is the law of the mob, that it never stops with the thing it sets out to do. It is exactly like any other manifestation of uncontrolled human pa.s.sion--given licence it takes more licence, it releases that which is ugly, violent, revengeful in the community as in the individual human heart. I have heard often of a "quiet mob," an "orderly mob," which "went about its business and hanged the n.i.g.g.e.r," but in all the cases I have known about, and I made special inquiries upon this particular point, not one single mob stopped when the immediate work was done, unless under compulsion. Even good citizens of Statesboro will tell you that "the n.i.g.g.e.rs got only what they deserved," and "it was all right if the mob had only stopped there." But it did not stop there; it never does.

All the stored-up racial animosity came seething to the surface; all the personal grudges and spite. As I have already related, two Negro women were whipped on the Sunday night before the lynching. On the day following the lynching the father of the women was found seeking legal punishment for the men who whipped his daughters, and he himself was taken out and frightfully beaten. On the same day two other young Negroes, of the especially hated "smart n.i.g.g.e.r" type, were caught and whipped--one for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, the other, as several citizens told me, "on general principles." But this was not the worst. On Wednesday night an old Negro man and his son--Negroes of the better cla.s.s--were sitting in their cabin some miles from Statesboro, when they were both shot at through the window and badly wounded. Another respectable Negro, named McBride, was visited in his home by a white mob, which first whipped his wife, who was confined with a baby three days old, and then beat, kicked, and shot McBride himself so horribly that he died the next day. The better cla.s.s of citizens, the same men who would, perhaps, condone the burning of Reed and Cato, had no sympathy with this sort of thing. Some of them took McBride's dying statement, and four white men were arrested and charged with the murder; but never punished.

Indeed, the mob led directly to a general increase of crime in Bulloch County. As Judge Daley said in his charge to a subsequent grand jury:

"Mob violence begets crime. Crime has been more prevalent since this lynching than ever before. In the middle circuit the courts have been so badly crowded with murder trials that it has been almost impossible to attend to civil business."

Another evil result of the lynching was that it destroyed valuable evidence. The prosecutors had hoped to learn from the convicted Reed and Cato whether or not they had any companions and thereby bring to justice all the other Negroes suspected of complicity in the murder of the Hodges.

If the Before Day Club ever existed and had a criminal purpose (which is doubtful) most of the members who composed it were left at large, awaiting the next opportunity to rob and murder.

_Mob Justice and the Cotton Crop_

Mob-law has not only represented a moral collapse in this community, but it struck, also, at the sensitive pocket of the business interests of the county. Frightened by the threatening att.i.tude of the whites, the Negroes began to leave the county. It was just at the beginning of the cotton-picking season, when labour of every sort was much needed, Negro labour especially. It would not do to frighten away all the Negroes. On Thursday some of the officials and citizens of Statesboro got together, appointed extra marshals, and gave notice that there were to be no more whippings, and the mob spirit disappeared--until next time.

But what of the large Negro population of Statesboro during all this excitement? The citizens told the "decent Negroes": "We don't want to hurt you; we know you; you are all right; go home and you won't be hurt." Go home they did, and there was not a Negro to be seen during all the time of the lynching. From inquiry among the Negroes themselves, I found that many of them had no voice to raise against the burning of Reed and Cato. This was the grim, primitive eye-for-an-eye logic that they used, in common with many white men:

"Reed and Cato burned the Hodges; they ought to be burned."

Even Cato's wife used this logic.

But all the Negroes were bitter over the indiscriminate whippings which followed the lynching. These whippings widened the breach between the races, led to deeper suspicion and hatred, fertilised the soil for future outbreaks. In the same week that I visited Statesboro, no fewer than three cotton-gins in various parts of Bulloch County were mysteriously burned at night, and while no one knew the exact origin of the fires, it was openly charged that they were caused by revengeful Negroes. None of these terrible after-effects would have taken place if the law had been allowed to follow its course.

_A Fighting Parson_

The overwhelming majority of the people of Bulloch County undoubtedly condoned the lynching, even believed in it heartily and completely. And yet, as I have said, there was a strong dissenting opposition among the really thoughtful, better-cla.s.s citizens. All the churches of Statesboro came out strongly for law and order. The Methodist church, led by a fighting parson, the Rev. Whitely Langston, expelled two members who had been in the mob--an act so unpopular that the church lost twenty-five members of its congregation. Of course, the members of the mob were known, but none of them was ever punished. The judge especially charged the grand jury to investigate the lynching, and this was its report:

"We deplore the recent lawlessness in our city and community, specially referred to by his Honour, Judge A. F. Daley, in his able charge. We have investigated the matter in the light of information coming under our personal knowledge and obtained by the examination of a number of witnesses, but we have been unable to find sufficient evidence to warrant indictments. We tender thanks to his Honour, Judge Daley, for his able and comprehensive charge."

A feeble attempt was made to discipline the military officers who allowed the populace to walk over them and take away their guns. A court-martial sat for days in Savannah and finally recommended the dismissal of Captain Hitch from the service of the state; but the Governor let him off with half the penalty suggested. Two lieutenants were also disciplined.

In the state election which followed the lynching, numerous voters in Bulloch County actually scratched the name of Governor Terrell, of Georgia, because he ordered the troops to Statesboro, and subst.i.tuted the name of Captain Hitch. Sheriff Kendrick, who failed to protect Reed and Cato, was re-elected without opposition.

It was in a tone of deep discouragement that Mayor G. S. Johnstone, of Statesboro, said to me:

"If our grand jury won't indict these lynchers, if our pet.i.t juries won't convict, and if our soldiers won't shoot, what are we coming to?"

_Revolution of Opinion in the South on Lynching_

Conditions at Statesboro are, perhaps, typical of those in most Southern towns. In most Southern towns a lynching would be conducted much as it was in Statesboro; there would be the same objecting but ineffective minority of good citizens, the troops would refuse their duty, and the lynchers would escape in much the same way. And yet, if we were to stop with the account of the Statesboro affair, we should overlook some of the greatest influences now affecting the lynching problem in the South. No one who visits the South can escape the conviction that, with its intensified industrial life, and the marvelous development and enrichment of the whole country, other equally momentous, if less tangible, changes are taking place. Public opinion is developing along new lines, old, set prejudices are breaking up, and there is, among other evident influences, a marked revolution in the att.i.tude of the Southern people and the Southern newspapers on the lynching question. I turn now to the lynching at Huntsville, Ala., which reveals in a striking manner some of the features of the new revolt in the South against mob-law.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COURT HOUSE AND BANK IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA

The Negro, Maples, was lynched by being hung to the elm tree at the corner of the court house, near the extreme right of the picture.

Photographed by Collins & Son]

_A Negro Crime at Huntsville, Ala._

One evening in September, 1904, a Negro of Huntsville, Ala., asked an old peddler named Waldrop for a ride. Waldrop was a kindly old man, well known and respected throughout Madison County; he drove into the city two or three times a week with vegetables and chickens to sell, and returned with the small product of his trade in his pocket.

Waldrop knew the Negro, Maples, and, although Maples was of the worthless sort, and even then under indictment for thieving, the peddler made room for him in his waggon, and they rode out of the town together. They drove into a lonely road. They crossed a little bridge. Tall trees shaded and darkened the place. Night was falling. The Negro picked up a stone and beat out the brains of the inoffensive old man, robbed him, and left him lying there at the roadside, while the horse wandered homeward.

How a murder cries out! The murderer fled in the darkness but it was as if he left great footprints. The next day, in Huntsville, the law laid its hand on his shoulder.

Now, Huntsville is one of the best cities in Alabama. No other city, perhaps, preserves more of the aristocratic habiliments of the older South. It was the first capital of the state. Seven governors lie buried in its cemetery; its county house, its bank, some of its residences are n.o.ble examples of the architecture of the ante-bellum South. And while preserving these evidences of the wealth and refinement of an older civilisation, few cities in the South have responded more vigorously to the new impulses of progress and development. Its growth during the last few years has been little short of amazing. Northern capital has come in; nine cotton-mills have been built, drawing a large increase of population, and stimulating the development of the country in every direction. It is a fine, orderly, progressive city--intensely American, ambitious, self-respecting.