ve the antiblack activities. The real fear, however, seems to have been that whites might discover that blacks were human--an insight that seems to have been hard to accept. Its opposite--that blacks were not particularly human--was easy to accept and enact, as the lynching and burning of the pregnant widow of a lynching victim in Valdosta, Ga.: "Mary Turner had made 'unwise remarks' about the execution of her husband, 'and the people, in their indignant mood, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude'" (Litwack 591). Thinking and talking while black.
Offhand presumptive white authority over black existence was vividly evidenced in the 1930s, especially in the South. In St. Joseph, Mo., in 1933 the headline was this: "Crowd Cheered and Laughed at Negro's Horrible Death." In Greenwood, Fla., in 1934 the headline above the comment that "all white folks are invited to the party" had the flavor of a public announcement of a festival: "Big Preparation Made for Lynching Tonight." The New York World-Telegram of November 29, 1933, details a kidnapping of a Black prisoner from jail by an armed and violent mob. After kidnapping the man, the mob proceeded to drag the helpless victim to the center of the town where they drenched him in gasoline and burned him alive. The Macon Telegraph of October 26, 1934, details another kidnapping of a black man that resulted in his public lynching by a similar unruly mob. The images that these reports convey differ little in kind from similar images that flicker in newsreels of the anti-Jewish projects in Nazi Germany. If what the Nazis are doing to the Jews in those newsreels, what are these other actions, which are occurring not in a police state but on American soil?
News reports of these perfectly successful lynchings supply ample evidence that horrible inhuman abuses were being perpetrated against African Americans in the 1930s and--perhaps more important--that mainstream public opinion ...