THE HONOLULU SENSATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 27, 2 February 1932, Page 6

THE HONOLULU SENSATION.

(By W. E. KINGSTON.)

Not the least significant part of the Honolulu lynching sensation is that it shows how the typically American institution of lynching can break out in a different country and against a different people. The American people have long been acquainted with the phenomenon of lynch law against the negroes hi the cotton-growing States of the South, tiut that the same impulse to usurp the law should take root in the sunny islands of the Pacific, and against not a negro but a Japanese, indicates how deeply rooted and widespread is this terriblo institution. But serious students of the problem will be not at all surprised. For one thing, lynch law is pretty evenly distributed throughout all the United States. Lynchings have occurred in fortyfour out of the forty-eight States in the Union, and even in the last decade there have been lynchings in twenty-five different States. The total of the recorded lynchings in the last halfcentury is something just over the 5000 mark; in the period 1919 to the beginning of 192S the total is 387, of whom 353 were negroes and 34 were •white people. The fact that so many white people were lynched, even so recently, provides the clue to the whole ghastly story of lynching; it is that in certain States lynch law and physical violence has for many years, and is still to-day, readily resorted to in place of the slower processes of the law. The rioters seize on any pretext. For example, in 1923, when only 28 persons were lynched, the niobe accused three of them of murder; another for "frightening children"; seven were charged with sex offences; one for "remaining in a town where negroes were not allowed"; and a negro woman in Mississippi was lynched by a mob "in search of another." In 1920 there were six victims of a lynching in Florida when a prosperous negro physician, a duly qualified voter, sought to vote in the Presidential election. In 1925 a negro was seized and lynched as he left the courthouse where a jury had acquitted him of the murder with which he was charged. Two others killed in the same year were insane. The present case of Joe Kahahawai, the Japanese youth in Honolulu, is not the first in which a Japanese was lynched by a mob, the leaders of which were arrested, although the other cases happened in California some years ago. In the last half-century, in various parts of the United States, mobs have lynched Italians, Mexicans and citizens of Great Britain and Switzerland. .The total of 5000 includes over 100 women, sixteen of thcin white. Generally speaking, thirty per cent of the victims were charged by the mobs who hung or burnt them to death with murder, and twentyfive per cent with rape. The other forty-five per cent were accused of many different things. The States in which these riots occurred varied from one side of the country to the other, from California to Illinois and to Florida, although a big majority were in the Southern States. As lynchings are usually fairly fully reported to the papers of the whole nation, and as the mob when inflamed with passion and prejudice will almost charge anybody witli anything, it is easy to understand the Honolulu sensation in the light of the predominant American influence there. In "Pope and Faggot" a comprehensive study of lynching in America, Walter White, the author, says: "Lynching has become more or less firmly fixed in the American psychology." Finally, there are always difficulties about convictions of lynching; leaders. This is of interest now because of the impasse in the Honolulu court, with its appeal against the judge's strong directions to the jury, who apparently wanted to let off Mrs. Fortescue and Lieutenant Massie and the others too lightly. Walter White says in his book: "Until very recent times, and in most of the South even to-day, no lyncher has ever needed to feel the slightest apprehension regarding punishment or even the annoyance of an investigation. Even in the few instances where there were arrests and trials, the accused usually had friends on the jury, if not fellow lynchers; in others he knew that jurors and court officials wero in sympathy with him or else dared not press the case too vigorously."