It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all eager, some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor afraid. Northern Negroes go down to investigate lynchings, buy these photographs, bring them back to safe New York, and then print them off in circulars with details of the whole affair. Southern newspapers, though reticent, cannot forego giving descriptions of lynchings, everyone is so much interested in them. Newspaper reports are also reprinted. There is no need to resort to hearsay in telling of the mob murders of the South. They are heavily documented and absolutely authenticated. The United States Government cannot, for instance, prosecute such a Negro association as the N. A. A. C. P. for the pamphlets it issues on lynchings, because it does no more than publish facts which have been publicly authenticated. If prosecuted, worse details would see light. Therefore, these pamphlets go forth. The first thing they do is tell the colored people as a whole what has been happening. The Negroes of Alabama and Tennessee hear what has been happening in Georgia; the Negroes of Florida and Louisiana hear what has taken place in Arkansas and Texas. Above all, the educated Northern Negroes know of it. Advanced papers such as the _Crisis_, the Chicago _Defender_, and the _Negro Messenger_ are giving the Negro people as a whole a new consciousness. First of all in Christianity in the days of slavery and in their melancholy plantation music they obtained a collective race consciousness. And now, through persecution on the one hand and newspapers on the other they are strengthening and fulfilling that consciousness. Destiny is being shaped in this race, and white men are the instruments who are shaping it. May it not emerge eventually as a sword, the sword of the wrath of the Lord. I met many Whites who boasted of having taken part in a lynching, and I have met those who possessed gruesome mementoes in the shape of charred bones and gray, dry, Negro skin. I said they were fools. Actually to have the signs upon them! Truly they were in the state of mind in which most men seem to be when fate is going to overtake them. They were proud of their “quick way with niggers,” they justified it, they felt the wisdom of lynching could never be disproved. The matter to them was not worth arguing. They assumed that anyone who wished to argue the point must have sympathy with the “niggers,” and that was enough for them. It never occurred to them that one who doubted the wisdom of lynching might be actuated by sympathy or at least apprehensive for them.