MOB JUSTICE

Evening Star, Issue 22683, 24 June 1937, Page 8

MOB JUSTICE

LYNCHING IN AMERICA A HORRIBLE FATE 4. 'oraphic account of recent lynching in the United States of. America is given in this article, which was published in ‘ Time.’ In Washington, before a gallery crowded with negroes, the. House ot Representatives was beginning to debate a drastic anti-lynching bill introduced by Congressman G-avagan, from New York’s black Harlem. In Jackson (Mississippi), before delegates to a farm conference, tbe Governor (My Hugh Lawson White) was boasting that Mississippi had not had a lynching in 15 months. In Winona (Mississippi), in a packed court room in Montgomery county’s white brick courthouse, Roosevelt Townes and Bootjack M'Daniels, 26-year-old negroes, were pleading not guilty to a charge of having murdered a crossroads country grocer during a robbery last December at Duck Hill. One day recently these simultaneous events' were the prologue of a ghastly melodrama, peculiarly Southern. CHILDREN AS SPECTATORS. As the debate at Washington droned on, furnishing a strange far-off accompaniment, Townes and M'Daniels were led handcuffed from tbe court room. If their minds registered anything as the sheriff and two deputaies escorted them down the back stairs to return them to gaol, it was relief. The court had assigned counsel to defend them, and set a date for trial by jury. Everything was according to law. But when they stepped out of a side door of the courthouse they found themselves face to face with what so often handles cases like theirs in the South. An angry mob surged forward, took them from the custody of their guardians without a struggle, and threw them into a school bus. Followed by 40 automobiles, th« bus sped down the highway toward Duck Hill. Two miles from the scene of last December’s murder, 500 country folk, including women and children, waited expectantly in a patch of pinewood. When the motor cavalcade from Winona arrived, the mob closed in to watch as the terrified negroes were dragged from the bus. People in the back rows could hear heavy chains clink as the two men were made fast to trees.