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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 27. Violence and Intimidation - 1. The Pattern of Violence - 2. Lynching
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560 An American Dilemma
The principles that the law and the law-enforcing agencies are supreme,
impartial and above all groups in society has never taken strong root.^
White people are accustomed—individually and in groups—to take the
law into their own hands and to expect the police and the courts to
countenance this and sometimes lend their active cooperation.^ In the
plantation areas where the social and political subordination of Negroes is
solidified, there is not much need for special organizations of vigilantes to
effectuate the extra-legal sanctions. The Ku Klux Klan and similar secret
societies thrive, rather, in the border regions and in industrial communities.*
But this is only a testimony that the extra-legal sanctions work more
effectively where they are less challenged.
In this region the custom of going armed continually or having weapons
within easy reach at home was retained from ante-bellum days. This custom
was taken over also by the Negroes during Reconstruction days.^ The
writer has been astonished to see how firearms and slashing knives are part
of the equipment of many lower class whites and Negroes in the South.
The laws against carrying “concealed weapons” are not efficient, as they
do not—and for constitutional reasons cannot®—forbid the owning, buying
and selling of arms. White policemen have often complained to the author
that it is not possible to disarm the civil population. They do not urge
reforms, however, but take the prevailing situation as natural and inevi-
table. In the Negro community, where personal security is most lacking,
this dangerous pattern of having knives and guns around is most wide-
spread. It undoubtedly contributes to the high record of violent actions,
most of the time directed against other Negroes.
2. Lynching
Lynching is spectacular and has attracted a good deal of popular and
scientific® attention. It is one Southern pattern which has continued to
arouse disgust and reaction in the North and has, therefore, been made
much of by Negro publicists. It should not be forgotten, however, that
lynching is just one type of extra-legal violence in a whole range of types
that exist in the South. The other types, which were considered earlier
in this chapter are much more common than lynching and their bad effects
on white morals and Negro security are greater.*^
Lynchings were becoming common in the South in the ’thirties, ’forties
and ’fifties of the nineteenth century. Most of the victims in this early
period were white men. The pattern of lynching Negroes became set
during Reconstruction. No reliable statistics before 1889 are available.
Between 1889 and 1940, according to Tuskegec Institute figures, 3,833
people were lynched, about four-fifths of whom were Negroes. The South-
ern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two-thirds
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