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A Fourteen Point
Indictment of Lynching
Today the crime of lynching stands condemned
before the bar of public opinion. the Wagner-Van Nuys
Anti-Lynching bill now before congress would make the local
community responsible for the prevention of lynching and for the
apprehension and punishment of those who participate. this bill
should be passed at this session provided public opinion is
sufficiently outspoken and insistent.
Without attempting to present the entire case
against this national evil, we venture to enumerate the more
outstanding legal and moral violations that may be charged
against it.
1st -- It is a grave offense against civilized society.
2nd -- Lynching is a denial of fundamental human rights and a
violation of constitutional guarantees.
3rd -- For more than a century lynching has served to
humiliate and disgrace America before the civilized nations of
the world.
4th -- Every lynching is an open and flagrant defiance of the
orderly processes of the law and lawful authority.
5th -- Every lynching is an open and flagrant defiance of the
orderly processes of the law and lawful authority.
6th -- In the absence of an adequate anti-lynching law this
crime is defended and sanctioned in many communities as a
tradition which perpetuate racial and class inferiority.
7th -- It is frequently mentioned as a threat to curb
legitimate and lawful protests against manifest injustices.
8th -- It perpetuates interracial suspicion, antagonism, and
hatred in a land dedicated to the democratic cooperation of all
for the common ground.
9th -- Although its principal victim is the Negro it is a
threat against the peace and security of other minority groups.
10th -- The example of unpunished lynchings has produced mob
outrages by other lawless bands, such as the K.K.K. and the
Black Legion.
11th -- Every lynching employs the violent technique of the
revolutionist and is the ally and forerunner of the violence of
the revolutionist and the Communist.
12th -- Today lynching enjoys the invidious distinction of
being the one remnant of barbarism in American civilization.
13th -- The continuance of lynching-with-impunity has been
responsible for mob outrages of every character. Lynching has
been contagious and frequently epidemic in character.
14th -- Lynching is the enemy of Christianity and of American
ideals.
There is every reason why Catholic
organizations throughout the land should petition Congress to
pass the
Wagner-Van Nuys Bill so that the power and authority of
the Federal Government may be employed to end this evil
institution and remove a disgraceful blot from our national
escutcheon.
Lynching must be nationally repudiated. Lynching must go!
Source:
The Interracial Review
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ANTI-LYNCHING
BILL, 1938. Civil rights was one of Mr. [Philip]
Levy's major interests, expressed notably as one of
the draftsmen of the
Wagner-Van Nuys anti-lynching bill, an amendment
to H.R. 1507, 75th Cong., 3d Sess. The bill made
lynching a federal crime, would prosecute negligent
law enforcement officials, and would fine the county
within which the lynching took place. The Senate
voted on February 21, 1938, to table the bill,
following eight weeks of filibuster by the bill's
opponents, including several Southern Democratic
Senators and Senator William Borah, Republican of
Idaho. Failure of President Roosevelt to take a
strong stand in favor of the bill hindered its
chances for passage. [For the civil rights context
and a discussion of the momentous filibuster, see
Robert F. Zangrando, "The NAACP and a Federal
Lynching Bill, 1934-1940," Journal of Negro
History, Vol. 50 (April 1965), pp. 106-117. Also
a Bobbs-Merrill Reprint in Black Studies, No.
BC-33l. The filibuster can also be followed in Congo
Rec., 75th Cong., 3d Sess., pp. 138-161 and pp.
2090-2118 passim (1938).]— Philip
Levy Collection on National Labor Policy,
1922 - 1970
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The Politics of Federal Anti-lynching
Legislation in the New Deal Era
By Isabelle Whelan
In 1933, at the
beginning of a period of profound change in the
United States, the NAACP launched its new campaign
for federal anti-lynching legislation. The country
was in the midst of an unprecedented economic
catastrophe and a new president apparently committed
to the ‘forgotten man’ was in the White House. He
headed a newly united national Democratic coalition
of urban liberals and rural conservatives from the
south and west. Federal anti-lynching legislation
had been off the agenda for ten years, since the
defeat of a bill introduced by Republican
congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri in 1922. The
Dyer bill, after having passed the
Republican-controlled House, was blocked by the
threat of a southern filibuster in the Senate. Over
the next decade, the GOP made increasing overtures
to the south, pushing yet further aside its
historical commitment to civil rights. But as the
Depression bit, campaigns by the NAACP and southern
white liberals against a rise in mob violence helped
to bring lynching more to the fore of the nation’s
consciousness.
The reformist
atmosphere of the New Deal gave hope to black
leaders and race liberals that the Roosevelt
administration would address the specific needs of
African Americans. Individual states had
traditionally been allowed to control their own race
relations, but as the federal government assumed a
greater role in its citizens’ lives during the New
Deal, liberal reformers hoped to see this change.
Ultimately, though, the New Dealers’ focus always
lay with economic recovery. Even when they did
consider racial issues, it was within a framework
that the “‘Negro problem’ was fundamentally a class
problem and treated best by economic reform.”6 For
some liberals, this attitude extended even to
counteracting mob violence, which they expected
would die out as opportunities for both whites and
blacks improved.
There were
4,608 victims of lynching in the United States
between 1882 and 1932, of whom more than seven in
ten were African Americans. From a high of 230 in
1892, the number of victims steadily decreased
during the twentieth century, dropping below double
figures for the first time in 1932. The next year,
the Roosevelt administration’s first year in office,
the number of lynchings soared to 28, with the rise
possibly aggravated by the economic turmoil of the
Depression. Although lynching had occurred in almost
every state in the continental United States, during
the twentieth century it became an increasingly
southern phenomenon, with overwhelmingly African
American victims. Until the early 1900s, lynchings
were treated as local matters, and even particularly
brutal cases barely made headline news. By the
1930s, anti-lynching campaigns had helped make it a
more mainstream issue, increasingly commented on by
the white press and in magazines such as the Nation
and Literary Digest.
The Duck Hill
lynching—at the height of the House anti-lynching
debate—made only page 52 of the New York Times, but
page one of the African-American paper, the Chicago
Defender. A southern-based movement against lynching
developed in the decades before the New Deal, as
white southern liberals began to address some of the
problems facing their region. The Commission on
Interracial Cooperation (CIC) was established in
1919 to promote interracial understanding. One of
its main aims was to eliminate lynching.— SAS
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 15 December 2011
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