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CHAPTER TEN WAGNER COSTNER ACT OF 1937 – Ed Sebesta 10/10/2020 What might have worked in 1922 in opposition to anti-lynching legislation would not likely work 15 years later in 1937. He is blocking the anti-lynching bill in the House Judiciary Committee. Sumners’ new strategy is unveiled in his press release distributed by United Press. Feb. 21, 1937, published in the DMN on Feb. 22, 1937. The headline is, “Sumners Fights Antilynch Bill as a Foe of Lynching: Tells Why His Committee is Blocking Legislation for Federal Control.” It is as follows: I am not opposed to antilynching bills, not because I favor lynching, but because I am opposed to lynching. The progress being made under State and local community responsibility now in the development of public opinion and public purpose, and in actual results, is the most favorable indication with regard to crime suppression to be found anywhere among our crime problems. This is the proof of that statement supplemented by what everyone knows about other crimes. In 1892 there were 226 lynchings in the United States, one for every 290,000 population. Forty years later, 1932, there were eight lynchings, or one for each 15,608,000, a decrease of 5,380 per cent. Last year, 1936, there were nine lynchings, according to the Tuskegee Institute. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching questions one of these cases. These figures show this crime has almost been wiped out. These figures have been made possible by the rapid development among the people of the communities of the determination to suppress lynchings. Everybody with any intelligence knows there can be but one protection for the individual threatened by mob violence, and that is the people of the community where the danger develops. It is also true, as all persons agree, that there is nothing so calculated to develop the necessary feeling of local responsibility and of duty as the fact of exclusive responsibility, and nothing is so calculated to relieve that growth and continue the peril of persons in danger of mob violence as Federal intrusion into a governmental problem of the States and their communities which is being solved by them with a rapidity greater than can be shown with regard to any other major crime. In the first place, we know that whenever the Federal Government enters any field of governmental responsibility the tendency is for the smaller units of Government to step out. But the thing proposed is not the usual Federal cooperation with the States, but it is the establishment of a Federal overlordship. It is a proposition to prosecute the States and their officers in a Federal Court.