Lynching

Why not make in Mexico and show all over Latin America a cinema based on a typical U. S. lynching, with no ferocious detail or bestial fact omitted?

In Mexico City this question was put last week by urbane, sardonic El Excelsior, newsorgan of Mexico's ruling class. "Here is a splendid opportunity for our infant film industry," declared El Excelsior, tongue in cheek. "A splendid opportunity also to effect that international reciprocity between Mexico and the U. S. that one hears so much about! What spectacle could be more imposing, more instructive or more edifying than a multitude of 7,000 blond men (supercivilized, of course) lynching an unhappy 19-year-old youth to whom had been attributed an ugly crime, the proofs of which were lacking?

''Our Mexican hero could make his appearance on the scene among the tanks and bombs; he would disperse the multitude and single-handed save the Negro from the lynchers, and, furthermore, prove him innocent because the crime had been committed by another.

"But, alas, although treaties permit the filming of such a picture, it would cost much money. Because we are poor we do not have international reciprocity in the cinema. But neither (and this is a compensation) do we have lynchings."

In London, the Daily Express, which last summer protested what it called exaggerated reports in the U. S. Press of London's unemployment riots, last week printed a cable from New York: "A great exodus of Negroes from the towns and villages of America's race-prejudiced Southern States began today. Terrified by the outbreak of lynching following the condonation of mob violence by Governor Rolph of California, America's vast population of colored folk are hurriedly leaving their homes and setting off in their second-hand cars and old farm wagons for--they know not where. So electric is the atmosphere, so certain is a further outbreak of lynching, that the Negro dare not stay in one place."

The Daily Herald quoted a "Southern authority'' in Washington as having forecast "a new civil war ... a massacre of unarmed blacks by armed whites mad with blood lust."

Other London papers made front page news of the U. S. lynchings, discreetly played down last week's developments in England's current crime stories--the kidnapping and murder at Leicester of 3-year-old Derek Robb, an attempt to kidnap a 7-year-old schoolboy at Northampton.

In Lima, Peru, the censor withheld from inflammable Peruvians news of last week's mob activities at Salisbury, Md.

When lynched at San Jose, Kidnapper Holmes was naked. Kidnapper Thurmond had lost his trousers. Although the Press was unanimously outraged over the incident, few papers chose to print the photographs of the victims as a Horrible Example. Among those that did were the Oakland Post-Enquirer, Santa Cruz News and Sentinel, Los Angeles Herald & Express, Medford (Ore.) Mail-Tribune, Prescott (Ariz.) Journal-Miner, Centralia (Wash.) Chronicle, Oklahoma City News, Knoxville (Tenn.) Journal, Gastonia (N. C.) Gazette, Anderson (S. C.) Independent, Johnson City (Tenn.) Staff News, Kingston (N. C.) Free Press, New York City Daily News, Mirror, American and Journal. The Los Angeles La Opinion painted shorts on Holmes, lengthened Thurmond's shirt. The Newark, N. J.. Star Eagle painted trousers on Holmes.

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