CAMPAIGNING IN SUPPORT
OF THE
UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

An Address Delivered before the Conference on Inter-Racial
Justice

by
James Weldon Johnson

My subject, as it is down on the program, reads: "Cam-
paigning in Support of the United States Constitution." That
wording of my subject is so comprehensive that it might in-
clude a great many things that I am not going to touch on at
all. It might mean all things to all audiences. If this were
an audience consecrated to the maintenance of individual lib-
erty. I might be expected to tell of efforts to preserve
freedom of speech, in pursuance of the First Amendment. Or
if this were a prohibition audience - and mind you, I do
not mean to say it is not - I might be expected to tell of
efforts, in pursuance of the Eighteenth Amendment, to make
Philadelphia dry.

But since this is an audience interested in justice to
racial minorities in America, especially the Negro, I shall,
naturally, be expected to confine myself to that part of
the Constitution comprised in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments. But here there is too much ground
for one speech, one speaker and one audience. In the Thir-
teenth Amendment is involved the question of peonage; and

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peonage is still widely practiced against the Negro. Indeed,
I sometimes think that as a victim of peonage the American Ne-
gro suffers more than from any other single injustice. In the
Fourteenth Amendment are involved the question of the Negro's
civil rights and the question of mob violence and lynching.
In the Fifteenth Amendment is involved the question of the Ne-
gro's right to vote.

With such a subject and so much material and without the
key given me by Mrs. Stirling, I would be at a loss where to
begin and where to leave off. Mrs. Stirling, when she wrote
inviting me to speak here, asked "Could you come and give us
the story of your publicity campaigning for the Dyer Anti-
Lynching Bill?" And so I know that I may confine myself to
the story of campaigning for that part of the Constitution
contained in the last part of the 1st clause of the first section
of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads as follows: "Nor
shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law, nor deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
That is, I am to tell the story of the campaign against Mob
Violence and Lynching. In other words, I am to talk about
agitation as a factor in abolishing these two evils. How-
ever, I do not propose to make an agitated speech on the sub-
ject. I intend to talk dispassionately and analytically - if
I can - even on the subject of agitation.

I do not think that I need to rehearse to you the bar-
barities and fiendish cruelties that go to make up America's

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shameful lynching record. We are after the methods used for crushing them out.

In the past five years the number of lynchings in the United States have been as follows:

<table><tr><td>1919</td><td>63</td></tr><tr><td>1920</td><td>65</td></tr><tr><td>1921</td><td>64</td></tr><tr><td>1923</td><td>26</td></tr><tr><td>1924 (thus far)</td><td>9</td></tr></table>

The average number of lynchings per year for the thirty years prior to 1919 was 107.

It is obvious that there must be specific causes for this sudden and almost precipitous decline in the number of lynchings. There are several, but the chief cause - the cause of which others are the sub-causes - is agitation against lynching. Through this agitation the country was gradually aroused to a knowledge of the truth about lynching - and was finally shocked to see its shame held up before the eyes of the rest of the world. Think of the rest of the world knowing that America was the only land on earth, Christian or heathen, where a human being could be burned alive at the stake, and where crowds of men and women and children would gather around to enjoy the sight.

For many years back there have been sporadic outbursts of indignation against lynching. The first I can remember was made when I was a boy at school. Sam Hose was burned at the stake in Georgia and Robert Ingersoll, the so-called infidel, publicly denounced the perpetrators of the crime as brutes

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and friends. Ingersoll did that while ministers and editors
and statesmen sat silent. From time to time efforts have been
made to abolish the practice of lynching, but the first or-
ganized, systematic, persistent and financed effort was begun
only eight years ago. And it is this organized effort that
has been the chief factor in the marked decrease in lynchings.

In 1916 the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People raised $10,000 to found a special fund to fight
lynching. It is known as the Anti-Lynching Fund. Since 1916,
when it was established, more than $50,000 have been raised
and expended through the Fund. That amount of money and a
great deal of work has gone into the campaign to stamp out
mob violence and to secure the enforcement of that part of
the Constitution which says that no state shall deny to any
person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.

Now, what you would like to know is what has been done,
and how.

One of the first things done was to find out the truth
about lynching and spread it throughout the country and the
world. Investigators were sent promptly to the scenes of
the most atrocious cases of lynching and the facts gathered
before the ashes of the victims were cold. The statistics of
lynchings were studied and collected; for this purpose a corps
of research workers was sent to Washington and spent several
months in the Congressional Library examining files of news-
papers, especially Southern newspapers, for thirty years back.

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The result of this investigation and research was "Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States," a book of over a hundred pages, which is the first and only comprehensive and authentic compilation on the subject. "Thirty Years of Lynching" gives a chronological list of persons lynched in the United States from 1869 to 1918. It gives names of the victims, date, place, and the crime with which the victim was charged.

The facts gathered by investigation and research have been broadcasted as widely as possible. In this campaign of publicity more than 2,500 mass meetings have been held and addressed; millions of pieces of literature have been distributed and circulated; facts and figures have been sent out that have been printed not only in American publications but also in the publications of foreign countries, including China and Japan and the republics of South America. This campaign of publicity was distasteful to a number of people, and to some it was repugnant. The horrible details and photographs of lynchings of Americans by fellow Americans gave a feeling of acute uneasiness to many good people. These same people could get a feeling of American self-righteousness, approaching satisfaction, out of atrocities committed upon Armenians by Turks or upon Jews by Russians, but when the thing was brought to their doors they could not face it. That in these United States a human being could be chained to a stake, irons heated red-hot, his body seared from head to foot, his eyes and tongue burned out and unnamable barbarities performed upon him before he was burned to death while frenzied or gaping hundreds watched and afterwards scrambled in the hot

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ashes for souvenirs, was a fact too sickening to be considered.

But as distasteful as was the task, it was a necessary one.
The country had, first, to be stirred out of its apathy and in-
difference. The veil of smug hypocrisy had to be torn from the
face of the nation, which had to be made to look and see itself
as it was. The raw, naked, brutal facts about lynching had to
be held up before the eyes of the people until the conscience
of the nation was sickened and a reaction of concern and hu-
miliation set in.

This campaign, however, did a great deal more than shock
the country. It out at the main root of the lynching evil.
And what was the main root of this evil? It was a carefully
fostered and subtilely propagandized lie - a lie that placed
upon the Negro the brand of being a race of rapists. Mind you,
the idea back of it was not that certain Negroes committed the
crime of rape, but that the Negro was by nature a rapist and
lynching was meted out solely as a punishment for that crime.
The effect of this propaganda was the greatest obstacle met
in the fight against lynching. the idea was widely, even
generally accepted, and it made even gentle and law-abiding
people apologetic for or indifferent to lynching. To them the
crime of rape was so abhorrent - and the more gentle and law-
abiding they were, the more abhorrent the crime - that the
more thought of its commission left them cold to any plea against
lynching. So, throughout the whole country this idea that the
Negro was by nature a rapist and that lynching was a punishment
for rape created a state of inertia that was difficult to get
under motion.

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Of course, there was a definite purpose in this slanderous
propaganda; that purpose was the shielding, the excusing, the
justifying of the South. The South knew that so long as it
could keep the country believing that rape and lynching were
cause and effect, it could escape the condemnation it deserved.

The campaign of education and publicity against lynching
exposed this lie and made known to the world that of the nearly
3,500 victims lynched in a period of thirty-five years less than
17 per cent had even been charged with rape. It was shown that
the majority had been charged with murder, and that many had
been lynched for the most trivial reasons; for drunkenness,
slander, impudence, insulting white men, etc. These figures
were based upon authentic data gathered from newspapers pub-
lished at or near the scenes of the lynchings.

Further, a study of the criminal records of New York City
brought out facts to show that the Negro was not only not more
addicted to the crime of rape than other groups, but even less
so. A study of the record for New York County, which is only
a part of New York City, showed that in that county in the sin-
gle year of 1917 there were 230 persons indicted for rape by
the Grand Jury and of this numbered 37 were indicted for rape
in the first degree; that is, in just one part of New York City
the number of persons indicted for rape in the first degree was
nine more than the total number of Negroes lynched in the en-
tire United States during the five-year period, 1914-1918; and
of that 37 not one was a Negro. In the five-year period cited,

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there were 26 cases of lynching in which rape was assigned as the cause. In drawing this comparison still closer it should be borne in mind that the evidence required by the Grand Jury of New York County to indict a person on the charge of rape must be more conclusive than the evidence required by a mob to lynch a Negro accused of rape. The New York Grand Jury requires corroboration, direct or circumstantial; the unsupported word of a woman is not sufficient. The mob does not even require that the woman be certain as to the identity of the accused.

This comparison, of course, does not take into consideration the number of Negroes in the United States who may have been legally convicted of rape, but it is striking, in view of the idea so widely spread that the Negro is a rapist by nature, to find that in cities like New York and Chicago the number of cases of rape committed by white men in a single year makes the number of Negroes lynched on charges of rape appear infinitesimal.

But the most deadly truth brought out in this investigation and study, the greatest blow struck in this campaign of publicity against this insidious method of branding the Negro as a brute and a beast outside the pale of human sympathy was the fact found out and brought forth that in the period of years covered by study and investigation, 63 women had been lynched. It was impossible for lynchers or their apologists to claim that these victims were lynched for the "usual crime."

When the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was being discussed in

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Congress and Southern members arose in all their ignorance of the facts to reiterate the old statement that Negroes were lynched for rape and for the protection of white womanhood, the authentic cases of eighty-three women lynched with the names, dates and localities given, stopped their mouths. Their chief argument being taken away they had little left to say.

Through the Anti-Lynching Fund, a National Conference on Lynching was called and held in New York City in 1919. The effort was made to get the most influential and powerful citizens of the country definitely lined up in the movement against lynching. As a result of this Conference an Address to the Nation was drafted and signed by some 141 signers eminent in every walk of life, among whom were: William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, Louis Marshall, Hugh M. Dorsey, Governor of Georgia; Emmet O'Neal, former Governor of Alabama; Charles W. Elliot of Harvard University; Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University; William Dean Howells, Anna Howard Shaw, Bishop Thomas R. Wailor of Tennessee; Elihu Root, Moorfield Storey. There were twenty leading white Southerners among the signers. Twenty-four thousand copies of this address were sent out all over the country and to the press of the United States and foreign countries.

This campaign of education and publicity finally prepared the way for the introduction in Congress of a bill to make lynching a federal offense. The bill was introduced by Congressman L. C. Dyer. Prior to this there had been several

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similar bills introduced in Congress, but the country never
heard of them. When the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was intro-
duced the country had been prepared for it. The Bill, by dint
of strenuous effort, was carried through the House of Repre-
sentatives by an overwhelming vote.

While the Bill was being debated in Congress the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People made what
was the greatest single stroke of publicity ever made in be-
half of the Negro and to place the facts regarding lynching
before the civilized world. It placed full-page advertisements
in nine of the largest daily newspapers in the United States
and in two important weeklies, setting forth the Shame of Ameri-
ca. This was done at a cost of $7,000, and through it probably
ten million people were reached in a day.

While the Anti-Lynching Bill was pending in the Senate,
a "Memorial to the Senate" was gathered by the Association and
placed before that body. One of the prominent senators told
me it was the most impressive memorial, so far as the weight
of the names was concerned, that had in his knowledge ever
been placed before the Senate. The Memorial, after briefly
citing the lynching figures and the fact that the Anti-Lynch-
ing Bill had been passed by the House of Representatives,
called upon the Senate to enact the measure promptly. The Me-
morial was signed by 24 State Governors, 39 Mayors of Cities,
47 Jurists and Lawyers, 66 Bishops and Churchmen including 3

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Archibishops, 29 College Presidents and Professors, 30 Editors, and 37 other prominent and influential citizens.

The Anti-Lynching Bill did not pass the Senate, but Congress proved a most excellent forum in which to have the question of lynching discussed and the facts brought out. It proved a forum which had the ears of the whole country, and so the effect upon the national conscience was tremendous.

On the practical side, the fact that the Anti-Lynching Bill did pass the lower house and was pending in the upper house of Congress threw a scare into the lynching states. They saw the threat that if lynchings were continued, the federal government would eventually step in and take the matter over from the states.

The Anti-Lynching Bill is still in Congress as House Bill #1 and it is still a threat.

It can be seen that this campaign which has been so intensively waged for the past eight or nine years was not a campaign of mere denunciation of lynching nor of mere agitation. It was the marshalling of incontrovertible facts and figures. Its chief result was in undermining the main prop upon which excuses and condonations and justifications for lynching rested. With the fact that lynchings were not for the one crime made known to the whole country and the world no person with any pretense to intelligence or decency could make the slightest justification for the crime of lynching. How great a change was wrought can be seen from the fact that so late as ten or twelve years ago there were a large number of newspa-

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pers both North and South that apologized for or condoned lynch-
ing, if they did not justify it. There were even ministers of
the gospel who stated from their pulpits their willingness to
join or lead a lynching mob and several governors of Southern
states have been known to make like utterances. Today there
is not a respectable newspaper in the United States that would
dare to justify lynching, nor would any intelligent church
tolerate any such utterance from a minister.

The work is not yet complete. There is still much to be
done. There have been thus far only nine lynchings this year,
but they are nine lynchings too many.

I still firmly believe that those who hold dear the in-
stitutions of our country and who feel this shame and disgrace
among the nations of the world, should not rest until a law
making lynching a crime punishable by the federal government
is enacted by Congress.