taught by tradition, and by practically every force of public opinion with which he comes into contact, to believe inferior making progress greater than his own. Here, for example, we have a group of poverty-burdened cotton-mill workers or equally poor farmers. In the same town lives a Negro doctor or business man or farmer with a comfortable home, an automobile, a bank account, a radio of the latest model, and well-dressed wife and children. The poor white lives in a shabby house, he has a difficult time in paying for a most meagre living, his wife and children are poorly clad. Physical vio lence upon the person of the member of the "inferior" race who has dared prove himself not so inferior is the sole balm for the poor white's wounded self-esteem. Out of no more startling circumstances than these have arisen lynchings, not necessarily against the prosperous Ne groes, though against them often enough, particularly since the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. That resentment has motivated many men to join a lynching mob. The tendency to direct mob violence against successful Negroes has been especially noticeable during the past ten years of lynching.
There is, however, an even more potent reason for the resort to physical violence in the South. This factor has not often been considered, but upon reflection it will perhaps explain in part, not only lynching mobs, but the general truculence and belligerency of the South. Briefly, it is that the South, from the very beginning of
