Date
April 13, 2012
Time
10:40am
Location
D'Angelo Center
Jason Morgan
Ward
Mississippi
State University
© New
Amsterdam Star-News, October 17, 1942
On
October 12, 1942, Mississippi vigilantes lynched two
fourteen-year-old boys from a rusty river bridge. Twenty-four years earlier,
the NAACP's Walter White had traveled from Manhattan to Mississippi
in order to investigate a quadruple lynching at the same
bridge. In 1942,
African American journalists branded Mississippi's Hanging Bridge
"a monument to Judge Lynch" and compared southern vigilantes to
Nazis. Noting that
whites lynched the boys while Congress debated a bill to outlaw the
poll tax, Harlem's New Amsterdam Star-News announced that
the most "backward state in the entire union hung up another
victory for Hitler."
The 1942 lynching of Ernest Green and Charlie Lang connected mob
violence in Mississippi to a wartime campaign for civil rights and
a global war against fascism. The tragedy also prompted
northern civil rights activists to question whether rural black
southerners could and would fight back against racial abuse. Meanwhile, whites in
Mississippi blamed civil rights supporters in New York and other
northern cities for provoking racial violence. Even as African Americans
connected their civil rights struggle to the war effort, southern
white supremacists articulated their own definition of "Double
Victory."