In Washington, before a gallery crowded with Negroes, the U. S. House of Representatives was beginning to debate a drastic anti-lynching bill introduced by Congressman Gavagan from New York's black Harlem. In Jackson, Miss., before delegates to a farm conference, Governor Hugh Lawson White was boasting that Mississippi had not had a lynching in 15 months. In Winona, Miss., in a jampacked courtroom in Montgomery County's white brick courthouse, Roosevelt Townes and Bootjack McDaniels, 26-year-old Negroes, were pleading not guilty to a charge of murdering a crossroads country grocer during a robbery last December at nearby Duck Hill. One day last week these simultaneous events were the prolog of a bloody melodrama, peculiarly Southern.
As the debate at Washington droned on, furnishing a strange far-off accompaniment, Negroes Townes and McDaniels were led handcuffed from the courtroom. If their minds registered anything as the sheriff and two deputies escorted them down the back stairs to return them to jail, it was relief. The Court had assigned counsel to defend them, set a date for trial by jury. Everything was according to law. But when they stepped out of a side door of the courthouse, they found themselves face to face with what so often handles cases like theirs in the South. An angry mob surged forward, took them from the custody of their guardians without a struggle, threw them into a school bus.
Followed by 40 automobiles, the bus sped down the highway toward Duck Hill. Two miles from the scene of last December's murder, 500 country folk, including women and children, waited expectantly in a patch of pinewood. When the motorcade from Winona arrived, the mob closed in to watch as the terrified Negroes were dragged from the bus. People in the back rows could hear heavy chains clink as the two blackamoors were made fast to trees.
Bootjack McDaniels, a lanky Negro with powerful shoulders, was asked to confess first. He gibbered that he was innocent. A mobster stepped forward with a plumber's blow torch, lighted it. Another ripped McDaniels' shirt off. Again he refused to confess. Then the blue-white flame of the torch stabbed into his black chest. He screamed with agony. The torch was withdrawn. He reiterated his innocence. Again the torch was turned on him and the smell of burned flesh floated through the woods. Again he screamed, and when it was withdrawn this time he was ready to confess. He was with Townes, he sobbed, when Townes poked a shotgun through the grocery window, fired into the grocer's back. When his confession was delivered in sufficient detail, the lynchers fell back and a volley of bullets crashed into Bootjack McDaniels, 1937's lynching victim No. 2.