Two negroes were mob victims last week in Alabama. A sheriff and several deputies were ordered to hand them over to a groweling crowd of savage farmers between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, near the Jefferson county line.

Daniel Pippen was eighteen years of age and the other victim, Albert Harden, was just sixteen. They had been charged with first degree murder. Whispered threats caused Tuscaloosa officials to become uneasy. So Sheriff Shamblin decided to shift the prisoners to Birmingham for safe keeping. Mr. Shamblin and his "force" of two deputies were met by the mob and the riddled bodies of the two negro youths were found on a distant hillside two hours later.

Once upon a time such news would have been shocking, but Black America is no longer alarmed at whatever occurs in Alabama. Afro-Americans and the civilized world may be more or less surprised at any act that is not disgraceful or unjust.

We are powerless to suggest a remedy for this primitive method that Alabama citizens resort to, to correct her social wrongs. So we find consolation in concluding that maybe the high percentage of illiteracy that prevails in that state, and the obvious lack of clean thinking existing there, have much to do with the general backwardness. Perhaps they are to be pitied for, after having centuries upon centuries to advance and achieve, it strikes us as being unusually pathetic, that Alabama remains inferior in all other lines of endeavor save the jungle code, that her citizens uphold, and splashes America's history with details of cowardly lynchings and is seemingly proud that she contributes annually two-thirds of all the lynchings that occur in this country.