May 18, 1936 — Southern Newspaper Publishers’ Association Convention, The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, WV

Lynchings are [a] climactic of type of a violence which is aroused by playing upon fear and hate in human relations. Emotions which precipitate lynchings are identical with those which plunge nations into war. Without hate and fear it would not be possible to stage a lynching or a war.

The surest method to follow in developing hate and fear to the point of violence, whether in precipitating a lynching or a war, is the use of stories of sex crimes committed by the people who are to be killed on the women of the people who are to do the killing. Men and women alike see in outraged womanhood their own mothers or wives or sisters, and they are moved by an invincible force to mete out punishment to the vandals. Something of Arthurian chivalry stirs men’s minds; they wear the colors of their own womanhood into a battle for all womanhood.

As it is in war, when true stories of sex violation are lacking, fictitious accounts of imaginary assaults against innocent women by brutish enemies are published, so it is in lynchings. As wars have their roots in economic conditions, greed and avarice, so also have lynchings. “My country right or wrong” furnishes the motive in wars; preservation of white supremacy, in lynchings. In both, a whole people lose for the benefit of the few.

Editors do condemn lynchings. They condemn even particular lynchings. Their handling of such crimes is dignified and logical. On no other subject have editorials and editors risen to greater heights of, eloquence in stronger language. But the very nature of the editorial, its dignity and its balanced phrases, restricts its effect on public opinion and its influence on human conduct.

The editorial writer competes in a losing battle with his news stories. He is lost to the public while that public reads on his front page — in language that fairly bristles with expressions calculated to awaken the ever-present fear and hate in the less-privileged members of the white race — a dramatic and inflammatory account of some violation of the white man’s code by a “giant Negro.” Front page space is not enough. Lest some might fail to see or read the story, streamer headlines, of an inch or more in height, catch the eye of any careless loiterer. Whatever the editor may say after this is like the silent fall of dew after a terrific hail storm.

Mencken Is Quoted

Quite apropos is the statement made by H. L. Mencken last month to the American Publishers Association, as it was reported in Time: “The editorial page . . . has been going downhill steadily for 50 years. It enlists good men, and sometimes brilliant men, and they work hard and faithfully. On even the worst paper, the editorial page . . . shows more careful writing than any other page, and not infrequently it shows wider information and sounder judgment. Yet how many read it and heed it? Write a scathing editorial on any subject you fancy. Print it on your editorial page. You will get a few letters, and a few of your local bores will call up — no more. Then take exactly the same editorial and reprint it next day on your first page . . . and with appropriate headlines. If you get less than ten times as many letters, call me up in Baltimore with the charges reversed, and a case of Maryland rye will be at your disposal.”

Because some Southern women are greatly concerned about lynching, we are on the alert to discover some effective method of approach to the public which will build a new public opinion toward this crime. It is my opinion that in the beginning not one of us thought of the press in any light other than an ally. We read editorials. When one is printed condemning lynching or recognizing our disinterested efforts in applying an educational program against lynching, we feel greatly strengthened for the time being. We are not as a whole over-critical of the press. I think we — even those of us who do not know Mr. Kipling’s writings so well — are inclined to agree with him when he says:

Remember the battle and stand aside
While Thrones and Powers confess
That King over all the children of pride
Is the Press, the Press, the Press.

We hasten to express our appreciation for every editor who strengthens our purpose a bit by his unqualified condemnation of lynching. We are grateful for editorial commendation of our courage and nobility in openly working against lynching. Again I repeat: We are grateful. But we are coming to see that editorials are not getting us far along our road. Naturally believing in the power of the press, we are interested in the dynamo which generates the power. Some of us think the front pages and the news columns are the dynamo, and we would like to reach the men who control this power.

Will Irwin Cited

Will Irwin says in his book Propaganda and the News, page 84: “More than twenty years ago I sat with a group of American publishers, talking shop. Conversation turned to the decline of the editorial as a social and political force. “My front page is my editorial,” said one of the company. “The headlines are mine,” said another.”

You know what these gentlemen of the press mean. Some of us women who are readers only are learning what they mean.

Possibly one of the most pronounced failures on the part of the press to deal fairly in the news columns is illustrated in the story of a prevented lynching in Conroe, Texas, a small town not far from Houston. Streamer headlines and space were given to the story: “Hunt Negro After Child is Attacked,” “Child Assailed as She Returned Home After Taking Sister to School,” “Hunt Negro After Girl is Attacked,” “Hundreds Seek Conroe Negro in Attack,” and subheads: “Girl of About Fourteen Victim of Attack,” “Fugitive is Believed in River Bottoms,” “Feeling is Intense as Posse Scours Woods,” “Girl Sobs Story.”

Whatever the nearby metropolitan papers had to say editorially, if anything, was said so vaguely and so generally that their words have been lost to memory in the vivid recollection of the clamor of the front page headlines and space. In addition, this story represents another and equally potent method of propaganda both in war and in lynching. I refer to the suppression of essential facts which if given equally emphasized publicity might crack the hard shell of hate and fear and let in a ray of reason.

This story dropped out of the papers at the end of the second day. No Negro was captured. No “barbecue” was pulled off. Nobody was arrested or held. The story just disappeared without one word of explanation. One paper carried this paragraph which was a clue to the whole story:

“They (the bloodhounds) weren’t getting anywhere — the man didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He just kept crossing and recrossing the river. As a result of this the dogs sort of lost interest in the affair and more dogs were phoned for. Well, the second set of dogs got on the job early in the night. They would pick it up and lose it right away and about 10:30 they checked out.”

The bloodhounds each time traced the trail back into the body of the white posse. The quality of the paragraph quoted and the nearbyness of the metropolitan press to the town leads one to conclude that either the papers had their own representatives on the field or the re-write man was a knowing fellow with a sense of, irony. These papers which carried this story have been for years editorially opposed to lynchings.

We know that men of the press know a very great deal more about people than we do. They know more about the emotions of people than we do. So whatever we learn after several years of study we are safe in concluding that our news is old news to the fourth estate.

Place of Different Stories

When a story is lacking in spectacular features which earn it headlines on the front page, it is found tucked away somewhere on an inside page, no more conspicuous in type or heading than is given to editorials. But suppression of facts feature these stories and to such an extent that the press is unwittingly developing another alibi for lynching. We have discovered this fairly recently in current news stories.

Any intelligent Southern newspaper man knows that when a jury of Southern white men gives a Negro one year in prison or one year on the chaingang for criminal assault or attempted criminal assault upon the person of a white woman or child, there is something which needs to be explained. These short penalties for this revolting crime, given without full publicity as to the facts involved, are proving a double distilled poison to Southern life. Men and women, in increasing numbers, point to these short penalties as evidence that the courts of the South are controlled by Communists who believe in social equality and intermarriage. This fear of Communistic control of our courts intensifies racial fear, or the other way about.

That there is propaganda by suppression is illustrated by two such cases of short sentences:

Last fall the papers carried a news story of, a Negro who had received one year in prison for attempting to assault a twelve-year-old child, the daughter of a white farmer. This needed study. A prominent woman citizen of the State in which the crime allegedly was committed visited the town. From the white merchants and city officials she learned of the good character of the Negro — his prompt payment of bills, his industry, and his sobriety. She also learned, from the same people, of the questionable character of the white man. After his Negro tenant was sent to prison for one year, the white farmer took all the crops of, the Negro, as well as his chickens and hogs, leaving the Negro’s wife and children without support. The news story gave the white child’s age as twelve. When the Negro was tried, he was tried for attempted assault not on the twelve-year old daughter but on her eighteen-year-old sister.

This year, the day after a Negro was lynched for alleged criminal assault, another Negro in the same town was given one year on the chaingang for a similar crime. The lynching of the first Negro was justified by the public on the ground that had he not been lynched he would have received a sentence of only one year. The papers have not yet carried the story of the suppressed facts. What force would have been placed in our hands for removing the halo of chivalry around lynchers and building respect for courts had the papers made public the story of the white woman and white man who supported themselves through selling a young white girl to any man with the price, without regard to race or color!

Diversion of, the public mind from the savage revenge of the mob by emphasizing the heinousness of the crime committed by the victim of the mob excuses any excess of torture. Men and women see in the outraged victim of a “black brute” their own mothers or sisters, wives or daughters. Anonymous letters, demanding to know “How would you feel if that had been your daughter or sister?,” have been received too often for us to overlook the effect these news stories have on the minds of men and women.

Descriptions in Newspapers

In describing the victim of an assault, newspapers use such words as “young, lovely, innocent, devout in her religious life, loving, affectionate; now broken and ruined, a glorious future of proud womanhood destroyed and blasted.” Men are stirred. No one with a drop of “red blood” in his veins will stand back! If they hesitate, there are women and girls milling around, demanding that they show themselves as heroes, and not yellow cowards.

This method of propaganda has been used successfully over a long period of years — that all white women of the South are categorically pure and noble and sacred, and all white men of the South are defenders of this purity, nobility, and sacredness against spoliation by a Negro. I was brought up on this theory. As a woman of mature years, I discovered that there were white women like those in the Scottsboro case and the Marianna, Florida, case. Even later have I become acquainted with the type of white men involved in the lynchings at Newton, Texas, and Marianna, Florida, in 1934, and the recent one at Danielsville, Georgia.

Cannibalism of mobs, revolting souvenir collections carried by lynchers, sadistic acts inspired by diseased and poisoned minds — these facts are played down if they are mentioned at all, while justification is given for any extreme measure of cruelty which a maddened mob may devise. “It was terrible,” one white woman remarked about the mob at Marianna, Florida, “but nothing that could have been done to the Negro would have been too much.”

In Will Irwin’s “Propaganda and the News,” almost every statement he makes about propaganda and war, the place of the press in creating hate and arousing fighting blood, can be paralleled with similar stories of propaganda and lynching — ways of turning on racial hate and fear and arousing the savage in white men. It seems to me that the Southern press has helped to cultivate the field of public opinion which is now fertile for seeds of communism and fascism. Lynchings are spectacular incidents of the complete destruction of law and the courts while the mass rules. Hatred, the essential ingredient for murder and lawlessness, is never completely dormant. Methods of propaganda — or technique, as sociologists call it — for stirring up this hatred have become so much a part of our method of control that unconsciously, because of familiar outlines, newspapers which now seek to change this in their editorial columns print news stories of lynchings which satisfy the state of the public mind; suppress details that reveal the white man as something less than chivalrous; divert attention from his acts of savagery; emphasize and support the emotions of hate and fear; and in other subtle ways feed the doctrine of group superiority, as an attribute of birth, to those of our race who have failed to achieve individual superiority over their Negro neighbors.

Source: The Changing Character of Lynching, Review of Lynching, 1931-1941, With a Discussion of Recent Developments in the Field, by Jessie Daniel Ames, Executive Director, Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (Atlanta: Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1942), pp. 55-58.