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DARKEST MISSISSIPPI

AN N. A. A. C. P. INVESTIGATION

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DEAN WILLIAM PICKENS has said that it takes courage for a Negro to live in Mississippi. This is strictly true, especially of the Delta and of those parts of Louisiana and Arkansas adjacent to the Delta. The Northerner's first thought upon entering this  territory for the first time is that he has gone from civilization to a frontier. It is not only because so many citizens carry guns - and use them - or because political thought is fifty years behind the rest of the world, or because archaic ideas of gentility and "manners" take the place of the wide-awake intelligence which one expects of Americans that this part of the South resembles a frontier.

A frontier is a region not yet fully civilized and, therefore, not fully penetrated with the concept that the law is impersonal, a standard to be administered impartially by persons designated for that purpose. A frontier is a place where people take the law into their own hands, where there are feuds, where crimes are avenged by the individual instead of being dealt with by the community, with the community's safety and best interests in mind. This is what is in the Northerner's mind when he declares that the Mississippi Delta, Arkansas and parts of Louisiana constitute a frontier.

For on the merest suspicion of crime, without trial by jury or any other trial, human beings in those states are subject to murder by armed bands of citizens hastily formed into mobs. And the mobs execute their missions with a cold-blooded lust of cruelty, of which Indians in war paint or the lowest type of aboriginal savage might well have been envious. Many cases of mob murder are accompanied by acts of fiendish torture and, what is most strange to the visitor from northern civilization, the southern women, in whose name the barbarities are committed, frequently witness and applaud them. The mob murders, which prevail and are accepted as commonplace throughout the South, especially in the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana and Arkansas, are what most forcibly impress the Northerner that he is in a land not yet completely civilized.

But there are other aspects of that part of the South which fill the visitor with astonishment. Most important of these is the treatment of colored people. They are constantly subject to insult and injury of every sort, without the slightest opportunity for obtaining redress from the courts. Public opinion seems to be indifferent to what happens to "niggers," as they are called, unless the treatment has been so bad that colored people leave the section and a labor shortage is threatened. Colored men, women and children, besides the quotidian humiliation to which they are exposed in "Jim-Crow" cars and waiting-rooms on the railroads, in exclusion from Pullman cars, sleeping accommodations on railroads, hotels, theatres, except in special sections upstairs, have no defense from actual injury. No colored man, unless he be fearless of death, may defend himself from unprovoked attack on the part of any drunken white man who chooses to make it. 

The consequence of the disregard of the common humanity of the Negro and the white man in the Delta and adjacent regions has been an increasing bitterness that may yet eventuate in catastrophe. In a number of Mississippi citied and elsewhere in the South, Negroes are armed for self-defense. On Friday and Saturday, May 23 and 24, a serious race riot was narrowly averted in Memphis, Tenn. As the Memphis, Tenn., [[italic]]Commercial Appeal[[/italic]] put it in an editorial, "There was a powder train all over Memphis Saturday. That there was no explosion was due to sheer luck."

And all this, the casual visitor finds to his intense astonishment, is due to the belief that despite his achievements in the arts, literature and science, in spite of his having evolved America's one contribution to the music of the world - ragtime - in spite of his heroism and efficiency on the battlefields of France, the Negro is considered by Southerners, in virtue of his dark skin, to be something less than human.

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[[caption]]ALMA M. JONES, Hunter

SARAH H. WHITE, Cincinnati

AGNES O. GRIFFIN Hunter

EFFIE WOODS, Hillsdale

LEOLYA NELSON, Syracuse

MARY K. HOLLOWAY, Cincinnati

GEORGE B. HANCOCK, Colgate

FRED M. HAYES, Hillsdale

ARMADA T. WEATHERS, Armour

JOSEPH L. JOHNSON, Pennsylvania State

ADOLPH P. HAMBLIN, Knox

CHARLES W. FLORENCE, Pittsburgh

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