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Books by Walter White
The Fire in the Flint (novel,1924)
/
Flight
(novel,1926) /
Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929)
How far the Promised Land?
955) /
A
Man Called White (autobiography,1948).
*
* * * *
Books on Lynching &
Racial Violence
The Chronological
History of the Negro in America (1969) /
Strain of
Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (1975)
But There Was
No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction
(1984) /
Lynch Law
( 1905) /
An American Dilemma
(1944)
The Crucible of Race:
Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
(1984) /
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
(1989)
Rope and Faggot
( 1929) /
The Tragedy of
Lynching (1933) /
Race Riot in East St,
Louis (1964) /
Urban Racial Violence
(1976)
/
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(1968) /
Violence
in America (1969) *
* * * *
The American Institution of Lynching
By Amin Sharif In 1946 and 1947, The
Interracial Review spoke out against lynching in America.
"Walter
White on Lynching," an essay by Amy MacKenzie, came about by an interview with
Walter White of the NAACP. In the other two instances, editorials
were published advocating an end to lynching through passage of a federal
Anti-Lynching Bill.. Mr. White’s interview appeared in September of 1946; the two editorials
--
"Lynching Must Go!" and "The
Anti-Lynching Bill" --
appeared in May and August of 1947, respectively. From these writings, one
discovers how entrenched the attitudes of racial intolerance
were some six decades ago in the USA..
What is made clear by these articles is that
lynching was a pervasive practice against the Black population
in the Upper and Deep South. By the Upper South, I am referring
to states like Kentucky and Tennessee. Kentucky-Owensboro is
where, according to Walter White, over 15,000 white men, women,
and children assembled to watch the lynching of a “Negro
convict.” Walter White is quick, maybe too quick, to point out
that this incident was an “abnormal” occurrence. He is,
unfortunately, referring to the size of the lynch mob and not
the principal act -- the lynching.
What is tragic about these articles is that
they each have imbedded within them the recorded lynching of a
black person or persons. In the editorial "Lynching
Must Go!" twenty-eight
white men were acquitted after having confessed to the mob
murder of Willie Earle, a Negro of Greenville, South Carolina.
In the editorial, "The Anti-Lynching
Bill., the victims are two Negro couples murdered, again, by
twenty-eight white men who were at the time of the editorial
“still at liberty.” And always, the same reason is given for
these attacks upon the “Negro” -- racial intolerance.
One can only posit a guess as to what it
meant to be Black at a time when lynching occurred every few
months, perhaps, even every few weeks. Black children had no
need to fantasize about a boogey man living in their closets or
beneath their beds. They had only to listen to the radio or hear
the hushed conversations of their parents to be engulfed in a
terror that did not end at dawn.
Of course, black people in the generations
that followed had their own monsters to contend with. Just look
at those grainy black and white images of the Civil Rights Days
found in Ebony or Life
magazine. Look passed the dogs and the water hoses. Look passed
the black and white students being beaten senseless. Look
closely into the faces of the white crowd surrounding those
demonstrators. There, you will see how deeply hate can distort
the human soul. There is no compassion, no trace of humanity in
those faces. For
they have consumed the poison of their fathers.
Amy McKenzie, the interviewer of Walter
White, begins her article by an observation of this process of
racial hatred -- the poison -- being passed from one
white generation to the next. She gazes upon a picture of a
young white girl, so small that she is carried in her mother’s
arms, attending “Her first Lynching.” The obvious and
prophetic implication of the picture, with its understated
title, is that this will not be the child’s last appearance at
what can only be described as an event of mass murder. And, as
history would have it, this child’s generation is the one that
was so resistant to Civil Rights. In a kind of bizarre twist,
the mob murderers of the1940s explain the existence of the
racists of the 1950s and 1960s.
Near the end of his interview, Walter White
is fairly certain that one day an Anti-lynching Bill would be
passed by Congress. And I am certain that most people, Black or
white, believe that there must be a federal Anti-lynching law on
the books. But what would you say if I told you that there is no
such law. There are hate crime laws. There are laws that protect
the “civil rights” of minorities. But there is no federal
law that specifically prohibits lynching.
Why, you ask? The reason is simple. No American
President has ever had the guts to present one to Congress. Roosevelt
had the opportunity to push one through Congress during the
New Deal but chose not to do so. Truman thought that his
Commission on Civil Rights would take care of the lynching
problem. After Roosevelt and Truman, lynching became a forgotten
subject. But lynching has never been erased from the minds of
Black people -- especially Black men.
Even today, there is a running joke about Black men from
up North being careful when they go South for a visit. And it
would all be funny, except beneath the humor lies a realization
that today, as yesterday, the lynching of Black people is still
among America’s oldest institutions. * * *
* *
Bill
Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II (2008)
* * * *
*
update 2 July 2008 |
