Reason for Rape

Last year 21 Negroes were lynched in the U. S., compared with ten the year before. Disturbed by this turn in the long ebbing tide of mob murder, a group of public-spirited whites joined with a group of public-spirited blacks in a Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching. Chairman of the commission which approached its problem dispassionately was George Fort Milton, publisher of the Chattanooga News, author of The Age of Hate. Other respect-commanding white members included Julian Harris, news director of the Atlanta Constitution and son of Uncle Remus' creator; President William Joseph McGlothlin of Furman University; Dr. Howard Washington Odum of the University of North Carolina. Noted Negroes on the Commission were President John Hope of Atlanta University, Principal Robert Russa Moton of Tuskegee Institute, President Benjamin

F. Hubert of Georgia State Industrial College. Last week this commission made its report at Atlanta. Major findings:

1) Two of the 21 lynchees were "certainly innocent" of any crime. At Mount Vernon, Ga., black S. S. Mincey, local G. 0. Politician, pressed his partisan agitation too far for the comfort of Democrats. A masked mob dragged him from his home, beat in his skull, left him to die from concussion of the brain. At Thomasville, Ga., black Lacy Mitchell dared to testify against two white men charged with raping a Negro woman. Four men, the defendants' friends, dragged Lacy Mitchell from his home, shot him dead.

2) "Real doubt of guilt" existed in at least half the other lynchings.

3) Of the 3,693 lynchings in the past 41 years, only 23% carried the charge of rape.

4) Eleven of the 1930 lynchees were illiterate while only one had reached the fifth grade in school. Many of them were "defective half-wits."

On the basis of its factual report, the Commission prepared to draft an effective anti-lynching statute for Southern States which would, somehow, substitute reason for rape-of-the-law.

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