Lynching.

Nothing illustrates the failure of American justice better than the persistence of lynching and of race riots in the first decade of the twentieth century. More than twenty-five hundred people, most of them black men, had been lynched between 1886 and 1889; there were more than one hundred lynchings in 1900 and again in 1901. Between 1885 and 1905 there were more lynchings in the United States than there were legal executions. One proposed solution to this crisis was to make lynching a federal crime: at that time it was punishable only in state courts, where blacks were often excluded from juries and where few witnesses were willing to testify against leaders of mobs. Another solution, presented by defenders of "Southern justice," was to repeal the Constitution's Fifteenth Amendment. Some whites charged that the problem stemmed from blacks having the right to vote. Remove political equality, and whites would no longer...