Following the Color Line Part 29

_Governor Cunningham--A Real Leader_

But I have wandered from my story. In Acting-Governor Cunningham, the people of Alabama had a leader who was not afraid to handle a dangerous subject like lynching. He sent a court of inquiry to Huntsville, which found the local military company "worthless and inefficient," because it had failed to protect the jail. Immediately, upon the receipt of this report, the Governor dismissed the Huntsville company from the service, every man in it. Quite a contrast from the action at Statesboro! The Governor then went a step further: he ordered the impeachment of the sheriff. A little later Federal Judge Jones took up the case, charged his jury vigorously, and some of the mob rioters were indicted in the federal courts.

Governor Cunningham took a bold stand against mob-law everywhere and anywhere in the state:

"I am opposed to mob-law," he said, "of whatsoever kind, for any and all causes. If lynching is to be justified or extenuated for any crime, be it ever so serious, it will lead to the same method of punishment for other crimes of a less degree of depravity, and through the operation of the process of evolution, will enlarge more and more the field of operation for this form of lawlessness."

It means something also when citizens, in support of their inst.i.tutions and out of love of their city, rise above politics. Judge Speake had been nominated by the Democrats to succeed himself. A Democratic nomination in Alabama means election. After his vigorous campaign against the lynchers, he became exceedingly unpopular among the majority of the people. They resolved to defeat him. A committee waited on Shelby Pleasants, a prominent Republican lawyer, and asked him to run against Judge Speake, a.s.suring him a certain election.

"I will not be a mob's candidate," he said. "I indorse every action of Judge Speake."

The committee approached several other lawyers, but not one of them would run against the judge, and the Republican newspaper of the town came out strongly in support of Judge Speake, even publis.h.i.+ng his name at the head of its editorial columns. Before he could be elected, however, a decision of the State Supreme Court, unconnected in any way with the lynching, followed like fate, and deprived Madison County of his services. He was now a private citizen, and even if he had come up for nomination to any political office, he would undoubtedly have been defeated. The New South is not yet strong enough to defy the Old South politically.

_Influences Tending to Prevent Future Lynchings in the South_

The influences against lynching in the South are constantly growing stronger. With most (not all) of the newspapers, the preachers and the best citizens united against it, the outlook is full of hope. And rural free delivery and country telephones, spreading in every direction, are inestimable influences in the quickening of public opinion. Better roads are being built, the country is settling up with white people, schools are improving and the population generally, after a series of profitable cotton crops, is highly prosperous--all influences working toward the solution of this problem.

When I went South I shared the impression of many Northerners that the South was lawless and did not care--an impression that arises from the wide publication of the horrible details of every lynching that occurs, and the utter silence regarding those deep, quiet, and yet powerful moral and industrial forces which are at the work of rejuvenation beneath the surface--an account of which I have given. I came away from the South deeply impressed with two things:

That the South is making fully as good progress in overcoming its peculiar forms of lawlessness as the North is making in overcoming _its_ peculiar forms.

II.--LYNCHING IN THE NORTH

Having looked, into two Southern lynching towns, let us now see what a Northern lynching is like. The comparison is highly interesting and illuminating.

Springfield, O., is one of the most prosperous of the smaller cities of the state. It is a beautiful town having, in 1904, some 41,000 people. It has fine streets, fine buildings, busy factories, churches, an imposing library. Some of the older families have resided there for nearly a century. It is the seat of government of one of the most fertile and attractive counties in the state: an altogether progressive, enlightened city. Of its population in 1904 over 6,000 were Negroes (about one-seventh), a considerable proportion of whom are recent settlers. Large numbers of Negroes, as I have shown in former chapters, have been migrating from the South, and crowding into Northern towns located along the Ohio or in those portions of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and other states, which border on the Old South. Many of the Negroes in Springfield came from Kentucky. We discover in these Northern towns exactly as in the South, the two cla.s.ses of Negroes: the steady, resident cla.s.s, more or less known to the whites, and a restless, unstable, ignorant cla.s.s, coming to one neighbourhood to-day to help build a bridge, and going elsewhere to-morrow to dig a ca.n.a.l. For years no such thing as race prejudice existed in Springfield; but with the growth of Negro population it increased with rapidity. For instance, a druggist in Springfield refused to sell soda-water to a Negro college professor, the typesetters in a publis.h.i.+ng house compelled the discharge of Negro workmen, a Negro physician visited the high-school, found the half-dozen Negro pupils sitting by themselves and, angrily charging discrimination, ordered his child to sit among the white children. This feeling of race repulsion was especially noticeable between the working cla.s.s of white men and the Negroes who come more or less into industrial compet.i.tion with them. The use of Negroes for breaking strikes in the coalfields and elsewhere has been a fertile source of discord, kindling the fire of race prejudice in places where it never before existed.

_How the Negroes Sold Their Votes_

In Springfield there were about 1,500 Negro voters, many of whom were bought at every election. The Democrats and the Republicans were so evenly divided that the city administration was Democratic and the county administration Republican. The venal Negro vote went to the highest bidder, carried the elections, and, with the whiskey influence, governed the town. Springfield, enlightened, educated, progressive, highly American, had 145 saloons--or one to every 285 people. Before the lynching, nine of these were Negro saloons--some of them indescribably vile. A row of houses along the railroad tracks, not three blocks from the heart of the city, was known as the Levee. It was a Negro row composed of saloons and disorderly houses, where the lowest of the low, Negro men and both Negro and white women, made a general rendezvous. Just back of it was one of the foremost Catholic churches in town; hardly a block away were the post-office, the public library, and the foremost club of the city, and within three or four hundred yards were the back doors of some of the city's most aristocratic residences. For years, the ineffective good citizen had protested against these abominable resorts, but when the Republicans wanted to win they needed the votes from these places, and when the Democrats wanted to win _they_ needed them. Burnett, the Democratic boss, said in a tone of real injury to a gentleman--a Democrat--who protested against the protection of the Levee:

"Don't you want the party to win? We've got to have those sixty or eighty votes from Hurley"--Hurley being the notorious Negro proprietor of a dive called the Honky Tonk.

_Corrupt Politics and the Negro Question_

So these vile places remained open, protected by the police, breeding crime, and encouraging arrogance, idleness, and vice among the Negroes.

And yet one will hear good citizens of Springfield complaining that the Negroes make themselves conspicuous and obnoxious at primaries and elections, standing around, waiting, and refusing to vote until they receive money in hand.

"To my mind," one of these citizens said to me, "the conspicuousness of the Negro at elections is one of the chief causes of race prejudice."

But who is to blame? The Negro who accepts the bribe, or the white politician who is eager to give it, or the white business man who, desiring special privileges, stands behind the white politician, or the ordinary citizen who doesn't care? Talk with these politicians on the one hand, and the impractical reformers on the other, and they will tell you in all seriousness of the sins of the South in disfranchising the Negro.

"Every Negro in Springfield," I was told, "exercises his right to vote."

If you were to tell these men that the Negroes of Springfield are disfranchised as absolutely as they are anywhere in the South, they would stare at you in amazement. But a purchased voter is a disfranchised voter.

The Negroes have no more real voice in the government of Springfield than they have in the government of Savannah or New Orleans. In the South the Negro has been disfranchised by law or by intimidation: in the North by cash. Which is worse?

_Story of the Crime that Led to the Lynching_

A few months before the lynching a Negro named Dixon arrived in Springfield from Kentucky. He was one of the illiterate, idle, floating sort. He had with him a woman not his wife, with whom he quarrelled. He was arrested and brought into court.

I am profoundly conscious of the seriousness of any charge which touches upon our courts, the last resort of justice, and yet it was a matter of common report that "justice was easy" in Clark County, that laws were not enforced, that criminals were allowed to escape on suspended sentence. I heard this talk everywhere, often coupled with personal accusations against the judges, but I could not discover that the judges were more remiss than other officials. They were afflicted with no other disease.

Even in a serious sociological study of Clark County by Professor E. S.

Tood, I find this statement:

In Springfield, one of the chief faults of the munic.i.p.al system has been and is the laxity and discrimination in the enforcement of the law. Many of the munic.i.p.al ordinances have been shelved for years.

The saloon closing ordinances are enforced intermittently, as are those concerning gambling.

When the Negro Dixon was brought into court he was convicted and let out on suspended sentence. He got drunk immediately and was again arrested, this time serving several weeks in jail. The moment he was free he began quarrelling with his "wife," in a house directly across the street from police headquarters. An officer named Collis tried to make peace and Dixon deliberately shot him through the stomach, also wounding the woman.

This was on Sunday. Dixon was immediately placed in the county jail.

Collis died the next morning.

_Human Life Cheap in Clark County_

I have called attention to the fact that the lynching town nearly always has a previous bad record of homicide. Disregard for the sacredness of human life seems to be in the air of these places. Springfield was no exception. Between January 1, 1902, and March 7, 1904, the day of the lynching, a little more than two years, no fewer than ten homicides were committed in the city of Springfield. White men committed five of these crimes and Negroes five. Three of the cases were decided within a short time before the lynching and the punishment administered was widely criticised. Bishop, a coloured man who had killed a coloured man, was fined $200 and sentenced to six months in the workhouse. This was for _killing a man_. O'Brien, a white man, who killed a white man, got one year in the penitentiary. And only a week before the lynching, Schocknessy, a white man who killed a white man, but who had influential political friends, went scott-free!

On the morning after the Collis murder, the _Daily Sun_ published a list of the recent homicides in Springfield in big type on its first page and asked editorially:

"What are you going to do about it?"

It then answered its own question:

"Nothing."

The following morning, after the lynching, the same paper printed in its headlines:

AWFUL REBUKE TO THE COURTS

_They Have Temporised With the Criminal Cla.s.ses Until Patience was Exhausted_

I cite these facts to show the underlying conditions in Springfield; a soil richly prepared for an outbreak of mob law--with corrupt politics, vile saloons, the law paralysed by non-enforcement against vice, a large venal Negro vote, lax courts of justice.

_Gathering of the Lynching Mob_

Well, on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to twenty--a p.r.o.nounced feature of every mob--with a wide fringe of more respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly. They gathered hooting around the jail, cowardly, at first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder as darkness came on and no move was made to check them. The murder of Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro, Ga.; these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered man; it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield; and it included also the sort of idle boys "who hang around cigar stores,"

as one observer told me. The newspaper reports are fond of describing lynching mobs as "made up of the foremost citizens of the town." In few cases that I know of, either South or North, except in back country neighbourhoods, has a mob been made up of what may be called the best citizens; but the best citizens have often stood afar off "decrying the mob"--as a Springfield man told me--and letting it go on. A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible cla.s.ses.

And no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening, apparently, had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came out and made a weak speech in which he said he "didn't want to hurt anybody." They threw stones at him and broke his windows. The chief of police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself. All of these policemen undoubtedly sympathised with the mob in its efforts to get at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did nothing effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the Mayor to order out the engine companies that water might be turned on the mob. He said he didn't like to; _the hose might be cut_. The local militia company was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated, vacillated, doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had no ammunition _except_ Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into a mob, would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that night from the safe and comfortable precincts of their armoury.