The International Labor Defense would see all victims of lynchings as victims of ruling class ‘justice’, and deserving of the same attention as class war prisoners and their families.

‘13 Lynched in Past Six Months, I.L.D. Reports’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 10 No. 162. July 7, 1933.

Survey Does Not Include Police Killings; “Death to Lynchers!’’ Demands I.L.D.

NEW YORK. Thirteen lynchings recorded in the first six months of 1933 are reported in a survey made public by the International Labor Defense today. Eleven of the victims were Negroes, and two white.

The list drawn up by the I.L.D. lays no claim to being complete, it was pointed out, but contains only those lynchings which have been publicly reported. It does not take into account the increasing number of police killings or Negroes which are becoming more popular as substitutes for the old-fashioned lynchings for which mobs of hundreds were often organized; nor does it count legal lynchings, which have also become more popular with the white ruling class as it becomes more difficult even in the South to draw white workers into lynch-gangs, or to stem the tide of protest from Negro and white workers following such mob lynchings.

Lynchings Not Reported

Many lynchings, it was also pointed out, are never reported anywhere, and others are recorded only in single paragraphs in perhaps one small-town weekly published in the region in which it occurred. News agencies are showing a constantly growing reluctance to carry news of lynchings over the wires, with the result that the appearance is created that lynchings are on the decrease. The same applies to police lynchings, legal lynchings, and lynch-murders by less than three persons.

In its campaign against lynching, peonage, Jim Crow, and all forms of national oppression against the Negro people, the International Labor Defense is pushing its campaign for passage of the “Bill of Civil Rights for the Negro People,” proposed by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, endorsed by the National Scottsboro Action Committee, and presented to the President and Congress by the Free the Scottsboro Boys marchers. Section 19 of this Bill provides that;

“Any person who aids or participates in a lynching or other act of violence directed against a person wholly or partly because of supposed ‘inferiority’ of race, color or nationality, or directed against a person because of alleged or suspected crimes associated in public tradition with supposed ‘inferiority’ of race, nationality or color, shall be considered and adjudged guilty of a crime punishable by death.”

The I.L.D. raises the slogan of “Death to Lynchers,” and demands the application of the death penalty in these cases and in the increasing number of cases of wanton murder of Negroes by police or individuals,which now go completely unpunished.

A survey of police lynchings, and lynch-murders during the first six months of 1933, as reported in the press and estimated to cover less than one per cent of the total of such murders, but a typical cross-section of them, will be released shortly by the International Labor Defense, it was announced.

Recorded Lynchings

Following is the list of recorded lynchings for the first six months of 1933:

1. Harry Ross, shot and killed Jan. 3 by three white men, outside of Memphis, Tenn. They reported they were taking him into the city to lay charges of “having made improper proposals to a white woman,” against him, when he “tried to escape” from their moving car.

2. Fell Jenkins, 20, was beaten to death by three white farmers at Aycock, La., January 11. They said he had been trespassing on the property of one of them.

3. 4, and 5. Three members of a Negro family of fishermen were hacked to death on Tavernier Island, one of the Florida keys, Jan. 19, by an invading gang of white men. All further information, including the names of the victims, suppressed by the authorities.

6. Robert Richardson was shot to death in Baton Rouge, La., Feb. 2, while “attempting to escape” from a gang of 25, headed by a deputy sheriff which invaded his house on a report, given out later, that he had “annoyed a white woman.”

7. Nelson Nash, 24, was hanged from a tree by a gang of men at Ringgold, La., February 19.

8. George Jeter, died February 19 at Aiken, S.C., from a beating administered by three white men who later said he had “stolen their whiskey.”

9. Levon Carlock, 19, beaten, tortured, and shot to death by six policemen “out on a lark” In Memphis, February 25, 1933. Police called on a white prostitute to say Carlock had “raped” her, at a time when he was sitting by his wife’s sick-bed.

10. John Williams, lynched during first week of May, 1933, by a mob of seventy-five led by a sheriff. It was charged he had stolen a hog.

11. Will Kinsey, 25, lynched May 12 by mob of forty, following a dispute with his landlord in which his brother and the landlord were both killed. Kinsey, wounded by the landlord, was taken by a mob from a physician’s office.

12 and 13. Jerome Boyett and Harvey Winchester, both white, held on murder charges, were taken out of Huntsville, Tenn. jail and lynched by a mob of armed men.

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. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist

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