c. November 28, 1939 — Kentucky branch, Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Louisville KY

We have managed to reduce lynchings, not because we’ve grown more law-abiding or respectable but because lynching became such bad advertising.

The South is going after big industry at the moment, and a lawless, lynch-mob population isn’t going to attract very much outside capital. And this is the type of attitude which can be turned to advantage much more speedily than the abstract appeal to brotherly love.

Source: Louisville Courier-Journal, Nov. 29, 1939.

Also: Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (New York: Columbia University Press) 1979, p. 169.