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

Questions for Further Study

• 1.: Using this document in combination with John Edward Bruce’s “Organized Resistance Is Our Best Remedy,” Ida B. Wells’s “Lynch Law in America,” and Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad’s Scottsboro Boy, summarize the history of lynching and other forms of violence against African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• 2.: What economic conditions factored into the upsurge in lynchings and violence against African Americans in the 1930s?
• 3.: What political circumstances prevented President Franklin D. Roosevelt from lending his full support to an antilynching law?
• 4.: If lynching is murder, why were laws against murder inadequate in dealing with the problem of lynching? Put differently, what specific tools would a federal antilynching law have put into the hands of law-enforcement officials?
• 5.: In light of the fact that no federal antilynching bill was ever passed, do you believe that White’s essay, along with similar documents by other writers, ultimately had an effect? Explain.