Senator DIETERICH. And you have come here to utter a libel against the Governor and the officers of the State of Maryland?

Mr. ADES. I think the evidence shows what I say is true.

Senator DIETERICH. Under the guise that you are trying to support this bill?

Mr. ADES. I am for this bill.

Senator DIETERICH. Mr. Chairman, I object to any further consideration of the testimony of this witness.

Senator VAN NUYS. The objection is sustained.
Senator DIETERICH. It is not relevant.

Mr. ADES. May I file this with the secretary?
Senator VAN NUYS. You may.

Senator DIETERICH. It is an insult to the law-abiding colored citizens of my State to have a Communist inject himself into this, because they are law-abiding and decent. Some of them are representatives in the State legislature, and one of them is in Congress. There are no Communists among them.

Mr. ADES. I would consider that to be rather unfortunate. [Laughter.]

Senator DIETERICH. Is that the feeling of the community here? Senator VAN NUYS. You represented to me, sir, when I gave you an opportunity to be heard and tried to be fair with you, that you wanted to discuss the merits of this bill, and that you are in favor of it.

Mr. ADES. I wanted to give the reasons.

Senator VAN NUYS. Instead of doing that, you have crashed the gate and endeavored to disseminate communistic propaganda. Mr. ADES. May I file this for the record?

Senator VAN NUYS. You may.

Senator DIETERICH. Just put in the record what he read, and file the rest with the committee.

(The document, a portion of which was read by Mr. Ades, was filed with the committee.)

STATEMENT OF MRS. MARY H. SHARPE, NASHVILLE, TENN.

Mrs. SHARPE. Honorable Chairman and Honorable Senators of the committee, I am from an old southern family; for five generations we have lived in Tennessee.

My grandfather owned many slaves. Some of the descendents of those slaves were in the family as I grew into womanhood. From babyhood I gave them my love and they would have protected my life by the giving of their own had that been necessary. Can I now let one of their race be murdered and do nothing about it?

Yet that is happening today. As an uncouth man expressed it, "When a Negro looks guilty or we spect he committed a crime, tie him up, I'll put the string or fill him with lead."

Nashville, noted for its charms and beauty, is being dragged into the mire, because we, who represent the thoughtful group, the religious group, have allowed the dregs of our South to rule for us.

No longer is that to be true. I consider it a privileged opportunity to come before you, gentlemen, to plead for this bill. So strongly do I feel it, I have traveled many miles through snow and

ice to say to you for the women of the South, we are irked by all this talk of States' rights. What about States' wrongs?

Prejudice is too strong locally to deal with lynching. That is why we need a Federal law. We, as southern women, want the protection of the courts.

We ask for the rights of all citizens regardless of race or color. No longer will we stand for this crime taking the beauty from our social system. We have regard, as did Christ, for the sacredness of personality.

As a southern woman, I plead for the safety of our people. We have large groups in Nashville, both colored and white, as represented in schools and colleges. I urge this blot of lynching be removed from their midst.

Make this Costigan-Wagner bill into a law. We stand unitedly for justice and mercy, but justice as represented by law and ordernot the perverted justice of the disorganized emotions of a mob. Gentlemen, this bill must pass!

STATEMENT OF HARVEY KESTEN, NASHVILLE, TENN.

Mr. KESTEN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: As a southerner, I am particularly and profoundly concerned over the Costigan-Wagner Federal antilynching bill. I favor the passage of this bill, in the first place, because I am convinced that it will have an immense influence in curbing lynching. Such a bill will serve as a restraining influence and act as a deterrent upon those who resort to lynching instead of allowing the law to take its

course.

In the second place, I favor this bill, because I am desirious of seeing some authority established which will bring to a speedy end the brutalizing influences and effects of lynching upon our people. Lynching is a brutalizing influence not only upon those who participate in the actual crime but upon the whole people. It brings to the surface and gives vent to all of the savagery of the human: it stultifies and destroys the finer sensibilities and feelings and makes it easier for the participant to yield to his baser impulses. Lynching creates fear, mistrust, and suspicion; it makes for bitterness and contempt; it broadens the chasm separating the Negro from the white man; it creates social forces upon which no government can stand.

In the third place, I favor this bill because it offers protection to the most exploited and oppressed, the least privileged and protected body of our citizenry, the American Negro, who is most frequently subject to lynching. I have the privilege of claiming the friendship of scores of Negroes and through them I have come to know something of the fear and terror through which they live because of the ever-present menace of lynching. No Negro, whether he be illiter ate or highly cultured is safe from this menace. While a responsible American citizen he is denied the protection given the main body of our people. It is desirable and necessary that steps be taken to give adequate protection to the Negro.

I am in favor of this bill in the fourth place, because it voices the mind and heart of a new generation of white men and women in the South. We abhor and detest lynching. We believe that the

Negro is not only a citizen who is entitled to full and complete protection of the law and all other rights and privileges open to all citizens but a brother who should share the same benefits and privileges that we share.

Finally, I favor this bill because I am an American concerned about the welfare of our entire people and the attitude of other nations toward them. Some of my fellow citizens will oppose this bill on the ground that it violates State rights. I believe that human rights are above State rights and that every citizen is fully entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

STATEMENT OF CLARENCE MITCHELL, BALTIMORE, MD., AFROAMERICAN NEWSPAPER

Mr. MITCHELL. The mob action on the Eastern Shore of Maryland gave evidence of a breakdown in law and order for many reasons.

On our arrival we found that none of the officers were on the street, although feeling was still running high against colored people in general if tenor of conversation is a just indication.

One of the State policemen actually said, "We weren't going to kill anybody for the carelessness of officials who permitted Armwood to be brought back here." Lt. Ruxton K. Ridgely declared also that he made no attempts to use his pistol and would not permit any of his men to do so.

The common gossip of the town was that Sheriff Daugherty had surrendered the keys to the cell in which Armwood was locked.

Directly after the victim had been lynched John M. Dennis, a local undertaker, was called by a civil officer and asked to remove the body. The officer declared that he would promise the undertaker protection, but the latter refused, and the naked body was tossed into a lumberyard where it remained until near noon the next day.

Evidence of severe and brutal treatment was not wanting. The face had been battered beyond recognition, and severe heat, as is usually associated with the burning of highly volatile substance, had caused the outer layer of his skin to be charred and broken in many places.

No extra precautions were taken to prevent the curious persons from looking at the body and from sunrise until the time of its impromptu burial the corpse of George Armwood was the object of the entire town's attention.

The main street of the town was crowded all day following the lynching, and many versions of it were openly discussed by spectators. Some described how the leaders of the mob helped to drag the body through the streets. Others forcefully insisted that Armwood had gotten what he deserved.

Since that time Sheriff Luther C. Daugherty and John N. Robins, State's attorney, have been heard to admit additional information at the circuit court of Baltimore before Judge Eugene O'Dunne. John Richardson, white, accused of harboring Armwood and, incarcerated in the Baltimore jail, applied for a writ of habeas corpus. At the hearing Mr. Robins stated that he felt the community was not a safe place to have Richardson return to.

Sheriff Daugherty admitted that he was standing in front of the jail when the mob came for Armwood. He stated that he saw them trying to batter down the door and seized one end of a beam that was no longer than 20 feet but could not recognize any of the men who were holding it at the other end and in the middle.

He also insisted that other members of the mob filed by him as they were going for Armwood and although he counted nearly 75 persons he did not recognize any of these.

He, along with Mr. Robins, insisted that it was unsafe for Richardson to return to the shore and stated that while he would give the man as much protection as he possibly could, he was sure that anyone connected with the crime might be in danger of mob violence because the feeling was still running high (a month later) about the crime.

STATEMENT OF ELMER A. CARTER, REPRESENTING THE NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE

Mr. CARTER. America is the only civilized Nation which tolerates lynching. It occurs in no other country save as a concomitant of insurrection or civil war.

Its persistence in America can be ascribed in part to the failure of the Federal Government to make it a Federal crime, which in truth it is. For mob law, and that is what lynching is essentially, is an attack on those institutions which have been created for the purpose of guaranteeing the continued development of the citizenry and the communities of which they are a part. It is the usurpation of the prerogatives of the State by irresponsible and destructive elements of the population.

Lynching defended originally as a means of protection to womanhood-a fallacious assumption-has served neither to reduce crimes against women nor to inspire respect for the law. Repudiated by the leading women of the South, denounced by the respectable press, condemned by State officials, it nevertheless continues in defiance of every single force that has thus far been brought to bear upon it. It has become naturally enough the instrument by which the Negro in the South in many instances is exploited as a worker, disfranchised as a citizen, and degraded as a man.

Negroes have been lynched for bringing suit in the courts against white men, for seeking employment in a restaurant, for jumping a labor contract, for trying to act like a white man-whatever that may imply.

So completely has mob law become the law of the land that even in the cases where actual lynching has not been consummated, the courts in many instances have made virtual promises that the prisoner would receive the death penalty. And legal lynching in which State courts and officials have been participants is not uncommon phenomena.

Authentic observers are convinced that the situation is one which calls for a drastic remedy. The economic depression and the industrial collapse have intensified economic competition, and the possibility of latent racial antagonisms becoming open conflict is not as remote as some would have us believe. In the cities there are thous

ands of unemployed of both races-resentful, brooding, and discontented. On the roads, according to competent observers, are hundreds and thousands of Negro farmers, former share croppers, now dispossessed by the reduction in acreage of cotton, tobacco, peanuts, and so forth, like refugees from a beleagured city moving from place to place.

Add to this the displacement of Negroes by white in various occupations as a result of the Recovery Act codes and the widespread discrimination in relief administration which has been and still is being practiced in some sections of the country, and one need not be an alarmist to be apprehensive of the future with unchecked mob law, the accepted procedure of justice when Negroes are accused of crime.

Negro leaders, always counsellors of faith in the better class of white citizens, find themselves in a dilemma since the better class of citizens have proven of little avail once the mob law goes into action. Moreover, often by their silence the irresponsibles who compose the mob are accorded sanction.

It has come, then, to the point where if Federal action fails, Negro leaders may be compelled, by the logic of events, to advise the Negro to provide himself with a measure of that protection which the State and the Nation deny him.

Experience, however, has shown that law is not directed alone against the Negroes. Yesterday a Negro was lynched in Indiana, today white youths in California, tomorrow it may be a Yankee recreant to his trust. Who knows?

Nothing has evoked so much contempt of America and the ideals which it is eager to foist on other people as the barbarious spectacles in which it so frequently indulges. To Americans abroad they are a source of humiliation and shame.

Pearl S. Buck, distinguished American novelist, Pulitzer prize winner, author of The Good Earth, Sons and the Mother, in the course of an article in the March issue of Opportunity, journal of Negro life, says:

I shall not be proud again until my countrymen make lynching a major crime. For to break the laws of justice, not only to single being but to all human beings, is infinitely worse than the killing of one man by another because it is the murder of one by many, and we are all implicated inextricably in such a crime. I feel myself shamefully implicated, sitting here at my desk in my quiet home, pausing to look over peaceful Chinese fields and hills. I am degraded.

STATEMENT OF JOHN O. SPENCER, PRESIDENT OF MORGAN COLLEGE, BALTIMORE, MD.

Mr. SPENCER. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen. I represent the Maryland Interracial Commission, composed of white and colored members, appointed by the Governor of Maryland under act of the legis lature, so far as I know the only institution of similar kind in the United States. I wish to present a very brief statement of the attitude of this commission.

Senator VAN NUYS. Very well.

Mr. SPENCER. This commission desires to go on record in favor of the Costigan-Wagner bill (S. 1978), and to request that the bill be passed substantially as written.