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of Negroes, white toilers, as at Camp Hill, Reeltown, as in the eviction demonstrations in Chicago, Cleveland, etc. Any such demonstration could be defined as a "mob" acting in concert without authority of the law" for the purpose of doing "physical injury" to the capitalist oppressors. Actual experience bears this out. We need but bring forward the fact that the Virginia Anti-Lynch Law which also includes such a definition was used only once, and that not against lynchers, but for smashing the mass picketing of the textile strikers in Danville, Virginia. It is clear, therefore, that this bill, demagogically supported by the Negro reformists as a solution for lynching, is in actuality a legal weapon of lynch terror! It is an instrument directed to the physical suppression of the Negro masses and the working class.

In addition to its purpose as a weapon of outright physical violence against the masses, it also, like all other reformist measures, is directed toward bolstering up the waning faith of the masses in capitalist institutions--courts, legislative bodies, i.e., in the very instruments of ruling class oppression.

Now that local courts, as a result of Scottsboro, Tuscaloosa, etc., have been exposed before wide masses as instruments of the lynchers, the reformists seek to perpetuate the illusions regarding the impartiality of bourgeois legal machinery by recourse to the Federal courts. They imply that the higher courts are impartial and cannot be influenced by vulgar class or national prejudice. By this maneuver, they seek to conceal the true role of the Washington imperialist government which stands at the head of the whole system of national oppression of the Negro masses, a system of which lynching is an inseparable part. This objective support to the lynchers is further seen in the fact that in this bill lynching is treated, not as a part of the whole system of national and social persecution of the Negro people, but as

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something entirely separate and apart from this system. In this manner, Negro reformist leaders seek to foster the lie that lynching can be successfully fought without, at the same time, attacking the social and economic base from which it arises. It is not accidental, therefore, that this Bill contains no provisions for legal lynchings or frame-ups, because in these courtroom lynchings the courts themselves actually carry out the work of the lynchers.

It is quite clear that the purpose of the Costigan-Wagner Bill is to disarm the masses of Negro and white toilers in the face of the growing fascist lynch terror. Under the guise of a fight against lynching, the N.A.A.C.P. leaders, in effect, give practical support to the lynchers.

It is not accidental that at a time when the movement against lynching is gaining fresh momentum throughout the country, when popular indignation is rising everywhere against these barbarous attacks, at a time when the illusions of the masses in bourgeois democracy are being rapidly shattered, and when in ever greater numbers the masses are taking the path of revolutionary struggle against lynching and oppression, outside of bourgeois courts and legislative bodies, and under the leadership of the C.P. and revolutionary organizations--it is not accidental that the bourgeois reformists and their imperialist masters, pick precisely such a time to come forward with the proposals for a new law, supposedly against lynching, but in reality to stifle the rising movement of the masses, to dissipate its revolutionary energy, to ensnare the masses in the trap of bourgeois legalism.

At the same time, this bill is a cunning maneuver on the part of the imperialists and their N.A.A.C.P. agents to retain the waning prestige of the Negro bourgeois reformist leaders among the masses. This prestige has been sharply undermined as a result of our activities, particularly our mass campaign of action and exposure around the Scottsboro

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