January 1, 1927: Views of Other Editors

Today we a featuring two editorials found in The Pittsburgh Courier (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) dated January 1, 1927:

Views of Other Editors

CHECK LYNCHING

(From The Patriot, Harrisburg, Pa.)

Just how close Pennsylvania was to staging a lynching near Media may never be known. It may have been a nightmare, but the State and county acted with commendable zeal in taking measures to avert such a hideous crime.

Back of all the maudlin agitation was a Negro boy who brutally killed a white girl as she was returning from a shopping trip in Chester a few days before. The lad confessed and expressed a readiness to take his punishment. Apparently this was not enough for the followers of Judge Lynch and excitement resulted.

Such outbursts are unfortunate. They are especially hateful and painful to Negroes everywhere who have no more sympathy for the criminals of their race than the whites have for theirs. Even as remote from the scene of the threatened lynching, as this city, the colored folks of the better thinking class, felt the unpleasant reaction of the Media incident, deploring it as much as the law-abiding white.

One of the worst features of a lynching is that not only does it usurp the courts, but engenders hatred not merely of their victim but of their race. The result is that the innocent, law-abiding colored citizens become as much a target as the guilty and more so than the law-breaking whites.

ANTI-LYNCHING LAW IS GOOD

(From the Phila. Daily News.)

Congress should pass the anti-lynching law pending before it. The lynching of Negroes is a national disgrace. In the South it is engaged in as part of the policy of "keeping the blacks in their place." Negroes in the South are regarded as inferior to whites, no matter how depraved, cruel and useless a white may be. Any white man, they believe, is better than a black or a colored one.

The idea is wickedly and cruelly false. It therefore produces nothing but wickedness and cruelty. And in doing it brings world-wide disgrace upon the United States.

The South will not correct the evil itself. It becomes necessary, therefore, to make the crime of lynching a Federal concern. It becomes the more necessary to do this because there have been incidents of lynching in the North and the steady migration of Negroes from the South appears to be encouraging the evil.

The crime of lynching must be abolished from America. Since the South, the chief offender, will not stop it, the nation through Congress must assume the responsibility.

Thank you for joining me and as always, I hope I leave you with something to ponder.