Issue Number:47

Date: 06/30/1934

p. 1, c. 2

Lynchers in Congress


The Council of Southern Women for the prevention of Lynching circulated literature several years ago designed to educate the masses above a brutal custom that has taken 4,751 lives since 1882 in Southern states alone. Interested women with headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., have sent speakers out to mountains, churches and delegation, and to county schools in the swamp lands throughout the South ina sincere attempt to prevent lynching. Pamphlets tell of the mistakes mobs have made and the "framed up" lies t hat have caed the death of some innocent men. Others give history of some of the actual cases, showing a very different "charge" from teh usual "rape" charge that some newspapers use to increase circulation.

Recent happenings in the 73rd Congress that adjourned several weeks ago, give us reason to believe that the Council of Women for the prevention of lynchngs should lose no time in sending some literature and fw delegates to some of our Federal law makers. Despite the thousands and thousands of signed petitions sent in by Negro and white citizens of America requesting that the anti-lynching bill be brought to the floor of the Senate for a vote, Congress adjourned without considering the Costigan-Wagner Bi ll. Senator McKellar of Tennessee and Senator Smith of South Carolina resorted to parliamentary tricks that killed the bill.

It has been the opinion of the public for years that the illiterate whites of the Suth are the blood-thirsty mobsters hat repeatedly disgrace this Republic with this savage method of punishment. But attention should be directed now to Washington and to that other type of mobster who filibusters and uses all sorts of tricks to give his "voters unmolested" privilege of burning, shooting and killing at will.