|
OTHER PAPERS SAY
MR. RITCHIE AND THE NEGROES
(Editorial from the Brooklyn, N. Y. Eagle, December 8, 1931.)
Albert C. Ritchie, Governor of Maryland, is a possible Democratic candidate for the Presidential nomination in 1932. It is a political misfortune for him that his flat refusal of protection to a Baltimore Negro lawyer, counsel for a Negro accused of murder in the Eastern Shore area, is followed by a lynching of another accused colored man in the same area, a lynching that in its cold barbarity compels a nation's attention-
In a row over wages, Mack Williams, a Negro, was said to have shot a prominent lumberman dead. What preceded the shooting, what the provocation was, may never be known. The shooter tried to kill himself. He put a bullet through his own chest. Then the lumberman's son fired on him ¦ and the shot made the Negv'o perfectly blind. In this shape he was taken took him o'ut, his head completely to a hospital. A mob of 2,000 j swathed in bandages, his chest wound bleeding, handed him to a lamppoist, and then burned the body. He never saw his murderers.
Natu.ally the Association for the Advancement c'f Colored People sends a telegram to Governor Ritchie denouncing the mob-murder and saying:
"We see a disnatch quoting a speech of yours in which you appeal foT f'-11 faith in American institutions, and in the American ider. of democracy. We appeal to you not onlv as the Governor of Maryland but as a leading exponent of the American system to jractice what you preach."
jwever, nobody has tihe re-motestsexpectatiori of ?.ny action by the Government that will lead to thr. punbihment of he lynchers. The Negroe\canno't help or hinder Governor H|tchie's Presidential nomination, lut, if he were to be nominated, thiy might use their marginal voterto lose him in New York, Illinois,^Indiana and Ohio, even in a Democratic year. In these States the Negro vote is both cast and counted.
|
