999

THE WHITE HOUSE
MAR 17 1918
RECEIVED

Atlanta, Georgia,
March 5, 1918.

Hon. Woodrow Wilson,
President of the United States,
The White House,
Washington, D. C.

Mr. President:
During the past three decades nearly three thousand Ameri-
can colored men, women and children have suffered butchery and death
in almost every conceivable form at the hands of the lynchers of
America. Last year alone the number thus murdered was two hundred
twenty-two. The reported causes for such appalling brutality run the
gamut from alleged violation of the honor of white women to disputing
the word of white men. The fact however that only about five per
cent of these murders are reputed to have been inflicted upon accused
violators of womanhood argues almost conclusively that the desire
to protect womanhood is almost negligible among the so-called causes
of lynchings.

We accordingly regard lynching as worse than Prussianism,
which we are at war to destroy. Lynching is not a cure for crime,
either imaginary or real. It decreases faith in the boasted justice
of our so-called democratic institutions. It widens the frightful
chasm of unfriendly and suspicious feeling between the races and posi-
tively foments the spirit of antipathy and resentment. We are ac-
cused of concealing criminals. Who has concealed the many criminals
that have mercilessly murdered these three thousand defenseless men,
women and children of our race? That these murderers frequently ply
their trade in broad daylight and in plain view of the entire citizenry
even does not facilitate their punishment or detection. Within
less than one year one state alone has tortured and burned at the
stake three colored men without even the semblance of a trial or an
effort to apprehend and punish the murderers. In the last instance
an entire helpless colored population was marched around the fire
amid fumes of a burning human being and put on notice that as that
black man was suffering they too should fear to suffer. Thus the
defiant lynching giant strides on apace. While we are sacrificing
the best blood of our sons upon our nation's altar to help destroy
Prussianism beyond the seas, we call upon you to use your high offices
to destroy the lynching institution at our doors.

We are the one group of American people, than whom there
is none more loyal, which is marked out for discrimination, humilia-
tion and abuse. In great patriotic and humanitarian movements, in
public carriers, in federal service, the treatment accorded us is
humiliating, dehumanizing and reprehensible in the extreme. This
persistent and unreasonable practice is but a thrust at the colored
man's self-respect-— the object being not merely to separate the
races but to impress us with the idea of supposed natural inferiority.
Such demoralizing discrimination is not only a violation of the
fundamental rights of citizens of the United States, but the per-
sistent segregation of any element of our country's population into
a separate and distinct group on the sole basis of color is creating
a condition under which this nation cannot long endure.

When we refiect upon these brutalities and indignities
we remember they are due to the fact that in almost every southern
state we have systematically, by law or chicanery, been deprived
of the right of that very manhood suffrage which genuine democracy
would quarantee to every citizen in the republic. This propaganda
of filching from colored Americans the ballot is but a supreme

152221