Topics of the Times.
Type of event: Lynchings
Location: Minnesota; United States
Citation:
New York Times, June 17, 1920, page 10.
“Topics of the Times”
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Topics of the Times.
A Lynching Far to the
North.
Southerners, so often lectured for the frequency with which they lynch
Negroes instead of trusting their own courts to be justly stern in the
punishment of proven crime, will be sure to call the attention of their critics
to what happened in Duluth this week when the indignation of the citizens there
was turned to rage by the commission of the offense that does the same thing in
the South.
In that very Northern city matters took the familiar course, but
there were certain variations which may or may not have been due to the
moderating effects on temper of a high latitude. For one thing the mob, in its
attack on the jail, seemingly was not armed with deadly weapons. At any rate it
did not use any of them but overcame the resistance of the jailers and the
police with sticks and stones and streams of water from a hose. And after the
cells had been broken open and the prisoners seized, there was at least the
semblance of judicial proceedings. It was evidently a brief trial that the six
accused men received, but there must have been the taking of some sort of
evidence, for three of the Negroes were spared and only three taken out into the
street and hanged.
For a mob that showed a surprising regard for the forms
of law, for as an almost invariable rule in lynching accusation is treated as
proof of guilt and for the presentation of a defense no opportunity is
given.
In Duluth, as so often in the South, the resistance to the mob
offered by the local authorities must have been halfhearted, or worse, otherwise
it would not have been so ineffectual, and the storming of the jail would have
been accompanied with fatalities among its assailants.
They Lacked Even a Poor Excuse.
No valid or even colorable claim in behalf of Duluth can be based on the
fact that three of the six Negroes were spared by the executors of “wild
justice.” In that city and State there can be no pretense that the white
population is under any general menace from a black majority. Anything like a
real racial conflict there is unimaginable, and for the infliction of summary
vengeance on Negro criminals there is not the excuse which has something of
plausibility in some parts of the South the excuse that thus only can punishment
have the deferrent effect on which the safety of the whites and their women
depends.
That excuse is a poor one anywhere but in the North it is so poor
that probably nobody would venture to offer it as mitigating the guilt of resort
to lynch law.
Of course the lynching of Negroes in Duluth is far from being
the first that has occurred in the North. Human nature is much the same in both
sections of the country and in both there is appreciation of the fact that mob
violence is never justifiable and is always disgraceful to those who participate
in it and to those who permit it. Probably one difference does exist–a
difference in the likelihood that the lynchers will be punished. Even that is a
dubious likelihood, and certainly nothing like all of the 5,000 inhabitants of
Duluth who took some part in this lynching will pay any penalty for what they
did, though they are all as guilty, morally, as those who pulled the avenging
ropes.