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I shall follow the customary procedure of psychoanalysis, beginning at the surface and then probing deeper and deeper. So, beginning at the surface, we find that lynching is now less widely scattered than in former years. With the extinction of the frontier lynching tended to confine itself mainly to the South where its greatest number of victims are Negroes.1 But, you will ask, why does the South resort to lynching when it has all the facilities for executing the law?
A fairly widespread belief has it thus: The Negro, a particularly lascivious creature, is lynched because “he assaults white women. W. H. Thomas writes: “All who know the negro recognize, however, that the chief and overpowering element in his make-up is an imperious sexual impulse, which, aroused at the slightest incentive, sweeps aside all restraints in the pursuit of physical gratification. We may say now that this element of negro character constitutes the main incitement to the degeneracy of the race, and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting.”2 Negroes, if we believe the same writer, are prone to incestuous relations. “So great is their moral putridity that it is no uncommon thing for stepfathers to have children by their stepdaughters with the consent of the wife and the mother of the girl. Nor do other ties of relationship interpose moral barriers, for fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, oblivious of decent social restrictions, abandon themselves without attempt at self-restraint to sexual gratification whenever desire and opportunity arises.”3 Negroes “have an inordinate craving for carnal knowledge of white women,”4 and criminal assault on women “is the offence