In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 dorsey, dyer, and lynching Physically slight and carefully spoken, Jack Woofter was an unlikely adversary , and yet as secretary of the georgia state committee on Race Relations (gscRR) he showed courage and determination. an acquaintance recalled him as “very quiet, rather blond, of medium height. His face was sensitive, the features delicate yet masculine. When the commission had board meetings, at Blue Ridge or elsewhere, he usually sat at the back of the room, slightly slouched down on his spine, with a perfect poker face. He was a southern gentleman who knew his way around in both the rural and urban south.”1 In 1922 and 1923, Woofter’s character was tested in a public disagreement with the national association for the advancement of colored People (naacP) over federal antilynching legislation and in the cIc’s attempts to defend black farmers in georgia by prosecuting members of the ku klux klan for night-riding. In the fall of 1923, Woofter claimed the southern campaign against lynching was “a citizen’s fight” requiring no outside help, since only the states and their white electorates could solve the lynching problem and the disorder that it represented .2 He exchanged correspondence with the naacP about the cIc’s work, but the positions of the two organizations on the prevention of lynching were irreconcilable . naacP assistant secretary Walter White was convinced that the inability of most southern states to suppress mob violence required federal antilynching legislation, for which public opinion in northern and western states had to be mobilized. The cIc’s response was that a federal law would be unenforceable , unconstitutional, and counterproductive. some black americans concluded that this stance demonstrated the ineffectiveness of southern liberalism and that Woofter, personally, was an apologist for glacial change. The two politicians who most clearly represented the respective positions of Woofter and White were Hugh manson dorsey, a progressive democrat who denounced racial violence during his second term as governor of georgia, but opposed federal intervention, and leonidas c. dyer, a Republican congressman from st. louis, missouri, who repeatedly sponsored a federal antilynching bill in the first half of the 1920s. during Woofter’s youth, mobs killed african americans at a rate of about one a month in georgia, including some of the worst atrocities committed anywhere in the south. no lynchings had occurred in clarke county, however, and Woofter regarded the city of athens as “an island of peaceful race relations even though there were rough places nearby.”3 When he entered high school, he began to hear stories about killings in other counties, and he was intrigued by the embarrass113 114 | Race Harmony and Black Progress ment that asking about such events could produce in adult company. shortly after his twelfth birthday, the horror of lynching was vividly impressed upon him when he found himself standing on the spot where a mass killing had just occurred. He was left shaken by his proximity to the incident and the realization that most white georgian men regarded black people with varying degrees of malice, fear, and cruelty—feelings he never shared. In the summer of 1905, he was part of a group of boys from athens traveling by horse and wagon to a ymca summer camp. When they stopped to rest in a small town, a white resident proudly showed them a row of wooden posts: “There boys,” he said, “is where we lynched seven niggers last week. There was one in that there jail accused of rape and when the crowd went in it was dark and they warn’t shore which one he was so they cleaned out the jail and took all seven that was in there and tied each one to a fence post here and shot the whole passel. That’s the way we teach niggers to behave here.” I have a vivid imagination but I did not need half of it with that row of fence posts in front of me—some bullet scarred—to see the mob moving inexorably by lantern light, to hear the frantic protests followed by hopeless cries when the victims began to realize the brutality of their captors, and finally the agonized screams as the burst of gunfire cut them down. only a small boy’s dread of showing weakness enabled me to control a wave of nausea. When he got home, he found the slaughter was common knowledge in athens and generally disapproved of—“but there did not seem to be the slightest...

Share