Mr. CASE. That it has not been guilty of negligence in offering him proper police protection.

Mr. RANKIN. You are hewing it down to exactly what I have said from the beginning, and I go back to Phineas Garrett's original statement that it ought to be called a bill to encourage rape; that will be the result of it. It will not alleviate race trouble, but will intensify it. And don't you forget that your time is coming, because whenever you stir this trouble in the Southern States, you know what it means. I do not care what anybody else tells you, the Negro is a tenant at sufference wherever he comes in contact with the white man. When you disturb that condition, one of them is going to move, and you know which one it is going to be.

Detroit, Mich. now has over 200,000 more Negroes than it had just 3 or 4 years ago, or at the outbreak of the war. You have the Japanese situation in California.

Nobody under the shining sun has worked harder, or sacrificed more, to protect these people from mob violence than have the officials of the southern States. Yet, every once in a while, we run into this nagging legislation that on its very own face does not propose to protect the innocent man who is killed by mob violence. If it did. you could not any more pass it, it would not stand any more chance of passing both Houses of Congress, even with the Republican Congress in full command than Bob Taylor's gutta percha dog had of catching the asbestos cat in Hades, and everyone of you know it.

Mr. CASE. Mr. Rankin, I am sorry, but I still do not understand what your point is.

Mr. RANKIN. I understand yours. You are yielding to a bunch of trouble makers who come here and try to ram through the Congress a law to meddle with the State governments that are doing the best job that could be done under the circumstances. The object of it is to nag the white people of the Southern States and to harass the people of the District of Columbia. That will be the result, if it ever becomes a law.

You know what you are going to have here; just keep this up, and you will have race riots in Washington. The people of this District. are alarmed now and they have a right to be alarmed. Just keep this stuff up now until you see it right in the District of Columbia and you will realize what this kind of a thing leads to.

Mr. CRAVENS. We have been talking about money quite a bit this week. Now this provision of the bill to subject county or city or political subdivision to $10,000 liability, that of course will come from the taxpayers of that county or that district or that area? Mr. RANKIN. Yes.

Mr. CRAVENS. And you are going to penalize 9944/100 of the lawabiding citizens for the action of the small percentage that goes out and causes this trouble.

But you are going to penalize everybody in every State that is against lynching, do everything they can to prevent it, but you are going to make them pay the bill for the conduct of a very small percentage.

Mr. RANKIN. In other words, they are going to penalize people who pay the taxes of the counties whether they had anything to do with

the offense or not.

Mr. CRAVENS. Including the Negroes that live in that county. Mr. RANKIN. Oh, yes; and intensify the race trouble that these Reds have already stirred up.

If you do not do it under this Celler bill-I told Mr. Celler on the floor of the House, under that bill they could hang every Jew in New York if they were not charged with a crime, and the law would not protect them; and I still say it. I think you can mob every Negro in New Jersey under either one of these bills; unless you can hang this on that technicality to try to make it look like a lynching. They are not protected.

I know he was asked to introduce the bill; I am not accusing the gentleman from New Jersey. Behind it is an attempt to nag the white people of the Southern States, the people who have done more for the Negro than anybody else since the beginning of time.

It is true, we had slavery for 100 years or more. My people were among the slaveholders. Where did we get those Negroes? We bought them from your people. But did you know that slavery was the worst curse the South ever knew, the greatest blessing the Negro, up to that time, ever knew? We not only showed them the light of civilization, but we taught them Christianity the very thing the Communists are now trying to destroy.

Today, in the South, and I will say this for my own State, the Negroes enjoy more prosperity, more happiness, more peace, more protection, and more security than they have ever enjoyed anywhere else under the shining sun, and this legislation is simply to nag the white people of the Southern States and to stir friction for which both races will suffer.

I certainly hope that the committee will turn it down, and I believe if the American people understood it, there would be such a wave of protest that it would never see the light of day.

Mr. CASE. Thank you, Mr. Rankin.

STATEMENT OF HON. W. J. BRYAN DORN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Mr. DORN. Mr. Chairman, gentlemen of the committee, I am sorry to come here after hours. I know you gentlemen have labored all day on this bill and I know how you hate to remain after 5.

Mr. Chairman, gentlemen of the committee, I would like to say that I am very much interested in this problem. I feel like today more than ever before that the world is one community and that problems of, say, even Mongolia and all over the world, affect us right here in the United States, affect each one of us individually, and I feel like, as the world progresses and becomes more enlightened, that processes of law and things like that should be followed.

I am very much opposed to mob violence and lynching. I feel like that is one of the most heinous crimes in the world, but I would like to say for the particular section of the United States in which I reside, I have never seen a lynching, I have never seen mob violence, and Í hope I never will.

Getting to the point of this bill, H. R. 3488, I believe it is more of a moral and educational problem than it is just a problem of passing a law against it.

You remember the Federal Government passed a prohibition law or adopted an amendment to the Constitution of the country against the use of intoxicating beverages. That was a failure. We had Federal law enforcement agents all over the country, but that law was a failure. Great moral reforms and things of that nature will have to come from the minds and hearts of people through education, through spiritual enlightenment and advancement, not through legislation.

I feel like, Mr. Chairman, that today you could pass a law against sin by the Federal Government of the United States; you could pass a law against any number of things and I know we have to have laws naming some specific violation. But as far as this particular problem is concerned, I believe it should be left up to the States of this Union because the gentleman well knows the dangers that are inherent in a strong, centralized government, such as the dictatorships we overthrew in the late war and the one great dictatroship we have difficulty with today. I say that if the people in those communities had the right to control their own law enforcement, their own elections, Mr. Chairman, you would not have a Soviet Government in Moscow today.

I say it is a danger you might well consider in reporting this bill out; and may I add this, and it is a cold fact, in 1946 in Monroe, Ga., four members of the colored race were murdered by a mob. Twentyfive agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were assigned to that case. They have yet, and this is 1948, to find out who those guilty of this crime were. They have not apprehended anyone. There have been no recommendations to the Federal grand jury, and I just leave that with this committee, that even if you do pass a Federal law, and suppose you do, it will still have to go before a jury in this country. We have trial by jury and I still think that it is best to let our States handle this problem.

Consider the case at Greenville in my State. As you all know, they had the murder of a colored boy and the State authorities in 48 hoursyou might argue that they were tipped off by the FBI-but I know as a matter of personal knowledge that the sheriff and the law enforcement agencies of that county and the Governor and the law enforcing agencies of the State were on that case instantly and arrested all the members of that mob within 48 hours.

They were brought to trial, and it is true the jury did not return any conviction in that case, but it was a great forward step. The State prosecuted that case to the fullest extent of the law; whereas, in the Georgia case, the 25 FBI agents have not found anyone connected with the crime even though they spent months and months on that case.

So why argue whether it is best to put the matter in the hands of the Federal Government or not. Better leave it up to the States where law enforcing agencies are familiar with those and the condtions that might cause a crime of this nature.

Let me say again that I think it is one of the most brutal, heinous crimes in the world.

You have problems all over the world, in Near East, India, Arabia, Palestine; and I might add this, that even in the South, with its discrepancies, you probably have a better condition under similar circumstances than any people in all the history of the world.

There are no two races with more different characteristics than that of the colored and the white races. Yet in the South we have main

tained fairly good relationship for two centuries whereas you are having thousands of people killed in India, hundreds killed in Palestine and in a lot of other sections of the world.

I might add this, that we are gradually groping with, and controlling and winning out in this problem in the South. Mob violence is becoming less every year. Education, moral advancement, all of that is taking care of this problem and I maintain that it is more of a moral issue. The fact that it is decreasing every year, is a solution to this problem.

May I say this, Mr. Charman, and I am interested in these minorities, I really am. I want to protect minorities; but did you know that evolutionary processes are better than revolutionary processes? I am sure the chairman does, as well as the gentlemen of the committee, remember the French Revolution. You cannot change the world overnight. Remember reconstruction; they defeated the very purpose which they sought. The object they sought was destroyed.

I am sympathetic with a lot of these groups in trying to alleviate this situation. I think the objective is good but I would like to approach it from another angle. I feel that something accomplished through an evolutionary process, gradual education and development, is better than something attempted overnight.

In other words, Mr. Chairman, you cannot pass a law putting a white collar around every American's neck or passing a law saying he shall have a doctor-of-philosophy degree tomorrow. You can pass a law but you still have the problem and I maintain it is a similar situation here.

This should be gradual, evolutionary development. If it is revolutionary, we might defeat the purpose we want. We want to rectify the problem, but I mean the best way to do it is through State law enforcement agencies.

This is a big country; it is a tremendous country: 48 republics is what it amounts to, 48 commonwealths united together in the one country.

No one law passed here in Washington is apt to suit the best interests of everyone in every section of this country. So I say it is well that we do have 48 commonwealths with a State legislature and State courts and State government.

I hope the members of the committee will carefully consider the legislation before it is reported out.

I am sure you gentlemen are familiar with this problem; you have taken it up and I would just like to add that for 75 years in the South, the colored race has made more progress since slavery than any race of people, including my own, and my hat off to the colored race, in the history of the world in a life period of time.

One hundred and fifty years ago some of them came from Africa and yet this period has produced men like George Washington Carver and the late Booker T. Washington. There is a man in Charlotte, N. C., a colored citizen, the head of a $60,000,000 insurance company. Think of it, gentlemen: that is your evolutionary process. I quote from a man whose name I believe is William Allen White. He said, if you ever educate the people above their ability to absorb and take in, you have made an unhappy people of those people and you are defeating the purposes for which you are seeking.

So, Mr. Chairman, I say again I wish we would leave this up to the States of the Union who are making progress, who are making desperate efforts to control and grasp, and alleviate this very situation you seek to remedy.

Thank you very much.

Mr. CASE. Thank you, Mr. Dorn.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN BELL WILLIAMS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI

Mr. WILLIAMS. Mr. Chairman, I will not take much of your time this afternoon. I am not prepared to give you a statement on the constitutionality of the antilynching bill. I am sure that you have already heard distinguished lawyers lawyers argue that question from

both sides.

Had I known in advance that the committee was to give this bill its hearing today, I would certainly have prepared something along those lines.

I come from a State that is 49 percent Negro and 51 percent white. Several counties in my district run two-thirds Negro. Ever since reconstruction days we of the South, and particularly we of the State of Mississippi, despite what you might hear to the contrary, have been doing the very best that we know how in order to elevate the position of the Negro. And if you listened on the floor this afternoon to Mr. Jamie Whitten of my State who was a former prosecuting attorney, he told you that the Negro got just as good an opportunity and as good a hearing in the courts of the State of Mississippi, if not better, than the white man. Mr. Whitten knew whereof he talked because he prosecuted as district attorney down there in our circuit courts for several years before he came to Washington.

After coming out of the Army, I was elected Hinds County prosecuting attorney myself. Hinds County is the largest county in the State of Mississippi, including the city of Jackson, the largest city. We have two judicial districts in Hinds County which means that I had to perform the duties of two county attorneys, and I will say without reservation that we have never yet had a single Negro to be indicted by the grand jury and come into court for trial but that there were at least one, or more, white men in there to look after his interests.

I have tried cases all the way from misdemeanors to rape cases; we have been successful in the prosecution of several capital cases. While I was county attorney, we convicted two rapists. I assure you that these rapists were given every benefit and protection that would have been given a white man under the law.

Now, we in the South are misunderstood. You hear that said, of course, and you wonder if we are just using that as an excuse. Actually we are misunderstood. The reason we are misunderstood is because we have a problem peculiar to our section of the country. The reason we are not understood is because we know how to get along with the Negro by going our way and letting him go his.

I charge, and I will state positively, that segregation is not discrimination by any means.