A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940

Conclusion

186 Conclusion In January 1938, as the lynching era drew to a close, the U.S. Senate debated a federal antilynching bill that would have given federal courts jurisdiction in lynchings that were committed by three or more people. At the time, the senior senator from Mississippi was Pat Harrison, a former prosecutor from Gulfport who first had been elected to Congress with the support of James Vardaman’s allies. Harrison became an ardent ally of Woodrow Wilson, however, and was considered a moderate during the Roosevelt era. A key supporter of the New Deal, Harrison fell out of favor with President Roosevelt because Harrison wanted to reduce the tax on capital gains to help stimulate the economy.1 Throughout his long congressional career, however, what mattered most to Harrison was the Democratic Party, and Harrison believed that the passage of a federal antilynching bill would be disastrous for the future of the party in the South. Harrison and several other influential senators, including Harrison’s close friend James Byrnes from South Carolina, organized a filibuster against the antilynching bill, which the Senate debated from early January until the last week of February 1938.2 Harrison began his two-hour speech against the bill by claiming that the prospects of a federal antilynching statute put fear “into the hearts of the womanhood of the South.”3 Harrison acknowledged that northern Democrats were feeling pressure from African American voters to support the legislation, but he pleaded with his colleagues not to “ravish” the Constitution and not to “tear down the pillars upon which the white civilization of this country was builded” in order to retain the vote of fickle African Americans. Recent history, Harrison claimed, proved that a federal statute was unnecessary because lynching was on the wane in the South. Lynching Conclusion 187 had only developed in the first place, moreover, because northern “carpetbaggers ” and agitators had put the South through “the fires of hell” during Reconstruction, when white government was dismantled and “every state office was filled by a Negro.” With “no law to protect them,” Harrison declared, whites had been “compelled to take the law in their own hands, not only to inflict punishment upon the guilty but to put fear into the minds of others.” Harrison acknowledged that during Reconstruction lynching had “increased tremendously,” but he offered no apology for the actions of his forbears and admitted that if he had faced the “situation that confronted them, I have no doubt that I would have attendedtheirdailycouncilsandbeenpresentattheirnightlymeetings.” But times had changed, and Harrison claimed that African Americans were not “maltreated, unprotected and discriminated against” in the South. In fact, he and other white southerners were “the best friends thattheNegroeverhad.”Harrisondefiantlydeclaredthatnomemberof the Senate had “a greater interest in the welfare of the American Negro” than he did. The issue raised by the antilynching bill, however, was not the protection and progress of blacks, which Harrison claimed was “a matterofpride”tohim,butratherthepreservationofconstitutionalgovernment and white civilization. If Congress passed an antilynching bill, Harrison warned, the NAACP and other activists would soon want to dismantle Jim Crow laws and public segregation. Next would come the demand to end miscegenation ,andthatwouldbefollowedbyworse:thetriumphofradicals who would “no doubt seek to have the Federal Government, perhaps under the cover of bayonets, compel every State to permit Negroes to vote in white Democratic primaries of the South.” Harrison reminded his Democratic colleagues that the South was now “wildly Democratic” because southern whites believed in local self-government and “that the Democratic Party would stand on guard and seek at all times to protect and preserve the white civilization of the South.” If Democrats continued down the road to “usurp the rights of their States and destroy the fundamental principles of government,” then Harrison saw no future for the Democratic Party in the South. Ten months after Harrison made his impassioned plea on behalf of 188 a deed so accursed white civilization in the South, a mob of whites from Wiggins, Mississippi ,justthirty-fivemilesnorthofHarrison’shomeofGulfport,lynched a courageous young man named Wilder McGowan. Whites accused McGowan of raping and robbing a seventy-four-year-old white woman, but Thurgood Marshall later claimed that McGowan’s innocence was well known throughout Wiggins and that “the alleged crime was merely used as an excuse to lynch McGowan because he . . . ‘did not know his place.’”4 The twenty-four-year-old McGowan owned a prosperous moving and hauling business...