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Two: One-drop Men in the Shadow of the Beast: Walter White and James Weldon Johnson
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51 t w o One-Drop Men in the Shadow of the Beast Walter White and James Weldon Johnson One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions. The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life. There is enough Negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic. —Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard’s Spots Reflecting on the years following World War One, James Weldon Johnson noted in his autobiography that “the number of lynchings was not so high as it had been in former years, but the barbarous manner in which victims were being put to death could not have been surpassed by the fiends in hell.”1 Johnson, who investigated various occurrences of mob violence and reported on many more in his work with the NAACP, offered the 1921 murder of Henry Lowery in Nodena, Arkansas, as evidence that the sadistic inclinations of white mobs were growing: some five hundred men and women had gathered to observe, encourage, or participate as Lowery was slowly burnt to death over a small leaf fire. Other social activists and cultural critics in the first half of the twentieth century, including Walter White, W. J. Cash, and Lillian Smith, concurred with Johnson’s assessment that lynchings had decreased in number but increased in brutality.2 While these critics may have underestimated the savagery of earlier mob violence in their effort to stimulate outrage at contemporary lynchings despite the decrease in numbers , the horrific nature of the violence in the teens, twenties, and thirties offered evidence to support such claims. In addition to the Lowery murder that Johnson discusses, they likely had in mind such high-profile atrocities as the lynchings of Mary Turner and Claude Neal. After burning Mary Turner in Brooks County, Georgia, the lynchers cut her unborn child from her womb and stomped it to death, while the murderers of Claude Neal in Jackson County, Florida, reportedly force-fed him his penis and testicles before burning him to death.3 In the Shadow of the Black Beast 52 If the decrease in the number of lynchings was offset by the increase in sadism , positive signs existed in the expanding national protest against lynching and its urban counterpart, the race riot. Organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women, The Negro Fellowship League, and the National Equal Rights League sought to shape the public and political perception of mob violence in favor of the victims and the legal system. Increasingly, the fledgling NAACP led the protest in the late teens and twenties by investigating mob violence throughout the South (as well as the urban North) and then reporting on the atrocities to the national media and legal authorities. The organization, under the leadership of Johnson, lobbied successfully to force the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill through the House of Representatives in 1922, and although the bill eventually died at the hands of southern senators and their filibuster, the effort brought the atrocities of mob violence into the national spotlight.4 These efforts would be complemented by the founding of antilynching organizations such as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in 1930 and the Writers’ League Against Lynching in 1934. The Writers’ League was a welcome if somewhat belated addition to the antilynching ranks, for the literary protest against lynching was already common terrain before the Writers’ League sought to organize artistic outrage under one literary umbrella. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, authors produced dozens of works that were devoted, either wholly or in part, to the condemnation of America’s most brutal pastime. In addition to the works of James Weldon Johnson and Walter White that I discuss in this chapter, a sampling of antilynching works from the period includes novels such as Ellen Glasgow’s The Voice of the People (1900), Sutton Griggs’s The Hindered Hand (1905), and Waldo Frank’s Holiday (1923); short stories such as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Lynching of Jube Benson” (1904), Theodore Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff” (1918), and Jean Toomer’s “Blood-Burning Moon” (1923); dramas such as Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916), Mary Powell Burrill’s Aftermath (1919), Georgia Douglas Johnson’s ASundayMorningintheSouth(1925),andPaulGreen’s InAbraham’sBosom(1926); and poems such as Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak” (1903...