NYPR Archives & Preservation
When Anti-Lynching Legislation was Discussed on WNYC in 1938.
The recent unsuccessful effort to pass a national anti-lynching bill in the Senate is not new. In February 1938, a month-long Southern filibuster prevented the passage of the Wagner-Van Nuys-Gavagan Anti-Lynching Bill. The legislation was reluctantly shelved by its lead sponsors, Robert Wagner of New York and Indiana's Frederick Van Nuys, to allow passage of a $250 million WPA budget appropriation. Two days before the Democratic Senators agreed to retreat, NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White was on WNYC advocating its passage:
Let us face the facts. What the present filibusterers are fighting for is the right to continue terrorization, not only for Negroes in the South but all of 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 that 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 being arrested or questioned concerning their crimes.
White argued that this 'mob rule' was a threat to American democracy, and his ten pages of remarks were replete with horrific statistics and an overview of failed efforts to pass such legislation. (You can read Walter White's complete broadcast statement at: WHITE).
According to a notation on the text of White's broadcast speech, his opponent in this broadcast forum was a man named Frank Delany. However, I have not been able to find anything of what Frank Delany said in opposition to the anti-lynching bill. Or, for that matter, anything about Frank Delany.
WNYC program director Seymour N. Siegel had originally tried to get the white supremacist Senator from Mississippi Theodore G. Bilbo to counter White; when Bilbo declined, Siegel lined up the notorious fascist Lawrence Dennis. The account is described in this NAACP memo from Roy Wilkins to Walter White.
It's not clear whether Walter White had rejected going on air with Lawrence Dennis or if Dennis pulled out and Frank Delany was brought in. Meanwhile, Senator Bilbo never came to the WNYC studio —but he did speak during the filibuster in all too familiar tropes:
If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.
It's worth mentioning that as early as December 1929 the NAACP's Walter White was on WNYC for a Welfare Council panel titled 'Investigating Lynching'. The NAACP also had a regular slot on WNYC between 1929 and 1930. See: NAACP.
