Morning in Bledsoe County

At 5 a.m. it was still dark in the Sequatchie Valley. James I. Scales, 17, rose as usual from his dormitory bed in a Negro reformatory 69 miles northeast of Chattanooga. James was a trusty. He dressed and crossed the cold yard to the bungalow of Superintendent H. E. Scott, where he usually helped the womenfolk with the daily chores. But on this morning, there was a change in routine. Superintendent Scott was away in Nashville.

At 9 a.m. Assistant Superintendent W. S. Neil knocked & knocked at the Scott door. He got no answer. Breaking in, he stumbled over an assortment of bloody articles: an ax, a hammer, two butcher knives, a shotgun barrel--and James Scales's discarded clothes. The bodies of Superintendent Scott's dying wife and dead 19-year-old daughter lay on the floor.

On a farm ten miles away, James Scales was caught in the clothes he had taken from the Scott house. Confessing to the double murder, he was whisked away to the Bledsoe County jail. The sheriff was away, so a young woman cook, temporarily in charge, locked him up. Within the hour, three men appeared and solemnly assured the cook that James was wanted back at the reformatory. The inexperienced jailer gave her prisoner up.

By noon, a 30-man mob assembled in the reformatory yard. A stout rope was thrown over a low-hanging limb. James Scales, taut with fear, was dragged atop an empty oil drum. Suddenly Superintendent Neil, in the immemorial gesture of all Southern peace officers, shouted: "I don't want anything like that done here." Then he ducked. As the shotguns blasted, James Scales fell, his head and back studded with lead.

Tennessee's Governor Prentice Cooper dutifully pronounced the lynching "regrettable," offered a $500 reward for conviction of the guilty. But no one seemed to know who they were--even though a few had tarried in the reformatory yard, prodding the other inmates to come out and view the body, "as an example."

With the lynching of James Scales, the 1944 U.S. score rose to two: Mississippians had already lynched one. In 1943, there were three lynchings. The U.S. could not yet boast of a year without mob violence. But in four decades the record had improved. Between 1900 and 1941, the nation had 4,699 lynchings* on its conscience--more than 100 a year.

* 1,291 whites; 3,408 Negroes.

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