Ladies and Gentlemen:

I wish to express my appreciation to Station WNYC for introducing this timely discussion of the Wagner-Van Nuys-Gavagan anti-lynching bill on its forum hour. The struggle to eradicate lynching is not merely a fight to save individuals from horrible deaths at the hands of insensate mobs. Fundamentally it is a struggle for the survival of law and order. When a person is accused of crime, the Constitution of the United States guarantees him due process of law, and an orderly trial in the courts. But lynch law substitutes for duo process judgment by the mob and trial by fury. Every sane person knows that mobs and orderly government cannot exist side by side in the same country. Essentially there is little difference between mobs, whether they are gathered to lynch a Negro in the South, or a labor organizer in the North. It is just one step from unorganized mobs lynching helpless individuals to organized mobs lynching democracy itself. Lynching is the open door to fascism and all other forms of dictatorship, which are so repugnant to the American spirit and traditions of democratic government.

The history of mobs in the United States shows that since 1882 there have been more than 5,000 lynchings. Of this number approximately 748 victims have been white, and the remainder Negroes. At the beginning of this century lynchings were occurring at the rate of about 100 per year. They dropped to an average of about 70 per year from 1904 to 1907, but in 1908 went up to 100 again. In 1915 there were 96 lynchings and in 1919, 83.

It was not simply the appalling number of lynchings per year which inspired movements for a federal anti-lynching law. There was also the additional fact that neither state nor local governments were making any serious attempt through their police and judicial machinery to prevent lynchings or to apprehend and punish the lynchers after lynchings occurred. With 90 lynchings a year, or an average of 1 every four days, it seemed inconceivable that state and local governments would not have been stirred to some kind of vigorous action if they had been genuinely interested in curbing lynching and in securing to its citizens due process of law.

I assume the radio audience is in general familiar with the technique of lynching. They must know that in hundreds of cases the persons lynched are merely suspected of a crime, and in many, many instances subsequent investigation has demonstrated beyond question the victims' complete innocence. I assume also that the audience knows that the usual statement that lynching occurs only because of sex offenses is utterly untrue. Researchers all agree that less than 17% of the lynchings since 1882 have had any connection with a charge of sex offense. The records show persons have been lynched for all sorts of petty offenses: such as petty larceny, disorderly conduct, etc.; and in many instances for no crime at all, as for instance, participation in labor disputes, or for merely being too prosperous for a Negro.

In the face of this bloody record, it has been shown that only 8/10ths of 1% of the lynchings have been followed by any conviction of the lynchers. Professor Chadbourne, of the School of Law of the University of North Carolina, in his book, "Lynching and the Law", published by the University of North Carolina press, asserts that in 99.2% of the lynchings the states and local communities have not punished the lynchers nor made any efforts to do so.

It was this condition which encouraged the movement for federal anti-lynching legislation. The first serious attempt was made in 1921 when Congressman L. C. Dyer of St. Louis, Mo., introduced the Dyer Bill. This was passed by the House, then overwhelmingly Republican, in January, 1922, by a vote of 230-119, but was filibustered to death in the overwhelmingly Republican senate.

The proponents of the federal anti-lynching bill, although defeated, had the satisfaction of noting that the mere agitation for this legislation and the threat of its passage had the effect of reducing lynchings from 61 in 1922 to 28 in 1923, the lowest figure up to that time in the long history of lynching.

Lynchings jumped to 34 in 1926 and down to 10 in 1932 but up to 28 in 1933. This sharp increase, coupled with the brutality and Roman holiday aspects of many of the lynchings plus the open flaunting of law and order by the late Governor James Rolph, of California, when two white men were lynched in San Jose in 1933, led to the introduction in January, 1934, of the Costigan-Wagner federal anti-lynching bill which was filibustered off the calendar in a Democratic Senate in the spring of 1935.

In January, 1937, a new drive was made for federal legislation against lynching. After a bitter parliamentary fight, Congressman Joseph A. Gavagan of New York succeeded in having his bill passed on April 15, 1937 by the House of Representatives, by a vote of 277-119. This Gavagan bill (H.R.1507), sponsored in the Senate by Senators Robert F. Wagner of New York and Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana, has been before the Senate almost continuously since January 6, its passage being blocked by a small group of Senators from certain southern states, aided by Senators Borah of Idaho and King of Utah. To-date the cost of the filibuster to the American taxpayer has been $432,600.

All the federal anti-lynching bills which have been proposed have been based on the explicit provisions of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which provides that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the law. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress power to pass appropriate legislation to enforce the guarantees of the Amendments.

It should be noted that the 14th Amendment puts its restrictions upon the states: no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law; no state shall deny equal protection of the law. Since a state can act only through its officers, the word "State" includes every officer of the state, county or municipal government who exercises governmental power. Therefore, when the present Gavagan-Wagner-Van Nuys anti-lynching bill was drafted, it was purposely limited to punishing derelict state and local officers who willfully fail, neglect, or refuse to exercise their powers to prevent a lynching or to apprehend and punish the lynchers after a lynching occurs; and to imposing a liability ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 on the municipalities and counties where lynchings occur when the officers of such municipalities or counties were derelict in their duties in not preventing the lynching or where citizens when called on by officers for aid in preventing a lynching refused refused to respond to the officers' appeal for aid.    

As soon as this anti-lynching bill was brought before the Senate, its opponents raised the cry of state's rights. They asserted that the anti-lynching bill was an unconstitutional invasion of the right of the soverelgn states. But they overlook the fact that the Constitution itself provides that the Constitution and the laws of the United States are the supreme law of the land, and there is no such thing as invasion of states rights where it is necessary for the United States government to take action to preserve the constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection of the laws, unless one is prepared to argue that the states have the right to disregard and flaunt the Constitution itself.

The history of the United States Supreme Court shows instance after instance where the federal government has stepped in to protect the constitutional rights against illegal action of the states. For example, in 1922, the case of Moore v. Dempsey, the United States Supreme Court ruled that where a person is on trial in a state court and the trial is so dominated by mob threats that a fair trial was impossible, the federal courts will set aside the conviction of that person as violating the guarantee of due process of law. Is it not absurd to contend that although the United States Supreme Court says in the Moore v. Dempsey case just cited that the federal courts can interfere to prevent a mob lynching of a man in a state court room, nevertheless the federal government is powerless if a mob lynches a man on the street in front of the court house, or even on the court house steps?

As a matter of fact, Congress has passed laws to see that the state courts respect the guarantees of due process and equal protection which are provided in the 14th Amendment. In 1879 a Virginia judge who had excluded Negroes from the jury rolls was indicted in a federal court under a federal statute making it a criminal offense for a state officer to exclude Negroes from jury service solely on account of race or color. This indictment was sustained by the United States Supreme Court in a case entitled Ex parte Virginia, and has been the law ever since that date.

It has been contended by opponents of this bill that it destroys state sovereignty. This contention ignores the fact that the states in the past few years have submitted voluntarily to the assistance and control of the federal government in carrying on certain functions which heretofore have been regarded as exclusively state functions. There is the matter of federal aid to education. In the recent years of the New Deal there have been all sorts of federal grants to states with accompanying federal jurisdiction. Many of the states whose representatives most vigorously oppose this bill have been the chief advocates and beneficiaries of federal bounty. Only the other day Senator Smith of South Carolina succeeded in putting a provision in the farm bill, that the federal government should grant a loan of nine cents a pound on cotton no matter what the market price, with the additional provision that cotton farmers who chose to turn over their cotton to the federal government might get an additional two cents per pound for it.

Senator Tom Connally of Texas, the leader of the filibuster against this bill, has been shown to have urged a federal grant from the WPA to Sherman, Texas, to replace the Grayson county court house there which was destroyed in 1930 when a mob fired it and lynched a Negro prisoner, who later was found to be innocent. The cost of this court house at the time of destruction was placed at sixty thousand dollars, but Senator Connally urged and secured a grant of three hundred and four thousand dollars from the federal government to replace it. In this matter he had no objection to the federal government entering into the state and county to restore property destroyed by lynching mobs, but he sees great danger to the American form of government if the federal authorities seek to protect prisoners from mobs and enforce the Constitution of the United States. 

Some opponents have argued that an individual state officer does not act for the state when he violates his duty. They say that no state authorizes a sheriff or a constable to turn his prisoner over to a mob, and that when the sheriff does this he is not acting for the state but against the state and therefore the state should not be held responsible for his acts. But the judge in the Virginia case was not authorized by Virginia law to exclude Negroes from the jury. He was violating Virginia law in excluding Negroes from jury service solely on account of race. Nevertheless the United States Supreme Court holds that since he acted in the name of the state and was a state officer, his act was the act of the state, and the state could not escape responsibility by claiming he had exceeded his authority.

It is the same thing in those lynching cases. If a sheriff claims the authority of the state in placing a person under arrest, he cannot turn right around and say that he is not acting as a state officer when he permits a mob to take his prisoner without putting up any resistance. If he is a state officer at the outset, he remains a state officer straight through and the state must be responsible for his actions. The state gave him his authority and the state is responsible for the manner in which he exercises it. So we find that Section 3 of the bill has the direct support in Federal legislation and federal judicial decisions. 

The other section of the bill which the filibusterers have most objected to is Section 5, providing county and municipal penalty provisions. The Supreme Court of the United States has sanctioned a county penalty imposed on the county and city by the itself for mob violence. This is a very old device of administering criminal law. When William the Conqueror defeated the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 and became the ruler of England, he imposed a fine on the local governmental subdivisions for every Norman found murdered in such subdivision where the murderer was unknown. The purpose of such a murder fine was preventive, to impress on each tax payer the necessity of being vigilant to see that law and order were maintained in the community.

This county and municipal penalty in the anti-lynching bill has the same purpose in view. The penalty operates as a spur to the taxpayer, to make it their personal business to see that no lynchings occur within their city, or county respectively. These county penalties do deter lynchings. Professor Chadbourne in his book, "Lynching and the Law", states, that "each county which has been fined has had no more lynchings and the average number of lynchings per year in the state has declined sharply after the infliction of each penalty." The value and legality of such a liability clause is indicated by the fact that 23 states have legislation imposing liability on their respective political subdivisions for mob or riot death, bodily injury or injury to property. Thus the much disputed county penalty clause proposed in the federal anti-lynching bill has long been a part of state legislation dealing with the same subject.

The issue in this fight transcends race and also the immediate crime of lynching. The filibuster challenges democratic government itself. If the forces now fighting to prevent a vote on this bill succeed, the same or other blocs will be heartened to slaughter in the same fashion every other piece of liberal legislation which may come before this or succeeding Congresses. When the overwhelming majority of the members of the Senate and of the American people can thus be denied their right to a definitive vote on any measure, then indeed, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch recently declared, we have the beginnings of authoritarian government and the death of democracy. Let us face the facts. What the present filibusterers are fighting for is the right to continue terrorization not only of Negroes in the South but of all Americans everywhere to keep them from working and organizing for better economic, educational, [and] political opportunity. It is a facile and fictitious argument to say there were only eight lynchings in 1937; in the mobs which lynched those eight were more than eight hundred persons which means that eight hundred murderers are walking the streets of America, scot-free and completely immune from even being arrested or questioned concerning their crimes. Every right for which Americans for more than three hundred years have fought and died is endangered by the rule of the mob. Either orderly government is going to conquer the mob or the mob will destroy government. That is the choice which America can no longer escape making. Since the states have failed, and failed miserably, the federal government must act—and act soon, to avert the catastrophe which mobbism and the lynching mob is speedily bringing down upon us. 

(Taken from the original typewritten text courtesy of the NAACP Papers/Library of Congress Manuscript Division)