Texas Minds Its Own Business

Not since 1930 had Texans felt the need for a real anti-lynch law. That year a mob in Sherman, Tex. hanged a Negro accused of rape, and while its fury was still up, set fire to Negro business buildings in the town. The fire got out of hand, destroyed a good part of the white folks' downtown district too, including the courthouse. It was the last big mob lynching in Texas' violent history (score: 551 lynchings). Now that President Truman was trying to impose an anti-lynch law on the South, Texans got to thinking again of passing one of their own.

The dean of the Texas House of Representatives, El Paso's ex-judge Samuel Jackson Isaacks, suggested it. He offered a bill which, he promised, would "deter Congress from stepping into a state responsibility, in which they have no more business than they do in cases of rape, burglary or traffic violations." The bill provided a penalty for lynch mobsters of from five years' imprisonment to death. Last week, four days before Harry Truman's civil rights program was talked to a standstill in the U.S. Senate (see above), the Texas House of Representatives passed the bill, virtually without debate, 125 to 1. The senate and Governor Beauford Jester were expected to make it law.

Across the line in Arkansas, aggressive, young (36) Governor Sidney S. McMath was having as much trouble putting over civil rights as his good friend Harry Truman, who already had tapped McMath as the kind of progressive leader the South needs. The legislature adjourned after blocking McMath's anti-lynch, anti-poll tax program. To rebel cries that McMath was trying to produce a "mongrel" race, the governor replied wearily: "I thought we had gotten above that sort of thing."

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