a Negro. And I prosecuted him to the very fullest extent of the law. In the South, Negroes get along a lot better in criminal cases in their efforts to defend their just claims than the white people do. I recall a case, and you will find it here in your United States Supreme Court reports right now, where there was a Negro school teacher by the name of Harraway operating one of the largest schools in Howard County, Ark., and was getting Government assistance for hot-lunch programs. He was stealing those commodities and selling them to other school teachers and to the people throughout the country; stealing them from the little boys and girls, the little colored boys and girls there that should have been enjoying that food. When I prosecuted him, this worthy organization, an eastern organization known as the some kind of an organization to take care of the colored people caused that case to be tried two times in the Arkansas Supreme Court and once in the United States Supreme Court, trying to protect that man that was mistreating their own people.

In the South, when any Negro is charged with any kind of a crime, as prosecuting attorney I was always faced with the assistance on behalf of the defendant of every lawyer that the colored organization of the East could hire. They received free defense for their crimes in the South while the white people have to pay for theirs or get an attorney appointed by the court.

Lynching! I can't see where there is any justification for the United States Government to take over the just rights of the respective States. Our forefathers, when preparing the Constitution and deciding whether or not it should be adopted, were afraid of one thing. You will recall that the little State of Rhode Island was the last of the colonies to adopt or ratify the Constitution. They were afraid of just exactly what is happening today. They were afraid the Federal Government would eventually swallow up the rights of States and abolishing State lines.

Now, if the Federal Government is to go into the South-and that is all in the world that this bill is for-and disturb our rights and our duties when we are getting along so well down there, I think that it is wrong, just as wrong as if you were to pass a piece of legislation up here that allowed us southern people to come up here and meddle with your business.

I believe that my record as prosecuting attorney down there in the State of Arkansas should be sufficient to show that I am against discrimination. I do not believe in the white people mistreating the colored people, and it is not going on in my State, and I live just as deep in the South as any person in this Congress. We have made a lot of advancement down there. You will have to remember that the Negroes were slaves approximately 90 years ago. They have come a long way. If the white people will leave them alone, they will do well. If we quit meddling in their affairs and trying to bring dissension between the white people and the colored, they are going to advance in life. But every time this Congress meets up here and uses some of this political demagoguery, to stir up the feeling between the white and the colored people, they are not doing but one thing, and that is holding back the colored people within my section. All in the world that the East and the North has done is given the Negro a chance to ride in a streetcar and make him think that he has gained something:

wonderful. Down in the South, we don't put the Negro in the back seat of the car but feel free to ride with them up and down the streets in the front seat. They are free to come into our homes; have more access to our white homes in the South than they have to white homes in the North.

Just a few days ago I got a letter from a boy, a colored boy, that I had known all my life stating he wanted a lot of information about the possibilities in Congress for the FEPC and the civil rights program. He was disgusted with the whole thing because he lives now in Detroit and he sees that all the things that he has been hearing about were untrue; that they do not give the Negro any more in the North and they do not give them half as much as they do in the South. I venture to tell some of these Congressmen that have been visiting in Europe that if they will go down in the South and visit just a little while, they will be ashamed of the treatment that they have been giving the Negroes in the North and in the East. Negroes down there are the friend of the white people. They have stayed with him even during the Civil War; they will continue to stay with him under any law that you care to pass here. It is not going to help the situation one bit in the world.

You say that you want to turn this thing over to the Federal district court because they can get a wider variety of jury. Well, we have got two district courts in Arkansas. The people throughout my State have just about the same mode of thinking as they do in any one particular section. For you to try a person in the Western District Court of Arkansas, or in the Eastern District Court of Arkansas, or in the county court or the circuit court of any county in that State, would bring about the same results. You have got to first contend that the people in the South are mistreating the Negroes before you can afford to bring about Federal legislation to overthrow everything that has thus far been accomplished in the South.

I am saying to you, and I can prove it, and I wish to again restate it, that there are more unsolved lynchings in the North and the Eastin any one of the cities-than there are throughout the entire South, and while the people may be thinking because they happen to live in the East and in the North that they are being of assistance to the colored people of the South, I just ask you to take a visit down there and talk to the colored people, not the white people, and ask them whether or not they want this tomfoolishness or whether they want to be left alone and given a chance to advance in life without the Federal Government making people do something that they are not going to be happy about.

Mr. BYRNE. Thank you, Mr. Tackett.

Are there any questions that anyone wishes to ask Mr. Tackett? (No response.)

Mr. BYRNE. Thank you, sir.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN E. RANKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI

Mr. RANKIN. Mr. Chairman, I did not know until a few moments ago that this hearing on this so-called antilynching bill was going on. Somebody called my office and asked if I wanted to be heard.

I do not know what the penalties are provided in these measures. You have several bills here. Now, if this is just an attempt to harass the white people of the Southern States, by stirring up race friction, it is absolutely nonsense to proceed further.

One of the bills you had here provided that the county should pay $10,000 or $20,000 damages wherever a person was unlawfully put to death in that county. I do not know whether that provision is in these bills, or not. You know, if that had been the law, one race riot would have cost one county in Illinois in 1920 around $40,000,000. They killed more Negroes in one race riot in Springfield, Ill.-Abraham Lincoln's home town-than have been killed in Mississippi in the last 40 years.

Mr. KEATING. No one from Illinois has appeared in opposition to any of these measures.

Mr. RANKIN. I am not talking about where they are from. I am talking about what happened. I saw in the paper some time ago that 65 percent of the prisoners in the penitentiary in New York were Negroes. Is that true?

Mr. KEATING. I am not an expert in

Mr. RANKIN. That is your State. While you are trying to stir up trouble for the rest of the country, you ought to look into your own affairs.

I want to show you what is going on in the Southern States. The Negroes were taken there by northern slave traders. The South tried to prohibit the slave trade in the Constitutional Convention; but were outvoted. The people from the States that sold us the Negroes have been the most vehement in their denunciation of the South, especially the ones from States that profited by the slave traffic.

The Civil War is over and the Negroes are freed, and we are glad of it. I have no apology for the old slaveholders of the South, one of whom was my great-grandfather. I remember long after his death his old Negroes lived all over my county. I remember many years ago, before I came to Congress, when I was prosecuting attorney, a group of those old Negroes came to see me, and they got telling what great man my grandfather was-great-grandfather. They said, "You know, when we got old in them days, they took care of us. Now we are old and ain't got nothing, and there is nowhere for us to go but to the poorhouse."

Well, after the War Between the States they were turned loose, and we had a carpetbag administration. That was something that practically everybody in every State in the Union has been ashamed of ever since. We survived that ordeal, and the Negroes have lived among us and enjoyed more peace, more happiness, more prosperity, more protection, and more security than they are in the State of New York or ever have or ever will, or anywhere else in the world that the Negro has ever come in contact with the white man. This applies to Indiana and Illinois also.

Mr. KEATING. Probably Massachusetts also.

Mr. RANKIN. You see where the judge in New Jersey threw those Communist lawyers from Washington out because they are being financed by the Communist Party to go up there and stir up trouble where they were trying some Negroes for robbing and killing a man. Now, let us see what this is going to mean. If you are going to apply that kind of a penalty, it is like the gentleman from Florida

said here, you had just as well try a man in Monroe County in the State court as to try him in Monroe County in the Federal court. That is where the Federal court sits.

I do not have the exact condition that these gentlemen have described. My counties have not only splendid roads but 90 percent of the homes in that district are electrified with cheap electricity. If you got your electricity in New York at the same rate that those whites and Negroes down in my district do, you would save $300,000,000 a year that you are paying through the nose to the Power Trust in that State.

When we electrified those communities, we electrified the Negro homes. Some of them own land. Many of them do not. But what are you doing? There is your beginning [indicating]. See that? "The Negroes in Soviet America." That is a Communist booklet. That was distributed all over the country. And that is the gang that has been stirring up, or trying to stir up trouble and misrepresent the white people of the South. This is a map of a Negro Soviet they were going to set up in the Southern States. We got most of that propaganda out of the State of New York, I will say to the distinguished gentleman. Some of it came from closer by.

Mr. KEATING. Some of the propaganda against the Power Trust has also come from the Communists.

Mr. RANKIN. Mighty little of it.

Mr. KEATING. They are always attacking the Power Trust.

Mr. RANKIN. I will give you the facts on the Power Trust that you cannot answer here or anywhere else. You refer to me as a conservative in the House.

Mr. KEATING. Don't let the gentleman misunderstand me.

Mr. RANKIN. I have done more to wring the ruthless hand of the Power Trusts from the necks of the unprotected American people than any other man in Congress, and I can say that without even boasting, and I have not changed my position.

But let us get back to this proposition here. What are you trying to do? What do you propose to do? You know that there are more Negroes who go to the penitentiary in New York where they constitute only about one-tenth of your population than they do from any of the Southern States or any three or four Southern States. The Negro has some weaknesses that the white people of the South take into consideration.

Mr. KEATING. You are referring to your district?

Mr. RANKIN. I am referring to the South.

When you stir friction, those Negroes are going to move. Where are they going-Harlem, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Indianapolis? Then what are you going to do with them?

In the rest of the South-and I am speaking particularly of my district where the relationship is the best I have ever known between the whites and the colored people-you talk about lynchings. There has not been a lynching in my county since I was born, and I am as old as the gentleman from New York, nearly.

Mr. KEATING. I hope you are referring to the chairman.

Mr. RANKIN. I am referring to the vocative gentleman from New York, Mr. Keating.

So, the relationship is the best I have ever known. You are talking about schools, education. At home, schooling is compulsory. The Negroes have their own schools, and they want their own schools. They get along. Negroes in my town now have a better schoolhouse than the one I went to school in when I was a boy. We have no friction with them. They behave themselves better evidently than they do in New York, because we do not send half as many to the penitentiary. They are enjoying a protection that they do not get anywhere else except in the Southern States. If you do not believe it, you just take the records of any other State in this Union now and check and see how many they have living in those States and how many they have in the penitentiary. You will find that those States that are raising the most howl about the conditions in the South have the largest percentage of their Negroes in the penitentiary.

When you disturb the peaceful relations now existing between white man and Negro, one of them is going to move. Which one is it? You know who it is going to be. You have done more harm, just such agitation as this has done the Negroes of the South more harm, deprived more of them of homes, than anything else that has occurred since I have been a Member of Congress. And today, as I said, the time has come when they are not needed as servants. We have three servants to take their place: oil, gasoline, and electricity. You are not doing them any good. And you do not care a tinker's damn about them. That is the tragedy of it. You don't give a tinker's damn, if you will excuse the expression, about the Negroes in the South. This is done to try to create a political furor for political purposes in the North.

I was here when this crazy measure was up during the Harding administration. There is a speech I made on it at that time in which I exposed the ridiculousness of a bill of this kind, the antilynching bill.

Of course, the Senate talked it to death; and you know good and well this bill never will become a law. I came to Congress that year, and the Republicans had a 169 majority in the House. They took this thing up, and we filibustered it and turned the spotlight onto it in the House. The Senate did the same thing. The election came off that year, and it took about 2 weeks to organize the House, they came so near losing the House; and Mr. Cooper, from Wisconsin, ran on an independent ticket and tied the House up for 2 or 3 weeks, if I remember correctly.

That is what you are doing now. You are not doing yourselves any good. If you want to know about this, go down there. Do not go down there and tell them what you are coming for. Do not go down there and ask the chief of police or the sheriff. There [indicating] is what they call the Negro section. Go over there. Go and see how they live and ask them and see how ridiculous they will make you feel before you get away from there. This thing is not for a thing in the world but just to create disturbance in the southern States, where we have done the very best we could. Nowhere else under the shining sun-nowhere-has the Negro ever received the treatment at the hands of the white people where he lived in large numbers as he does now among the white people of the South. But you are injuring the cause of the poor Negro.

This gang that is pushing this measure is fighting this Negro veterans' hospital down in Virginia.