Lynching and the circumstances from which it arose poisoned the South. Generations of white rural women were taught literally never to be alone. Observers blamed the apparent menace of black rapists for a host of social ills, including the despondency of isolated farm women, the movement of white families off the land and the ill-education of white children, whose parents kept them at home rather than expose them to possible risk while traveling to and from school on lonely country byways. Far more terribly, every black man knew that--because of mistaken identity or for the most trivial reason or for no reason at all--at any time he could be killed. As Richard Wright wrote, "the white brutality I had not seen was a far more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."
The Killing Fields
WITHOUT SANCTUARY; Lynching Photography in America By James Allen; Twin Palms Publishers: 212 pp., $60
No one has better understood the anguish at the heart of race relations in the South than Du Bois. With enormous charity he understood that "deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro problems place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the caste-leveling precepts of Christianity or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs and professions." Then, however, Du Bois acknowledged, these whites were confronted with that "criminal class" which "stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded," causing them to redraw the color line firmly. But Du Bois recognized that although this reaction might appear reasonable, it would, in fact, perpetrate a horrific crime by defining black Southerners as criminals "simply because they are Negros." Du Bois' warning remains as resonant today as when he wrote it a century ago: "Draw lines of crime . . . as tightly and uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be proscribed; but a color line not only does not accomplish this purpose, but thwarts it."
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