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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

White opens “U.S. Department of (White) Justice” by stating that the Department of Justice has absolutely failed to protect African Americans from violence and discrimination. He argues that this negligence is not confined to lynching cases but is a much broader pattern of disregard for the plight of African Americans. White briefly mentions the refusal of the Department of Justice to intervene on behalf of southern blacks who could not vote because of discriminatory laws and intimidation tactics. During the 1930s southern blacks faced numerous obstacles at the ballot box, including literacy tests, understanding clauses, and poll taxes. White contends that federal agencies are moving slowly on civil rights because the Roosevelt administration is unwilling to do anything that would offend its white southern supporters. While White sees disfranchisement and segregation as part of the NAACP’s broader civil rights campaign, he contends that the federal government has shown a particularly lax attitude toward mob violence in the South.

In the second paragraph, White reveals his journalistic skill and his experience as a lynching investigator. There was probably no one in the country more familiar with the patterns of mob violence in the South than Walter White. He believed that one of the most valuable weapons in the fight against lynching was to expose the harsh reality of southern lynchings. By revealing the gruesome details, the motives behind the murders, and the generally callous attitude of local authorities toward the killings, White hoped to convince the American public and federal officials that outside intervention was necessary to eliminate lynching.

The Tuscaloosa case that White describes reveals that local law enforcement officials played a part, perhaps knowingly, in the lynching. Typically, in the wake of a lynching, southern policemen would claim that they had done everything they could to prevent mob violence. They usually reported that the lynch mob had overpowered them, stolen the prisoners, and then left them tied up and blindfolded. But White points out that the police officers in Tuscaloosa showed callous disregard for the safety of the prisoner and played right into the hands of the waiting mob. The federal antilynching legislation that White and his allies demanded would have imposed stiff penalties on local law enforcement and government officials who failed to adequately protect prisoners from mobs. Therefore, it was very important that White point out instances where local authorities demonstrated negligence or even complicity in a lynching.

In paragraphs 3 and 4, White reveals that he and fellow activists have repeatedly lobbied the Department of Justice to investigate lynchings. By the 1930s White was the most recognizable black activist in Washington, D.C. He had enlisted the support of numerous congressmen and government officials in the antilynching campaign, but he had less success at the Department of Justice. Although federal statutes already existed that allowed the attorney general to prosecute the Tuscaloosa sheriff, White could not persuade a Justice Department official to meet with his delegation. Undeterred, White and his colleagues refused to leave the building until officials escorted them to see the attorney general in person. Yet they left with no commitment and waited months to hear back from the Department of Justice about their demands.

The fifth paragraph reveals the ingenuity and persistence of antilynching activists in using the legal system to their advantage. With no antilynching legislation on the books, the only way to justify federal prosecution of mob violence was to cite other laws that lynch mobs had violated. White had hoped that a revised version of a federal interstate kidnapping law would be broad enough to cover lynchings in which a mob carried a victim across state lines. This federal kidnapping law was named after the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had been kidnapped and murdered in early 1932. In paragraphs 6–10, White reveals that the same attorney general who had refused to investigate the Tuscaloosa lynching had agreed in principle to broader laws against interstate kidnapping. But when civil rights activists cited this revised law to urge the Department of Justice to investigate lynchings, the attorney general once again refused to take action.

White’s discussion of the Lindbergh kidnapping law reveals the importance of litigation in the NAACP’s civil rights activism. Before, during, and after White’s tenure as executive secretary, the organization pursued a strategy that was primarily legal, focusing on laws and litigation to force government action on civil rights. Through a succession of lawsuits in the 1930s and 1940s, the NAACP won a series of school segregation cases that led to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The NAACP also used this strategy to combat disfranchisement laws and other discriminatory practices. The organization’s antilynching campaign employed legal strategies as well. By using test cases, like the Curtis James lynching described in paragraph 12, the NAACP hoped to force the federal government to apply existing laws to civil rights violations.

In paragraphs 11–14, White describes how the Department of Justice evaded the NAACP’s claim that the James lynching violated the expanded language of the recently revised Lindbergh law. White uses the department’s own words to highlight the lengths that federal authorities are willing to go to avoid any involvement in a southern lynching case. White argues that Department of Justice officials are willfully misrepresenting existing laws and making excuses to justify their inaction. He points out that the Department of Justice is asking the NAACP to perform the duties that should be the responsibility of its own Federal Bureau of Investigation—to gather facts in order to establish the basis for prosecution.

In paragraph 15, White mentions the lynching of Claude Neal. This particularly brutal incident made headlines across the country. The Neal lynching harked back to earlier decades, when local newspapers announced lynchings in advance and huge crowds turned out to watch. Local authorities had arrested Neal for raping and murdering a white woman and had carried him to an Alabama jail. A white mob abducted Neal and held him in an undisclosed location for two days, while newspapers in Alabama and Florida announced the upcoming lynching. On October 26, 1934, a crowd of three thousand gathered at a farm owned by the murdered woman’s family. Much to their dismay, the mob killed Neal with a shotgun in a nearby forest after hours of torture. They then took Neal to the farm, where the gathered crowd defiled his body. Finally, the mob brought Neal’s remains into Marianna and hung the body from a downtown tree.

This brutal and brazen incident made national headlines, and White saw an opportunity to rally public support for the antilynching campaign. But he also recognized that the Neal lynching was an ideal test case for the interstate kidnapping law. Authorities had apprehended the suspect in Florida and carried him to Alabama. The lynch mob had then kidnapped him and carried him back to the scene of his alleged crime in Florida. But before the NAACP could even request a federal investigation, the Department of Justice announced publicly that the Lindbergh law did not apply to lynching cases.

In paragraphs 16–22, White describes the NAACP’s reaction to a highly publicized crime conference sponsored by the Department of Justice. Despite White’s intensive lobbying and the upsurge in lynchings during the early 1930s, the Department of Justice refused to include mob violence on the agenda. Moreover, conference planners failed to invite representatives of any civil rights organizations to the conference to discuss their concerns. Even with the highly publicized lynching cases of recent years, conference participants seemed more concerned with gangsters and kidnappers.

Despite the cold shoulder from conference organizers, White notes a hopeful sign on the first night of the conference. In his keynote speech, President Roosevelt spoke out forcefully against lynching. Just a few months earlier, he had confided to White that he could not support antilynching legislation without offending his southern supporters. Faced with mounting pressure from antilynching activists, the president could not ignore lynching altogether. As Roosevelt rallied support for his New Deal programs, he walked a fine line between alienating his powerful southern allies and offending his growing number of African American supporters. His lynching statement at the crime conference was intended to reassure his black supporters without committing himself to any actions that would anger southern Democrats.

Despite the president’s condemnation of lynching on the opening night of the conference, conference organizers continued to deny NAACP requests to put lynching on the agenda. White and his allies would not give up without a fight. When the Department of Justice denied repeated requests to address the lynching problem, civil rights activists took to the streets. The local NAACP prepared signs and started a picket line outside the Justice building. Local police responded by arresting the picketers, but the protest yielded tangible results. The attorney general invited African American representatives to participate in the conference and suggested that they could bring up lynching during an informal discussion session. When the conference coordinators backed off this promise, the local NAACP resumed its protest outside of the conference.

The willingness of the NAACP to stage peaceful protests reveals another dimension to the antilynching campaign. Decades before nonviolent protests hit the television screens, civil rights activists employed nonviolent measures to publicize their cause. In the antilynching protests outside the 1934 crime conference, activists carefully planned a public action that would dramatize the lynching problem. Because policemen had arrested early picketers under sign and parade laws, the second round of protestors planned a perfectly legal public action. Standing silently with lynching ropes looped around their necks and small signs pinned to their chests, the protestors forced the conference delegates to confront the reality of lynching even if they refused to discuss it. The protest stumped the local police and department officials, who could find no grounds on which to arrest the sixty protestors standing outside the conference. The spectacle finally forced the conference participants to adopt a vague resolution that did not name lynching specifically but conceded that racial violence was illegal and wrong.

In the closing three paragraphs, White makes clear that the moral victory at the crime conference did little to ease the bitterness and frustration of the antilynching movement. Less than three months after the conference, another lynching occurred that involved an interstate abduction. Vigilantes in southwestern Tennessee abducted Ab Young for killing a white highway worker. After crossing the border into Mississippi, they hanged him from a tree and riddled his body with bullets. The lynch mob tipped off a Memphis newspaper, which dispatched a reporter and photographer to the scene. Despite the well-documented mob murder, local authorities ruled that Young had died by hanging yet named no suspects. One local attorney even claimed that Young had hanged himself.

The phrase “at the hands of parties unknown” was a common one in southern lynching cases. Most southern whites refused to incriminate fellow whites for participating in mob violence. Even if they opposed lynchings and took steps to prevent mob violence in their communities, local authorities stopped short of singling out their friends and neighbors for punishment. White worked for years to expose this culture of secrecy and complicity, but southern whites continued to close ranks when outsiders criticized their handling of lynching cases.

White responded to the latest lynching by firing off yet another investigation request to both the Department of Justice and the White House. The NAACP received no reply. Despite years of relentless pressure to publicize lynchings and force a response from the federal government, White concludes his article with the bitter admission that the Department of Justice remained reluctant to use its enforcement powers to protect African Americans from mob violence.