Editorial Treatment of Lynchings

Abstract

Environment rather than personal inclination of editors determines the editorial treatment of lynchings, according to the results of a survey, begun in I 930, of editorials on lynchings in every one of thirteen Southern states. Mrs. Ames, who organized the Texas League of Women Voters, serving as its President for four years, has been Vice-Chairman of the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation and General Field Secretary of the Southern Commission on Interracial Cooperation. She is also Executive Director of the Central Council of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, with offices at Atlanta. The efforts of the Council are directed toward the development and promotion of educational programs against lynching and toward the repudiation of the claim that lynching is necessary to the protection of white women. During the last five years Mrs. Ames has personally visited the scenes of more than twenty lynchings, interviewing the people, including newspaper editors, and collecting editorials from local papers and from the dailies in the states in which the lynchings took place. Mrs. Ames has also found that in states where a relatively few large dailies have under no condition offered comfort to lynchers, the number of lynchings is steadily decreasing.