to comprehend for some people. In some areas in my district, I suspect they have a majority of colored people, and in those areas, they are usually quite rural and the colored people are not well educated and the white people are disturbed at times when things like that occur. It is quite natural that they would be.

I do not know of any of those white people in the most rural areas, even when they are overpopulated by colored people, that do not want the law of justice and courts to take place. I do not know of anybody that does not feel that way.

Mr. KEATING. There are cases that have been brought to Nation-wide attention where in my judgment, at least, local law enforcement officials have not taken the action which might be properly expected of them. You may disagree with that.

Mr. BENNETT. I certainly do.

Mr. KEATING. But I do believe firmly that there are such cases. Mr. BENNETT. There may be such cases, but every one I have had a chance to look into was written with red ink, written by people who wanted to destroy the South and wanted to create fomentation between the North and the South in this country and wanted to serve the communistic cause. When you get to look at the facts, you find different situations.

Mr. KEATING. I do not believe all the reporters in the South are Communists.

Mr. BENNETT. The reporters

Mr. KEATING. That does not get very far with me as an argument. Have you introduced, or has anyone else introduced a bill permitting the FBI to be called in on such instances, if you feel that is the proper procedure for us.

Mr. BENNETT. I do not know that it is necessary for anything to be done because I personally think the incidence of this is so slight that it is not required that anything be done.

Mr. KEATING. Do you not know the principal objection to this proposed legislation is that the FBI would be called into these cases? Mr. BENNETT. Who says so?

Mr. KEATING. Do you not know that that would be one of the first arguments presented?

Mr. BENNETT. I do not know that to be the fact. In fact, I think it is a categorical misstatement.

Mr. RANKIN. What about when you kill them in Harlem by the dozen? Do you call the FBI in?

Mr. KEATING. I would not have any objection to the FBI being called in in such cases under any circumstances.

Mr. RANKIN. You seem to be in a terrible fog in your statement about the South. It is ridiculous.

Mr. KEATING. I am not making any statement about the South. Mr. RANKIN. You are talking about the news that comes out of the South. You say it does not any more reflect what happens there— Mr. KEATING. I do not believe the gentleman is accurate, the gentleman now addressing me, when he alleges I said all the reporters in the country that send us messages from the South are Communists. Mr. RANKIN. Nobody made such a charge, but the stuff that you have been reading, the propaganda that you have been reading, has been put out for the purpose of maligning the South.

Mr. BENNETT. I have, I assume, a privilege since the statement was made a minute ago there by my colleague, a very capable colleague, of trying to correct the record somewhat. If the committee got the impression that I meant to imply that all stories which emanate from, the South and are critical of the handling of lynchings emanate from Communists, I certainly meant to make no such statement; and if I made a statement that all these reports are written by Communists, I hereby retract it-but I don't think I said it. I did say that I felt that this country has been flooded with propaganda with regard to the South that is so remote from the facts that it is hard to recognize it when you actually are faced with it. And I do say that I feel that these reporters who are getting that information outand I do not think they are southern reporters because I do not think a southern man would do that even to get the money-I do feel that their activity in painting the South in improper colors is very helpful to the Communist cause. I suspect-I do not have any factual foundation to say that this is true-but I suspect that some of them are actually in the pay of the Russian Government or at least are people who are carried away with their desire to help Russia, like Judith Coplon apparently was, through misguided idealism, if you can call it idealism. They think it is to the best interests of the world, whatever is going to happen hereafter, to destroy America by pitting one side against the other.

When you look at the cool facts of how many lynchings there are,. you find that there are practically none. When you look into the circumstances that I happen to know about these race difficulties, I find out you cannot even recognize the story. In other words, I know what the circumstances are. I know the people involved in them... I know what the circumstances are and yet when I read about it in the New York paper or somewhere up here, it is entirely distorted.

Incidentally, since I have been here in Congress, I found the same thing is true about many other things. I found out there is a good deal of distortion about a lot of things in the public press about some labor matters, about some matters dealing with veterans.

Mr. KEATING. I cannot quarrel with that; I cannot quarrel with the gentleman that there is a lot of distortion.

Mr. BENNETT. I thought it was just about the South when I came up here, but I see now that it is on a lot of other things: On veterans,. on labor, and a number of other things. There are many things that get into the press or over the radio because of the fact that it is their business generally to paint an interesting story. In other words, it is to their advantage to build up a peak in hysteria, you might say,. to get people agitated. It is destructive of our best interests to have that happen, from the standpoint of national security.

Mr. DENTON. Let me ask you about one statement. Here is a report that says during the decade from 1938 to 1947, at least 41 persons were lynched. The majority of guilty persons were not even prosecuted. No one received the death penalty. Obviously, it is still possible in certain areas to seize and kill a person in certain areas with certain assurance that they will not be brought to justice.

Mr. BENNETT. That is an average of four a year. When you have 13,000 murders and 12,000 rapes in a year

Mr. DENTON. The difference is that they are prosecuted for murder and they are prosecuted for rape but nobody has ever been prosecuted and convicted for lynching.

Mr. BENNETT. I do not know that the percentage is very much different. A lot of people that commit murder and rape are not tried for murder and rape.

Mr. DENTON. We had one case about which we were advised when the proponents were here. I noticed they all said that if they handled it themselves, they could do, they could take care of the matter. Everybody ever tried, they found not guilty in every case.

Mr. BENNETT. That is another thing because the newspapers paint it as if the man should be guilty. That is what they did last year. They painted it as if the sheriff down there was running around clubbing these people, whereas he did everything that he could do to save the colored people from any trouble at all. He even went to the extent of moving them out in automobiles so if there were race troubles nobody would get hurt. He leaned over backward to be kind.

Mr. DENTON. Out of 14 lynchings, somebody is guilty, if these reports are right. Yet nobody has been convicted.

Mr. BENNETT. Well, I certainly think that people ought to be convicted for committing lynchings and I think if they have not been in the past, they will be in the future.

Mr. DENTON. Is that not the whole difficulty, that they do not convict for lynchings?

Mr. BENNETT. How is this going to do any better? How is the Federal Government coming down there going to do better? Who is going to try these people? Are you going to ship down a bunch of people from Brooklyn to be the jury?

Mr. DENTON. Of course you have a local jury. I am just

Mr. BENNETT. How are you making it any different?

Mr. DENTON. When I was a boy, I had mob violence in my town. It is pretty hard to try those people in that community. The State has a bigger drawing power for juries, bigger district for the government, than that one local county.

Mr. BENNETT. What do you propose to do? I want to ask you concretely. There is nothing in there that would allow you to ship juries down, is there?

Mr. DENTON. You would try them in a district court, United States district court, which covers a much larger territory than one county. Mr. BENNETT. The South is a pretty big area, is it not?

Mr. DENTON. Your Federal judicial district would cover a number of counties.

Mr. KEATING. Mr. Denton's point, as I understand it, is that in a Federal district court, your jury would be drawn from an area beyond the one where the particular act of violence occurred and it might result in a more dispassionate view.

Mr. BENNETT. You can change venue. It is often done in the State court so that you will get a fair trial, particularly in these inflammatory cases. They can do that now. In fact, I suspect that most of them are 'done that way now.

Mr. DENTON. If the defendant can take a chance, can the State take a chance?

Mr. BENNETT. I do not know, but generally they do have another venue. I think that has been the general practice.

Mr. KEATING. In New York State, the State cannot ask for a change of venue.

Mr. BENNETT. What difference does it make if you have another venue?

Mr. DENTON. It makes this difference

Mr. BENNETT. The defendant certainly ought to be the guy that is interested. If he does not think he can get a fair trial in the next county, and he does remove to another county, what could be fairer than that?

Mr. KEATING. Mr. Denton's point, as I understand it, is that it is difficult to convict a person who is obviously guilty because the feeling in that particular community is so strong in favor of the guilty party that he is unable to find a jury which will convict him, whereas if the case were tried in a Federal court with the jury drawn from a wider area, there might be a better opportunity to see that justice was done. Mr. BENNETT. I understand it better now. I am not trying to take up for lynching. I think lynching is a horrible thing but I think the public sentiment in the South is very much against lynching and I am not suggesting that juries in the South, whether they be Federal or whether they be local juries, are going to do injustice and turn people loose. I am not suggesting that at all. I was sort of rebutting that you were going to get some different kind of arrangement. Outside of the fact that you might be able to get a broader base for your jury, I do not see very much difference.

I think the juries in the South are just as honest

Mr. BYRNE. Mr. Bennett, I think we have well discussed that question now. That is, I think we will not discuss that any further for the purposes of time.

Is there anything else now that anyone wants to ask Mr. Bennett? Mr. FRAZIER. Is it not a fact, Mr. Bennett, that in the South there have been a great many cases tried in the Federal courts for violation of civil rights and things of that sort, in which there was no conviction? Mr. BENNETT. I think there have been.

Mr. FRAZIER. My analysis is that if you had an antilynching law on the statute books that gave jurisdiction to the Federal courts, that the results would be somewhat similar to cases that were tried in Georgia and in other places in which defendants were acquitted, although tried by a Federal judge, prosecuted by a district attorney, and were acquitted in the South. Do you think there would be any difference if it was tried in a Federal court under a statute passed by Congress giving that court jurisdiction, other than the jurisdiction they now have?

Mr. BENNETT. I do not think there would be any material difference at all. I do not want to imply, however, that I think the people are erroneously letting them go free when they are charged because, as I say, the thing is so distorted in the press that you never know. If you are trying people by the press, you would be in a horrible situation. I am not condemning the press, but on the question of the South, they want to paint the blackest picture they can paint because that is good news.

Mr. FRAZIER. How many lynchings have occurred in Florida in the last 10 years?

Mr. BENNETT. I do not think anybody has died in Florida as a result of lynching in Florida for a long, long time. I personally have no recollection of anybody being killed. I can recollect as a young boy that there was a white man that murdered his family; that created quite a mob, but I don't think they finally killed him. I think the sheriff was able to spirit him away. The whole city was in a turmoil, a lot of shooting going on; but I think they spirited him away to a place where he could get a trial. If they had not taken him from the jail, he probably would have been killed.

Mr. BYRNE. If there are no further questions, thank you, Mr. Bennett.

We will hear next from Mr. Tackett of Arkansas.

STATEMENT OF HON. BOYD TACKETT, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ARKANSAS

Mr. TACKETT. I wish to appear, Mr. Chairman, in opposition to the antilynching bills. I presume that is the only matter you have under discussion at this time.

I have had considerable experience in the State of Arkansas prosecuting and defending criminal cases, and I can truthfully say and can prove it without any fear of contradiction, that there have been more white people lynched during my life in the State of Arkansas than there have been Negroes. During my life of 38 years, I recall four white people being lynched in my home county and I believe that there has been one Negro lynched in those 38 years in the State of Arkansas.

Mr. FRAZIER. Was that in the entire State?

Mr. TACKETT. That was within the entire State. If I am in error about that, it was something that happened back when I was a child. and do not recall it. But I do recall that four men, four white men, were lynched in my home county because they killed an old peddler. They were burned in jail. Of course, the northern newspapers did not carry that story. I honestly believe that you call homicide in the North murder. And you call homicide in the South lynching. There are more únsolved homicide cases in any eastern or northern city than there is in the whole of the south United States.

There are more unsolved murder cases that would be called lynchings in the South in any city that you can name-Detroit, Chicago, New York, or any of the other large cities in the East and North than the whole of the South. But they are called murders in the North, and unsolved murders; in the South they would have been called lynchings that were unsolved because the officers did not want to solve them.

As prosecuting attorney, there was one rape case in my district wherein a white man had raped a Negro. Had that been a case of a white person raping a white person, it would have been called a lesser crime than rape. It would actually have been called carnal abuse because the Negro girl gave her consent but she was under 16 years of age. Knowing of the ever-anxious critics of North and East, I prosecuted that man for rape, and he got the penalty of life in the State penitentiary and is serving there today. While I was serving as prosecuting attorney, there was one killing wherein a white man killed