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Despite what he had just witnessed, Negro Townes was not yet ready to repeat the confession which county officers had said he signed with his X after he was arrested last fortnight. But the blow torch soon burned the story out of him. As he hung limp in his chains, some of the mob went off to get another Negro he named as an accomplice. Back they came with one Shorty Dorroh. After he satisfied them that he had had nothing to do with the murder, they horsewhipped him, ordered him to get out of the State. Then they piled brush high about sobbing Negro Townes, drenched it with gasoline, touched him off—1937's lynching victim No. 3.
Back in Winona, the judge who had heard the Negroes' pleas of not guilty promised a Grand Jury investigation, but the sheriff and his men said they had not recognized any of the mobsters who seized their prisoners. Said Deputy Sheriff Hugh Curtis: "It was all done very quickly, quietly and orderly."
In Washington the House debate rose to a furious crescendo after Michigan's Michener read a press report of what had just happened at Duck Hill. Negroes in the gallery, who had cheered and applauded intermittently throughout the day when one of their champions made a good point on the floor, were shocked into silence. Two days later, with all but 17 Southern Representatives out of 123 voting against it, the Gavagan anti-lynching bill, which would make mobsters and law officers who yield up their prisoners liable to stiff Federal prosecution, was passed by the House.
Few proposals have caused more excited debate in the halls of Congress than Federal anti-lynching bills. At least one is offered every session. This session there were 59. The first anti-lynching bill, introduced in the house in 1902, was inspired not by lynchings of Southern Negroes but by the large number of lynchings in the 1880s and 1890s in which white aliens were the victims. These crimes caused the Government no end of embarrassment, resulted in payments of $475,500 in indemnities to foreign governments. When the South continued to lynch Negroes after alien lynchings ceased, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was organized to do something about it and anti-lynching legislation became a permanent sectional issue. The first bill to get through the House did so in 1922. Southern Senators killed it with a 21-day filibuster. In 1935 the Southern bloc in the Senate filibustered six days to smother a similar bill.
Few Washington observers would concede last week's bill an outside chance in the Senate. Many doubted that it would ever get out of committee. The fact that the Administration needs the support of Southern Senators to get the President's Court Plan passed, caused considerable speculation when the anti-lynching bill got through the House. A filibuster, which seemed almost certain, could jam up the legislative mill and thus delay or prevent passage of the Court legislation. Administration leaders feared that Southern Senators who oppose the Court Plan might welcome a filibuster on this other issue of such powerful interest to the folks back home as a disguise for their opposition to the White House.