‘Lynch Law and Mobbing of Union Organizers’ by Sol Harper from the Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 350. April 21, 1930.

DURING THE past 65 years the history of the working class has no better example of capitalist justice than the brutal shooting of thousands of Negro and white workers by the capitalist class, in America, and the lynching of more than 4,000 Negroes and many white workers has been the most brutal form of terrorism to keep the Negro workers cowed and afraid to organize to demand full social, economic and political equality.

In 1867, following the Civil War, the Southern ruling class gasped for some means by which the rising militant Negro workers could be crushed and proceeded to organize what is known as the original Ku “Kluck” Klan, under the leadership of an ex-confederate general, then a prominent democrat and one of the leaders in the first re-assembled democratic party, which held its first meeting after the Civil War in Tammany Hall, New York, with the aid of Augustus Belmont of traction interests.

The Klan and many others known as night riders galloped about the South, terrorizing Negro and poor white workers and a few carpet-baggers. It was the members of the Klan who originated the system of direct murdering of Negro workers without even a gesture of a trial. The origin of the word lynch started in the South by the activities of a man named Lynch and has been used ever since when workers are hanged, killed and burned, shot and hidden by a group of bosses and their agents.

Labor Organizations and Boss Mobs

While Negro workers were being lynched in the South, the bosses in the North, for instance in Colorado, Illinois, Montana, Washington, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New England and other parts, were murdering thousands of workers, by the use of armed military forces called out to break strikes, by police, private company guards and hired detective agencies.

Then, after a number of years, lynching began to become more and more a weapon of the boss class against white workers. White workers were lynched in the South and Negro workers in the North.

After thousands of Negroes had been lynched a number of fake anti-lynch bills were passed. Some Southern states like North Carolina passed what they termed an “anti-lynch bill,” Ohio passed one of these bills calling upon the county where a worker was lynched to pay a fine, and then the boss class began to find ways to hide open lynchings in many states. The unrecorded lynchings are numerous.

Anti-Lynch Bills During Past Fifteen Years

During the World War many reformist organizations agitated for the passage of worthless anti-lynch bills and fooled millions of Negro workers into thinking that lynching will be stopped by capitalists’ amendments to the constitution of the United States. At the same time the Negro women have been lynched while carrying children who were to become, slaves to the boss class. (The usual pretext used by the southern bosses, “rape,” could not be charged to these women.) Only in the bloody record of the Belgian Congo in Africa has the capitalist class exceeded the American lynching bees, brutality and oppression.

Lynch Negroes With Uniforms On

During the capitalist war, Negro soldiers, workers were lynched with the uniform of the United States on. They were jim-crowed and mobbed in training camps.

Throughout the United States the Negro workers have been terrorized by bosses’ mobs, and the returned veterans militantly began to fight back. The unemployed white and Negro workers began to organize militant movements at the same time the boss clan through a reborn Ku “Kluck” Klan in Atlanta, Georgia, circulated race hatred throughout America against immigrants, stirred up religious hate by protestants against Catholics and Jews and race hate against Negroes.

Then the Palmer Raids were started, aided by the American Legion bureaucrats, the National Defense Society, and other such bodies. White and Negro workers were taken out and tarred and feathered. Negro workers were branded and castrated in the South, and the reformist petty-bourgeois “protested constitutionally.”

Among them were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Socialist Party.

When the National Textile Workers’ Union, the Trade Union Unity League and the Communist Party began an active campaign to organize the slave-driven Textile Workers in North Carolina and other parts of the South, the mob terrorism used so largely against Negro workers in the past was at once turned on white workers and union organizers, resulting in the murder of Ella May, the threats to lynch Beal, Wells, Saylors, and the Negro workers Lewis and Welch, and others.

The New 100 Per Centers carried on raids upon the workers in the South. The latest activities of the lynch gangs has been the lynching of Jimmy Levine, Negro worker, at Occila, Georgia, on February 1st; Laura Wood, 60-year-old Negro woman, at Barbers Junction on February 11, and on the 5th of April John H. Wilkins was lynched in Georgia by the bosses’ agents.

In Atlanta, the present headquarters of the Klan and center of lynch terrorism in the South, H.M. Powers, Organizer of the Communist Party, and Joe Carr, Organizer of the Young Communist League, are being tried on “death penalty charges of organizing Negro and white workers into the same union.”

Lynching will last as long as capitalism, but we can effectively fight it by organization of workers’ defense corps. Organize to defeat lynching and the capitalist system which breeds it!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n350-NY-apr-21-1930-DW-LOC.pdf