In the Pines by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Author:Grace Elizabeth Hale [ELIZABETH HALE, GRACE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Most white southerners knew that murder was wrong. Still, politicians and white newspaper editors there had a way of talking about degrees. A lynching that mimicked the forms of a legal execution was, to some people, excusable, not a murder but a death sentence carried out by the people. There were things white southern men could not be expected to tolerate. A burning, on the other hand, was always bad.

In a competition that never should have existed, Duck Hill became known as one of the worst lynchings ever committed because of the way the murderers used a modern, industrial tool to burn their victims and because white magazines and newspapers published the pictures the participants took, giving them a wide circulation. Despite all the press coverage, neither the state nor the county ever investigated these crimes. According to Kester, Sheriff Wright had “personal friends” among the mob members. A former Winona mayor told the NAACP investigator that “a thousand people in Montgomery County… can name the lynchers.” Yet not one member of the mob was ever held accountable.

On the day of the Duck Hill lynching, word of what had happened in that Mississippi forest reached the floor of Congress as representatives were debating the Gavagan-Wagner anti-lynching bill. Michigan’s Earl Cory Michener read a press report. Black spectators who had packed the gallery grew silent. Two days later, the legislation passed, even as 106 out of 123 House members representing southern states voted against it as a violation of states’ rights. Sixth District Mississippi congressman William Colmer, who represented Jeff Davis County, was one of them, and he denounced the bill in a regular column he wrote for local papers like the Prentiss Headlight. In June, as the Senate prepared to consider the bill, the NAACP sent every single senator as well as all the major newspapers a copy of a report based on Kester’s undercover reporting.

By 1937, the NAACP had succeeded in making federal anti-lynching legislation what Time called “a permanent sectional issue.” Sponsors offered at least one bill every legislative session. In 1937, they proposed fifty-nine. The House of Representatives first passed a bill of this kind, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, in 1922. It died in the other chamber after southern senators used the filibuster to hold the floor for twenty-one days. In 1935, another anti-lynching bill passed the House, and southern senators filibustered for six days, killing it, too.

After repeated delays, the Senate’s version of the Gavagan-Wagner bill finally came up for a vote on January 6, 1938. A senator from Utah and another from Idaho joined fifteen southerners in a six-week filibuster that shut down all congressional business, including urgently needed economic relief. Anti-lynching legislation opponents turned the debate into what an NAACP official called a racist “harangue.” One by one, southern senators stood and asked what could possibly be next. Black patrons staying at white hotels? Equal funding of Black and white schools? Federal supervision of elections in the region, an admission of just what it

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