Lynchings in a Functioning System

“AN ACT To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase ‘mob or riotous assemblage,” when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense.

Sec. 2. That if any State or governmental subdivision thereof fails, neglects, or refuses to provide and maintain protection to the life of any person within its jurisdiction against a mob or riotous assemblage, such State shall by reason of such failure, neglect, or refusal he deemed to have denied to such person the equal protection of the laws of the State.

Sec. 3. That any State or municipal officer charged with the duty or who possesses the power or authority as such officer to protect the life of any person that may be put to death by any mob or riotous assemblage, or who has any such person in his charge as a prisoner, who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to prevent such person from being so put to death, or any State or municipal officer charged with the duty of apprehending or prosecuting any person participating in such mob or riotous assemblage who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to perform his duty in apprehending or prosecuting to final judgment under the laws of such State all persons so participating except such, if any, as are or have been held to answer for such participation in any district court of the United States, as herein provided, shall he guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment not exceeding five years or by a fine of not exceeding $5,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Sec. 4. That the district court of the judicial district wherein a person is put to death by a mob or riotous assemblage shall have jurisdiction to try and punish, in accordance with the laws of the State where the homicide is committed, those who participate therein: Provided, That it shall be charged in the indictment that by reason of the failure, neglect, or refusal of the officers of the State charged with the duty of prosecuting such offense under the laws of the State to proceed with due diligence to apprehend and prosecute such participants the State has denied to its citizens the equal protection of the laws. It shall not be necessary that the jurisdictional allegations herein required shall be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it shall be sufficient if such allegations are sustained by a preponderance of the evidence.”

Above is part of an antilynching bill proposed to Congress in 1922 by a senator from Missouri, which—like all others after it—ultimately failed, another casulty of its longstanding outright refusal to denounce murder.I have been thinking since attending the lunch conversation with Doria Johnson, whose efforts led to the passage in 2005 of a Senate resoultion condemning lynching, about the efforts of the many previous activists whose appeals to Congress to speak on lynching, or to make it a federal crime, that were unsuccessful. I was really struck with the fact that, though the federal govnment professed uninvolvement with segregation and the racism for which it stands, it was just as complicit as local and state governments in the santioning of racial violence. It’s good to remember that governments aren’t their own entities, but are composed of people—and the federal government composed partly of representatives of Southern states whose convictions remianed unaltered and even strengthened when they entered Congress. This bill provides an interesting reflection on the complitcity of local and state governments in enabling and even encouaging lynching at all stages, as it includes provisions for the imprisonment (“for life or not less than five years”) of state or municipal officers who allowed people to be taken out of their custody to be lynched, and penalites for state and local judiciaries who fail to sufficiently prosecute the perpetrators. This, again, points to the “open secret” of lynching in America—though we denied it on the world stage, it was universally understood within the nation that government-sanctioned murder was taking place, and that moreover many elements of the justice system, if it can be called that, were designed to faciliate it. This really drove home the point for me that we’ve discussed throughout the semester, that the disenfranchisement and murder of African Americans represents not a failure of the justice system, but a success of the American injustice system explicitly designed to subjugate black bodies “today, tomorrow, and forever.”