I was brought up in a State rights school of thought, but I know very well that the Federal Government does have a constitutional obligation to make good its guaranty through the Constitution that every citizen is entitled to equal protection of the law, and that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

On the other hand, I have been taught, and I know, that the police power of the State stands as a stumbling block to that. I think a very strong constitutional case can be made on both those bases. I think not only that one can be, but that one will be. It is not for us to decide whether this is a constitutional measure. That is something for the courts to decide. I feel sure a clear-cut issue of constitutionality can be presented.

I think I might say in conclusion that opinion in the South, and especially among my generation, is rapidly becoming more pragmatic than egoistic; that it is becoming more really realistic than traditional. There are thousands of us who care so much about this that we are willing to receive help from any quarter, even from our National Government. I really believe and hope our representatives in Congress will consider this overwhelming proportion of intelligent southern opinion, and when confronted with a choice between curbing lynching and curbing the Federal Government they will choose the former.

Senator VAN NUYS. Thank you very much, Miss Webb.

The next speaker is Charles H. Houston, dean of the Howard University Law School. At the request of the Attorney General of the United States Mr. Houston prepared a brief on the lynching of the Negroes at Tuscaloosa, Ala., in August 1933.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES H. HOUSTON, DEAN OF HOWARD UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mr. HOUSTON. If it please the committee, I appear before you as a citizen sworn to uphold the Constitution by three separate oaths: As a Reserve officer, as a lawyer, and as a member of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia. I mention this so that you may judge what I have to say not as the rash statements of a person who has nothing to lose and no faith to keep, but as the sober statement of one who is fully conscious of his duties and who speaks as a friend. I also want to speak as a war veteran, not as one who was drafted but as one who voluntarily enlisted; and finally from a standpoint of public obligation, as the administrator of a law school which is training young men to respect and try to improve the legal order.

I am not here to discuss the constitutionality of the bill, as that will be handled by others who have made a special study of this question. My primary purpose is to discuss the international and domestic implications of lynchings in the United States, and to point out the need why Federal legislation must be enacted and then firmly enforced.

The international implications of lynchings have two aspects, the effect of lynchings on foreign nations and their peoples, and the effect of lynchings on the people of the United States as related

to international situations. If the press can be believed, there is hardly an incident in which our Government attempts to warn foreign nations about their inability to suppress internal disorders that the foreign nation either officially or through its press does not challenge this country for its failure to suppress mob murders at home. The United States has no standing to criticize the riots in Paris and Vienna while mobs range in this land from Maryland to California. The failure of this country to suppress the lynching evil cripples its prestige and exposes its attempts to interferes or dictate in West Indian and Central American affairs as hypocrisy and special privilege. And certainly among nations having a nonCaucasian element in their populations, the existence of the lynching evil directed as it is mainly against blacks, furnishes the basis for a propaganda which will arouse their populations to fanatical fury against the United States. We are near enough to the World War to understand what clever persistent propaganda will do.

The notorious Scottsboro cases, which are not the kind of lynchings which this bill is aimed to reach, are nevertheless close enough to illustrate my point. I should now like to exhibit for the record a series of posters from various countries showing the use which foreign peoples can make of the lynching evil.

This is a Dutch poster, which was posted up at an open-air protest. This one is a French poster, and I call the committee's attention to "Save the Scottsboro Negroes ", at the bottom. I should like to call attention to another poster. It is printed in a Scandinavian language. The picture is a picture of Ada Wright, the mother of one of the Scottsboro boys. She and a gentleman named Engahl made a trip to Europe and spoke in 30 different countries. This is a German poster: Seven Negro workers condemned to death." I have here another French poster. Finally, I have another poster in Scandinavian, which again is an announcement of a meeting by Mrs. Wright.

When one considers that these posters are only samples; that entire cities were plastered with them; that Scottsboro indignation and protest meetings were held in all countries of the civilized world, one can begin to glimpse in a small way what the lynching evil is costing the United States from an international point of view. The riots and protests which were staged in front of United States embassies and consulates in the principal cities of Europe and South America are more indicators of this country's loss of prestige.

Now, Mr. Walter White and others have already told you that the Negro is sick and tired of being lynched and generally mistreated in spite of his hitherto unwavering loyalty to this country. Perhaps you have not thought about this. But foreign nations have, and there is not a single foreign nation which envisions the possibility of war with the United States that does not gamble on the possibility of -Negro defection. Less than 2 months ago a supposedly semiofficial provocative Japanese book was seized and all copies in Hawaii confiscated. This book was supposed to be a narrative of a future war between the United States and Japan, and according to the AfroAmerican, January 27, 1934

American Fleet starts through the Panama Canal in an effort to reach the Pacific coast before the Japanese battle fleet. The captain has

trouble with a Negro who is supposed to have deserted the ship at Habana, and while the captain is discussing his safety with his officers the Negro slips into his cabin and causes a terrific explosion which wrecks the ship.

The story then states that: "The President of the United States issues an order that no Negro may become a soldier of the United States, thereby cutting down on the forces."

The next question is whether there is any basis for this Japanese propaganda. May I quote from the Harlem Liberator, February 3, 1934, Negroes speak of war ", by Langdon Hughes:

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When the time comes for the next war, I'm asking you, remember the last war. I'm asking you what you fought for and what you would be fighting for again? I'm asking how many of the lies you were told do you still believe? Does any Negro believe, for instance, that the world was actually saved for democracy? Does any Negro believe, any more, in closing ranks with the war makers? Maybe a few soldiers believed Dr. Moton when he came over to France talking about, "Be nice and fight for the nice white folks. Be meek and shoot some Germans." But do any Negroes believe him now, with lynched black workers hanging on trees all around Tuskegee? I'm asking you?

I was in France and heard Dr. Moton say that.

And after the Chicago riots, and the Washington riots, and the East St. Louis riots, and more recently the bonus march, is it some foreign army needs to be fought?

And listen, I'm asking you, with all the war ships and marines and officers and Secretary of the Navy going to Cuba, can't they send even one sergeant after Shamblin in Alabama?

And even if I was studying fighting, which I ain't, why couldn't I do a little killing in the Navy without wrassling with pots and pans, or join the Marines, the lily-white Marines, and see the world, or go in the air force where you never admitted Negroes yet? I'd like to be above the battle too. Or do you think you gonna use me for stevedoring again?

And when the next war comes, I want to know whose war and why. For instance, if it's the Japanese you're speaking of-there's plenty of perils for me right here at home that needs attending to; what about them labor unions that won't admit Negroes? And what about all of them factories where I can't work, if even there was work? And what about the schools I can't go to. and the States I can't vote in, and the juries I can't sit on? And what about all them sheriffs that can never find out who did the lynching? And what about something to eat without putting on a uniform and going out to killing folks I never saw to get it? And what about them "separate colored" codes in the N.R.A.? And what about a voice in whose running this country and why-before I even think about crossing the water and fighting again?

Who said I want to go to war? If I do, it ain't going to be the same war the President wants to go to. No, sir. I been hanging on a rope in Alabama too long.

I confess that Langdon Hughes is a poet and a radical. but the point to be impressed is that sober Negroes who are keeping their mouths shut have the same thoughts in the backs of their heads. Only last Sunday, 2 days ago, Congressman DePriest gave a musical in the auditorium of the new House Office Building. A large gathering of the leading Negroes of the city were there; all the Negro officials almost. Mr. William Tyler Page, former Clerk of the House, was the principal speaker. After the proper oratorical approach he swept to his climax that the Negro had never deserted the country in time of need and the United States can always count on his unwavering loyalty. Not even a decent ripple of applause trickled through the room. If you think I exaggerate, you can ask any of the several Congressmen who were present.

May I call your attention to the situation in the last war? If you examine the records of the War Department you will find that the established Negroes, the leading Negroes, did not enter the Army. Fort Des Moines, where the first Negro officers were trained, was a camp of boys except for the Regular Army men who were there. Out of more than 100 civilians who went to the officers' training camp from the District of Columbia I can only recall two men commissioned who were over the age of the first draft, and they were both members of the metropolitan police department: Wormley Jones and Paul Jones.

I am not trying to raise a bogey or scare anybody. Personally I realize that our salvation lies in sharing the hazards of the national life. But I think you and the country both should know that there is grave disillusionment and deep distrust among large elements of the Negro population, especially in the South. It does not show on the surface. The southern Negro is far too canny for that; he knows he has not got a chance in case of open resistance. But week in and week out, the Negro press is feeding the Negro population with stories of lynchings, stories of oppression which are all too true, and they cannot help but take effect. And the time may come in an international crisis when the loyalty or disloyalty of one tenth of the population may spell the difference between national success and national disaster; and that day, unless sooner wiped out, the country may reap the lynching harvest.

Why? Because the South will be afraid for the country to arm Negroes in any large numbers. You may recall that a large part of the Negro troops were not called until a month after the white troops. You may also recall that the Negro officers were not called into camp until a month after the white officers; that the Twentyfourth Infantry had arrived at Houston, and immediately afterwards changes were made in the plans for mobilization of the Ninety-second Division, and it was never mobilized until it reached France. What happened was that the Negro troops were kept back until the white troops had been put into camp. I was in the Three Hundred and Sixty-eighth Infantry, which was at Camp Meade. and the Three Hundred and Fifty-first Artillery. The purpose of that was because another Houston outbreak on the part of the troops was feared, and it was arranged so that any unrest on the part of the Negro troops could be smothered. That was the situation back in 1917, and conditions are much worse at the present time.

And the South will be likewise afraid to go off to fight with a discontented Negro population left at home. The result will be that the national effort will be paralized before it even gets under way. I respectfully submit and urge upon you that this is not merely a matter of State concern, but a matter which goes to the roots of the national life and must be met by the full strength of the Federal Government where the States have failed.

I should like now to speak of some of the domestic impleations of lynchings. First of all, from the standpoint of white and black alike, the breakdown of orderly government. With the unrest in this country among whites and blacks both, a mob lynching a Negro may any day go on to attack the Government itself. The open rebellion against the State on the Eastern Shore of Maryland last

November is an indication what this country may expect if the lynching spirit is not first curbed, then completely stamped out. The startling spectacle of Governor Rolph practically abdicating to mob rule casts its shadow into the future. Instead of a government by responsible public officials with some measure of accountability, the community becomes the prey of irresponsible mobs and secret societies. Quoting from the report of the southern commission on the study of lynching, issued November 24, 1933, as a result of its investigation of the Tuscaloosa lynchings in August 1933, I call your attention to the conditions found by the most authoritative body in the South:

Contributing to the extreme community hysteria in Tuscaloosa was the effort of the International Labor Defense to enter the case as counsel for the accused Negroes—an effort repelled by mob violence. Immediate responsibility for this reaction, and probably for the lynchings themselves, rests upon a local secret organization, the Citizens' Protective League, with an elaborate system of espionage and intimidation. The membership of this organization runs into the hundreds and reaches into the courthouse and into some of the families prominently connected with the recently organized council against crime. Much of the hysteria observed in the Tuscaloosa vicinity is directly traceable to a pervasive, unreasoning fear, even on the part of the most intelligent people, that Communist agents had actually organized conspiracies of violence, outrage, and insurrection among the large Negro population of the county.

Even had these rumors been true, they would have afforded no justification for an orgy of murder and intimidation. As a matter of fact. however, the most careful search failed to reveal any insurgent spirit whatever among the Negro pouplation, or even any evidence of sustained effort on the part of the Communists to gain Negro support. The fears of the community on this score seem so unjustified that one must question whether they have not grown up as defenses and excuses. Communism is Tuscaloosa's scapegoat.

At present Tuscaloosa Negroes in all walks of life are fearful of their security. They feel that they cannot depend upon the constituted authorities for protection. Many Negroes interpret the recent repeated failures of the police and courts to mean that they must look to their own strength. Nevertheless, they have exercised commendable restraint and forbearance. Fearful as it is, Tuscaloosa's list of casualties might have been-and may yet be— much longer. The underlying causes are still there.

The white man's control of the Negro group, particularly in the rural areas, has been carried to surprising lengths. All Negro meetings must be held in the daytime; suspicious strangers are on the proscribed list. A white landlord spies on a Negro church service, meeting at 3 o'clock Friday afternoon and later dispels a rumor of its radical nature by saying, No; that was no Communist meeting; I was there myself; just a handful of crippled old "nigger women."

Herbert K. Stockton, in his brief supporting the Dyer antilynching bill, in 1922, warned the Congress of the United States, and particularly the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (p. 7):

The evil is rampant, it is hellish in particular instances, it is dangerous to the Nation in its increasing threets of race war and mob rule. To care such a cruel cancer in our body politic every curative force should be set in motion.

Let me next point out the utter demoralization of the law-enforcement officers themselves as a result of the lynching evil. I quote from James Harmon Chadbourn's Lynching and the Law, 1933, University of North Carolina, as to a representative attitude of peace officers in some of the 1930 lynching cases:

"Do you think I am going to risk my life protecting a nigger?"

In the majority of cases the sheriff and other peace officers merely stood by while the mob did its work. After the tragedy they said that the mob had