The Lineaments of Wrath by James W. Clarke

Author:James W. Clarke [Clarke, James W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Minority Studies
ISBN: 9781351303583
Google: ZiNHDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-16T02:29:15+00:00

Southern concerns about the region’s image in the “civilized world” also provided an important incentive to seek more palatable, but still intimidating, alternatives to mob violence. Violence and social instability were bad for business and economic development at a time when the South was anxious to attract outside investment to stimulate its troubled economy. Fears about possible federal intervention if the carnage continued were also growing. With memories of the “carpetbagger” governments of an earlier era still lingering, probably nothing worse could have been imagined by these militant states’ righters than more meddling by the federal government.25

But public pressures in that direction were building. From the 1890s and on into the first decades of the twentieth century, newspaper coverage of the appalling savagery of Southern lynch mobs shocked the nation and the world. Stories carried in Chicago and New York newspapers, for example, made their readers aware that mutilating and burning victims alive had not ended with the Dark Ages on another continent.

Adding to the pressures were pamphlets distributed by antilynching groups like the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and public speakers such as Ida Wells-Bamett, whose accounts of Southern atrocities stirred widening indignation and demands for remedial action. Condemning the lawlessness, one critic wrote,

These tiny kingdoms can kill their subjects like hogs if they want to, and under State rights they know that there is no law on earth to prosecute them but their own law; no judge ever prosecutes himself.26

Even President Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian notably unsympathetic to blacks, was moved to compare lynching with the slaughter carried on by German armies during World War I.27

As the rest of the country spoke of industrial expansion, “progressivism,” and a new century of progress, the image of the South as a grim and backward region, steeped in primordial savagery, remained fixed in the public mind. Apologists were forced to admit that lynching was a barbarous “crime against society,” but some equivalent sanction was needed, they insisted, “to put an end to the ravishing of their women by an inferior race.”28 Without such a deterrent, another wrote, lynching would remain “an indirect act of self-defense” that was necessary “to hold in check the Negro in the South.”29

But as pressures intensified, some Southern newspapers and civic leaders became increasingly uncomfortable with that kind of reasoning and its implications for the future. Interracial committees sprang up in a number of localities to address the lynching issue as well as other problems and to seek ways to establish better relations between the races. In 1919, a regional Commission on Interracial Cooperation was established in Atlanta for that purpose.30 Simultaneously, efforts were made by many of the same parties to reassure increasingly restive blacks who, they worried, would leave the South, thus placing in greater peril its already precarious economy. Should that occur, they realized, the region would lose its low-wage labor, perhaps the major inducement it could offer to outside investors.

Carrot and stick methods were employed in the effort to reduce the threat of a black exodus.

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