The Daily Worker

LYNCHINGS IN TEXAS GO UNPUNISHED THROUGHOUT OHIO
100 MINERS MAKE DEMOCRAT BIG RELIEF FOR TRIP
By WILLIAM PICKENS

Houston stages a lynching as a sort of 'semi-final' to the democratic national convention. This is certainly bad advertising for Texas, the South and the whole democratic party. The officials of Texas seem sensitive because of that bad advertising; in other words, it is not so much the lynching as its inopportune-ness that angers the officials. They would like to punish this particular set of lynchers for showing better taste.

The feeling is somewhat like this. "If these fellows just had to lynch a Negro, why in this city couldn't they wait until after the convention was over, and maybe until after the election in November? Or why couldn't the lynching have taken place somewhere else, not in the very city where the convention crowds are even now assembling?"

Any lynchers so bone-headed as that ought to be punished.

Earlier Lynching Unpunished
That is just where the leadership of the South fails: it cannot see that the only way to insure against an inopportune lynching, is to prevent all lynchings at all times and in all places. For example, just one month before this Houston lynching, a Negro was lynched in a little town known as Center, Texas.

If some of those who had lynched "Buddy" Evins on May 21 in Center were now serving in the Texas penitentiary, then these eight men in Houston would never have dared to commit another such crime.

If the law had been enforced and the criminals punished in the former affair, those tempted to commit this crime would have hesitated. No criminal would expect to "get away" with anything in Houston that he could not even get away with in Center.

Usually Self-Defense
Note that: Both in Center and in Houston the Negroes were charged with killing some white man, and that nobody has yet proved that the Negro did not kill merely in self-defense in both instances.

Everybody who knows anything about race relations, knows that when a man of the helpless and hopeless minority people kills a man of the dominant people, nine cases out of ten it is a pure animal act of self-defense on the part of the man of the weaker race.

But whatever the crime, the only way to avoid the embarrassment of inconvenient lynchings, is to abolish lynching altogether and everywhere.

To Punish Lynchers?
We would respectfully insinuate that if the governor of the State of Texas had taken as effective action against the Center lynchers as they threaten to take against the Houston lynchers, there would have been no Houston lynchers.

While glad to publish the views of Mr. Pickens, the editor is of the opinion that the Negro masses cannot depend on suggestions that "the governor and the state of Texas" do something or other. We are of the opinion that the remedy lies in what the Negro masses will do. They can find allies only in the militant section of the Labor movement, which fights for the abolition of race division in the labor movement, and the action of the workers, black and white against the ruling class. Negroes cannot wait for freedom until the slave owners become abolitionists. Editor.