Walter F. White:  “U.S. Department of (White) Justice”

Context

By the 1930s American lynch mobs had murdered nearly five thousand documented victims since the end of Reconstruction. Lynchings had occurred across the country during the late nineteenth century, claiming men and women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Yet as mob violence peaked at the turn of the century, lynching became an increasingly regional and racial phenomenon. From 1890 to 1910, southern legislatures enacted laws to segregate African Americans and strip them of their civil rights. Mob violence was an instrumental component of these white supremacy campaigns. White supremacists condoned or explicitly endorsed vigilante violence as a means of discouraging black political participation and resisting any semblance of racial equality. By the early twentieth century, the vast majority of lynchings occurred in the South, and nearly all the victims were black. While lynching is often associated with hanging, vigilantes frequently shot, stabbed, burned, and tortured their victims as well.

After an upsurge in mob violence during and immediately after World War I, the number of lynchings declined steadily throughout the 1920s. But as the United States sank into the Great Depression at the end of the decade, racial tension and mob violence erupted across the South. There had been an average of ten lynchings per year in the late 1920s, yet thirty occurred in the first nine months of 1930 alone. Civil rights activists like Walter White blamed the resurgence on the economic crisis, arguing that southern whites had resorted to desperate measures to control black labor.

As lynchings surged in the early 1930s, the antilynching movement gained momentum. The NAACP had led the charge in this fight since its founding in 1909. During World War I the organization spearheaded a protest parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. As many as ten thousand African Americans marched silently to the beat of muffled drums, carrying banners reading “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Give Us a Chance to Live.” Behind the scenes, the organization lobbied congressmen to enact federal protections against mob violence. In 1918 Republican congressman Leonidas Dyer sponsored the first antilynching bill in American history. Four years later, the House of Representatives passed the Dyer bill despite the nearly unanimous opposition of its southern members.

That antilynching bill made it through the House, but it could not survive a Senate filibuster. After southern senators blocked the passage of the Dyer bill in 1922, Congress did not take up antilynching legislation again until 1934. While some African American activists hoped that the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president signaled a new era for civil rights, the new president was reluctant to endorse the antilynching crusade. In a 1934 meeting at the White House, Roosevelt informed Walter White that he could not endorse any legislation that would alienate southern Democrats. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now,” Roosevelt admitted, as recalled by White in A Man Called White, “they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

Roosevelt’s unwillingness to publicly support antilynching legislation encouraged widespread apathy toward mob violence within the federal government. With Roosevelt reluctant to offend his southern white supporters, federal agencies took no steps to intervene in southern lynching cases. Civil rights laws passed during Reconstruction ostensibly protected southern African Americans from racial violence, but the Department of Justice made no attempts to prevent lynchings or prosecute mob members. The department’s chief law-enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), did not assist in a single lynching investigation during the 1930s.

Despite White’s and others’ mounting frustration with the federal government, the antilynching movement was gaining momentum by 1935, as the NAACP was working alongside civil rights groups, organized labor, and white southern women to rally public opposition to lynching. In early 1935 the organization sponsored “An Art Commentary on Lynching” at a New York City gallery. Gruesome exposés and scholarly studies of lynching fed public indignation. Contemporary polls revealed that even a significant percentage of white southerners favored legislation to stamp out lynching. But such promising shifts in public attitudes were meaningless without government action. By publishing articles like “U.S. Department of (White) Justice,” Walter White hoped to spotlight governmental apathy and pressure federal authorities to stamp out lynching once and for all.