Hon. Fred. Douglass’s Letter.

Dear Miss Wells:

Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.

Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.

But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven —yet we must still think, speak and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.

Very truly and gratefully yours,

Frederick Douglass.

Cedar Hill, Anacostia, D.G., Oct. 25, 1892.

Chapter L The Offense

Wednesday evening May 24th, 1892, the city of Memphis was filled with excitement. Editorials in the daily papers of that date caused a meeting to be held in the Cotton Exchange Building; a committee was sent for the editors of the "Free Speech” an Afro-American journal published in that city, and the only reason the open threats of lynching that were made were not carried out was because they could not be found. The cause of all this commotion was the following editorial published in the "Free Speech” May 21st, 1892, the Saturday previous.

EIGHT NEGROES LYNCHED SINCE LAST ISSUE OF THE “FREE SPEECH” ONE AT LITTLE ROCK, ARK., LAST SATURDAY MORNING WHERE THE CITIZENS BROKE (?) INTO THE PENITENTIARY AND GOT THEIR MAN; THREE NEAR ANNISTON, ALA., ONE NEAR NEW ORLEANS; AND THREE AT CLARKSVILLE, GA., THE LAST THREE FOR KILLING A WHITE MAN, AND FIVE ON THE SAME OLD RACKET—THE NEW ALARM ABOUT RAPING WHITE WOMEN. THE SAME PROGRAMME OF HANGING, THEN SHOOTING BULLETS INTO THE LIFELESS BODIES WAS CARRIED OUT TO THE LETTER.

NOBODY IN THIS SECTION OF THE COUNTRY BELIEVES THE OLD THREADBARE LIE THAT NEGRO MEN RAPE WHITE WOMEN. IF SOUTHERN WHITE MEN ARE NOT CAREFUL, THEY WILL OVER-REACH THEMSELVES AND PUBLIC SENTIMENT WILL HAVE A REACTION; A CONCLUSION WILL THEN BE REACHED WHICH WILL BE VERY DAMAGING TO THE MORAL REPUTATION OF THEIR WOMEN.

"The Daily Commercial” of Wednesday following, May 25th, contained the following leader:

THOSE NEGROES WHO ARE ATTEMPTING TO MAKE THE LYNCHING OF INDIVIDUALS OF THEIR RACE A MEANS FOR AROUSING THE WORST PASSIONS OF THEIR KIND ARE PLAYING WITH A DANGEROUS SENTIMENT. THE NEGROES MAY AS WELL UNDERSTAND THAT THERE IS NO MERCY FOR THE NEGRO RAPIST AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH HIS DEFENDERS. A NEGRO ORGAN PRINTED IN THIS CITY, IN A RECENT ISSUE PUBLISHES THE FOLLOWING ATROCIOUS PARAGRAPH: ‘NOBODY IN THIS SECTION OF THE COUNTRY BELIEVES THE OLD THREADBARE LIE THAT NEGRO MEN RAPE WHITE WOMEN. IF SOUTHERN WHITE MEN ARE NOT CAREFUL THEY WILL OVER-REACH THEMSELVES, AND PUBLIC SENTIMENT WILL HAVE A REACTION; AND A CONCLUSION WILL BE REACHED WHICH WILL BE VERY DAMAGING TO THE MORAL REPUTATION OF THEIR WOMEN.’

THE FACT THAT A BLACK SCOUNDREL IS ALLOWED TO LIVE AND UTTER SUCH LOATHSOME AND REPULSIVE CALUMNIES IS A VOLUME OF EVIDENCE AS TO THE WONDERFUL PATIENCE OF SOUTHERN WHITES. BUT WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF IT.

THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT THE SOUTHERN WHITE MAN WILL NOT TOLERATE, AND THE OBSCENE INTIMATIONS OF THE FOREGOING HAVE BROUGHT THE WRITER TO THE VERY OUTERMOST LIMIT OF PUBLIC PATIENCE. WE HOPE WE HAVE SAID ENOUGH.

The “Evening Scimitar” of same date, copied the "Commercial's” editorial with these words of comment: “Patience under such circumstances is not a virtue. If the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”

Acting upon this advice, the leading citizens met in the Cotton Exchange Building the same evening, and threats of lynching were freely indulged, not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—but by the leading business men, in their leading business centre. Mr. Fleming, the business manager and owning a half interest [in] the Free Speech, had to leave town to escape the mob, and was afterwards ordered not to return; letters and telegrams sent me in New York where I was spending my vacation advised me that bodily harm awaited my return. Creditors took possession of the office and sold the outfit, and the "Free Speech” was as if it had never been.

The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish lynchings of Afro-Americans which have recently taken place and was meant as a warning. Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.

Since my business has been destroyed and I am an exile from home because of that editorial, the issue has been forced, and as the writer of it I feel that the race and the public generally should have a statement of the facts as they exist. They will serve at the same time as a defense for the Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.

The whites of Montgomery, Ala., knew J.C. Duke sounded the keynote of the situation—which they would gladly hide from the world, when he said in his paper, "The Herald,” five years ago: "Why is it that white women attract negro men now more than in former days? There was a time when such a thing was unheard of. There is a secret to this thing, and we greatly suspect it is the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos.” Mr. Duke, like the "Free Speech” proprietors, was forced to leave the city for reflecting on the "honah” of white women and his paper suppressed; but the truth remains that Afro-American men do not always rape (?) white women without their consent.

Mr. Duke, before leaving Montgomery, signed a card disclaiming any intention of slandering Southern Page 263 →white women. The editor of the “Free Speech” has no disclaimer to enter, but asserts instead that there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

Chapter II. The Black and White of It

The “Cleveland Gazette” of January 16, 1892, publishes a case in point. Mrs. J. S. Underwood, the wife of a minister of Elyria, Ohio, accused an Afro-American of rape. She told her husband that during his absence in 1888, stumping the State for the Prohibition Party, the man came to the kitchen door, forced his way in the house and insulted her. She tried to drive him out with a heavy poker, but he overpowered and chloroformed her, and when she revived her clothing was torn and she was in a horrible condition. She did not know the man but could identify him. She pointed out William Offett, a married man, who was arrested and, being in Ohio, was granted a trial.

The prisoner vehemently denied the charge of rape, but confessed he went to Mrs. Underwood's residence at her invitation and was criminally intimate with her at her request. This availed him nothing against the sworn testimony of a minister's wife, a lady of the highest respectability. He was found guilty, and entered the penitentiary, December 14, 1888, for fifteen years. Some time afterwards the woman's remorse led her to confess to her husband that the man was innocent.

These are her words: “I met Offett at the Post Office. It was raining. He was polite to me, and as I had several bundles in my arms he offered to carry them home for me, which he did. He had a strange fascination for me, and I invited him to call on me. He called, bringing chestnuts and candy for the children. By this means we got them to leave us alone in the room. Then I sat on his lap. He made a proposal to me and I readily consented. Why I did so, I do not know, but that I did is true. He visited me several times after that and each time I was indiscreet. I did not care after the first time. In fact I could not have resisted, and had no desire to resist.”

When asked by her husband why she told him she had been outraged, she said: “I had several reasons for telling you. One was the neighbors saw the fellow here, another was, I was afraid I had contracted a loathsome disease, and still another was that I feared I might give birth to a Negro baby. I hoped to save my reputation by telling you a deliberate lie.” Her husband, horrified by the confession, had Offett, who had already served four years, released and secured a divorce.

There are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-Americans who consort with their women. A few instances to substantiate the assertion that some white women love the company of the Afro-American will not be out of place. Most of these cases were reported by the daily papers of the South.

In the winter of 1885-6 the wife of a practicing physician in Memphis, in good social standing whose name has escaped me, left home, husband and children, and ran away with her black coachman. She was with him a month before her husband found and brought her home. The coachman could not be found. The doctor moved his family away from Memphis, and is living in another city under an assumed name.

In the same city last year a white girl in the dusk of evening screamed at the approach of some parties that a Negro had assaulted her on the street. He was captured, tried by a white judge and jury, that acquitted him of the charge. It is needless to add if there had been a scrap of evidence on which to convict him of so grave a charge he would have been convicted.

Sarah Clark of Memphis loved a black man and lived openly with him. When she was indicted last spring for miscegenation, she swore in court that she was not a white woman. This she did to escape the penitentiary and continued her illicit relation undisturbed. That she is of the lower class of whites, does not disturb the fact that she is a white woman. “The leading citizens” of Memphis are defending the “honor” of all white women, demi-monde included.

Since the manager of the “Free Speech” has been run away from Memphis by the guardians of the honor of Southern white women, a young girl living on Poplar St., who was discovered in intimate relations with a handsome mulatto young colored man, Will Morgan by name, stole her father’s money to send the young fellow away from that father's wrath. She has since joined him in Chicago.

The Memphis Ledger for June 8th has the following: “If Lillie Bailey, a rather pretty white girl seventeen years of age, who is now at the City Hospital, would be somewhat less reserved about her disgrace there would be some very nauseating details in the story of her life. She is the mother of a little coon. The Page 264 →truth might reveal fearful depravity or it might reveal the evidence of a rank outrage. She will not divulge the name of the man who has left such black evidence of her disgrace, and, in fact, says it is a matter in which there can be no interest to the outside world. She came to Memphis nearly three months ago and was taken in at the Womans Refuge in the southern part of the city. She remained there until a few weeks ago, when the child was born. The ladies in charge of the Refuge were horrified. The girl was at once sent to the City Hospital, where she has been since May 30th. She is a country girl. She came to Memphis from her father's farm, a short distance from Hernando, Miss. Just when she left there she would not say. In fact she says she came to Memphis from Arkansas, and says her home is in that State. She is rather good looking, has blue eyes, a low forehead and dark red hair. The ladies at the Woman’s Refuge do not know anything about the girl further than what they learned when she was an inmate of the institution; and she would not tell much. When the child was born an attempt was made to get the girl to reveal the name of the Negro who had disgraced her, she obstinately refused and it was impossible to elicit any information from her on the subject.”

Note the wording. “The truth might reveal fearful depravity or rank outrage.” If it had been a white child or Lillie Bailey had told a pitiful story of Negro outrage, it would have been a case of woman’s weakness or assault and she could have remained at the Woman’s Refuge. But a Negro child and to withhold its father’s name and thus prevent the killing of another Negro “rapist.” A case of “fearful depravity.”

The very week the “leading citizens” of Memphis were making a spectacle of themselves in defense of all white women of every kind, an Afro-American, M. Stricklin, was found in a white woman’s room in that city. Although she made no outcry of rape, he was jailed and would have been lynched, but the woman stated she bought curtains of him (he was a furniture dealer) and his business in her room that night was to put them up. A white woman’s word was taken as absolutely in this case as when the cry of rape is made, and he was freed.

What is true of Memphis is true of the entire South. The daily papers last year reported a farmer’s wife in Alabama had given birth to a Negro child. When the Negro farmhand who was plowing in the field heard it he took the mule from the plow and fled. The dispatches also told of a woman in South Carolina who gave birth to a Negro child and charged three men with being its father, every one of whom has since disappeared. In Tuscumbia, Ala., the colored boy who was lynched there last year for assaulting a white girl told her before his accusers that he had met her there in the woods often before.

Frank Weems of Chattanooga who was not lynched in May only because the prominent citizens became his body guard until the doors of the penitentiary closed on him, had letters in his pocket from the white woman in the case, making the appointment with him. Edward Coy who was burned alive in Texarkana, January 1, 1892, died protesting his innocence. Investigation since as given by the “Bystander” in the “Chicago Inter-Ocean,” October 1, proves:

“1. The woman who was paraded as a victim of violence was of bad character; her husband was a drunkard and a gambler.

“2. She was publicly reported and generally known to have been criminally intimate with Coy for more than a year previous.

“3. She was compelled by threats, if not by violence, to make the charge against the victim.

“4. When she came to apply the match Coy asked her if she would burn him after they had 'been sweet-hearting’ so long.

“5. A large majority of the ‘superior’ white men prominent in the affair are the reputed fathers of mulatto children.

“These are not pleasant facts, but they are illustrative of the vital phase of the so-called ‘race question,’ which should properly be designated an earnest inquiry as to the best methods by which religion, science, law and political power may be employed to excuse injustice, barbarity and crime done to a people because of race and color. There can be no possible belief that these people were inspired by any consuming zeal to vindicate God’s law against miscegenationists of the most practical sort. The woman was a willing partner in the victim’s guilt, and being of the ‘superior’ race must naturally have been more guilty.”

In Natchez, Miss., Mrs. Marshall, one of the creme de la creme of the city, created a tremendous sensation several years ago. She has a black coachman who was married, and had been in her employ several years. During this time she gave birth to a child whose color was remarked, but traced to some brunette ancestor, and one of the fashionable dames of the city was its godmother. Mr. Marshall’s social position was unquestioned, and wealth showered every dainty on this child which was idolized with its brothers and sisters by its white papa. In course of time another child appeared on the scene, but it was unmistakably dark. All were alarmed, and “rush of blood, strangulation” were the conjectures, but the doctor, when asked the cause, grimly told them it was a Negro child. There was a family conclave, the coachman heard of it and leaving his own family went West, and has never returned. As Page 265 →soon as Mrs. Marshall was able to travel she was sent away in deep disgrace. Her husband died within the year of a broken heart.

Ebenzer Fowler, the wealthiest colored man in Issaquena County, Miss., was shot down on the street in Mayersville, January 30,1885, just before dark by an armed body of white men who filled his body with bullets. They charged him with writing a note to a white woman of the place, which they intercepted and which proved there was an intimacy existing between them.

Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American’s company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.

There is hardly a town in the South which has not an instance of the kind which is well-known, and hence the assertion is reiterated that "nobody in the South believes the old threadbare lie that negro men rape white women.” Hence there is a growing demand among Afro-Americans that the guilt or innocence of parties accused of rape be frilly established. They know the men of the section of the country who refuse this are not so desirous of punishing rapists as they pretend. The utterances of the leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but the class. Bishop Fitzgerald has become apologist for lynchers of the rapists of white women only. Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, in the month of June, standing under the tree in Barnwell, S.C., on which eight Afro-Americans were hung last year, declared that he would lead a mob to lynch a [“]negro who raped a white woman.” So say the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the South. But when the victim is a colored woman it is different.

Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. The case went to the courts, and an Afro-American lawyer defended the men and they were acquitted.

In Nashville, Tenn., there is a white man, Pat Hanifan, who outraged a little Afro-American girl, and, from the physical injuries received, she has been ruined for life. He was jailed for six months, discharged, and is now a detective in that city. In the same city, last May, a white man outraged an Afro-American girl in a drug store. He was arrested, and released on bail at the trial. It was rumored that five hundred Afro-Americans had organized to lynch him. Two hundred and fifty white citizens armed themselves with Winchesters and guarded him. A cannon was placed in front of his home, and the Buchanan Rifles (Stale Militia) ordered to the scene for his protection. The Afro-American mob did not materialize. Only two weeks before Eph. Grizzard, who had only been charged with rape upon a white woman, had been taken from the jail, with Governor Buchanan and the police and militia standing by, dragged through the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step, and with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise, he was at last swung out on the bridge with hands cut to pieces as he tried to climb up the stanchions. A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth century civilization of the Athens of the South! No cannon or military was called out in his defense. He dared to visit a white woman.

At the very moment these civilized whites were announcing their determination "to protect their wives and daughters,” by murdering Grizzard, a white man was in the same jail for raping eight-year-old Maggie Reese, an Afro-American girl. He was not harmed. The "honor” of grown women who were glad enough to be supported by the Grizzard boys and Ed Coy, as long as the liaison was not known, needed protection; they were white. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black.

A white man in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, two months ago inflicted such injuries upon another Afro-American child that she died. He was not punished, but an attempt was made in the same town in the month of June to lynch an Afro-American who visited a white woman.

In Memphis, Tenn., in the month of June, Ellerton L. Dorr, who is the husband of Russell Hancock’s widow, was arrested for attempted rape on Mattie Cole, a neighbor’s cook; he was only prevented from accomplishing his purpose, by the appearance of Mattie’s employer. Dorr’s friends say he was drunk and not responsible for his actions. The grand jury refused to indict him and he was discharged.

Chapter III. The New Cry

The appeal of Southern whites to Northern sympathy and sanction, the adroit, insiduous plea made by Bishop Fitzgerald for suspension of judgment because those "who condemn lynching express no sympathy for the white woman in the case,” falls to the ground in the light of the foregoing.

From this exposition of the race issue in lynch law, the whole matter is explained by the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race. This is crystallized in the oft-repeated slogan: "This is a white man’s country and the white man must rule.” Page 266 →The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law. The raids of the Ku-Klux and White Liners to subvert reconstruction government, the Hamburg and Ellerton, S.C., the Copiah County Miss., and the Layfayette Parish, La., massacres were excused as the natural resentment of intelligence against government by ignorance.

Honest white men practically conceded the necessity of intelligence murdering ignorance to correct the mistake of the general government, and the race was left to the tender mercies of the solid South. Thoughtful Afro-Americans with the strong arm of the government withdrawn and with the hope to stop such wholesale massacres urged the race to sacrifice its political rights for sake of peace. They honestly believed the race should fit itself for government, and when that should be done, the objection to race participation in politics would be removed.

But the sacrifice did not remove the trouble, nor move the South to Justice. One by one the Southern States have legally (?) disfranchised the Afro-American, and since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill nearly every Southern State has passed separate car laws with a penalty against their infringement. The race regardless of advancement is penned into filthy, stifling partitions cut off from smoking cars. All this while, although the political cause has been removed, the butcheries of black men at Barnwell, S.C., Carrolton, Miss., Waycross, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn., have gone on; also the flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the hanging of a fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana, a woman in Jackson, Tenn., and one in Hollendale, Miss., until the dark and bloody record of the South shows 728 Afro-Americans lynched during the past 8 years. Not 50 of these were for political causes; the rest were for all manner of accusations from that of rape of white women, to the case of the boy Will Lewis who was hanged at Tullahoma, Tenn., last year for being drunk and “sassy” to white folks.

These statistics compiled by the Chicago “Tribune” were given the first of the year (1892). Since then, not less than one hundred and fifty have been known to have met violent death at the hands of cruel bloodthirsty mobs during the past nine months.

To palliate this record (which grows worse as the Afro-American becomes intelligent) and excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country, the South is shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women. This, too, in the face of the fact that only one-third of the 728 victims to mobs have been charged with rape, to say nothing of those of that one-third who were innocent of the charge. A white correspondent of the Baltimore Sun declares that the Afro-American who was lynched in Chestertown, Md., in May for assault on a white girl was innocent; that the deed was done by a white man who had since disappeared. The girl herself maintained that her assailant was a white man. When that poor Afro-American was murdered, the whites excused their refusal of a trial on the ground that they wished to spare the white girl the mortification of having to testify in court.

This cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this “land of liberty.” Men who stand high in the esteem of the public for Christian character, for moral and physical courage, for devotion to the principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outrage. They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.

Men who, like Governor Tillman, start the ball of lynch law rolling for a certain crime, are powerless to stop it when drunken or criminal white toughs feel like hanging an Afro-American on any pretext.

Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too often taken the white man's word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved.

They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us a race of rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on hoping and believing that general education and financial strength would solve the difficulty, and are devoting their energies to the accumulation of both.

The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American. It has left the out-of-the-way places where ignorance prevails, has thrown off the mask and with this new cry stalks in broad daylight in large cities, the centres of civilization, and is encouraged by the “leading citizens” and the press.

Chapter IV. The Malicious and
Untruthful White Press

The “Daily Commercial” and “Evening Scimitar” of Memphis, Tenn., are owned by leading businessmen of that city, and yet, in spite of the fact that there had been no white woman in Memphis outraged by an Afro-American, and that Memphis possessed a thrifty law-abiding, property owning class of Afro-Americans the Page 267 →“Commercial” of May 17th, under the head of “More Rapes, More Lynchings” gave utterance to the following:

THE LYNCHING OF THREE NEGRO SCOUNDRELS REPORTED IN OUR DISPATCHES FROM ANNISTON, ALA., FOR A BRUTAL OUTRAGE COMMITTED UPON A WHITE WOMAN WILL BE A TEXT FOR MUCH COMMENT ON ‘SOUTHERN BARBARISM’ BY NORTHERN NEWSPAPERS; BUT WE FANCY IT WILL HARDLY PROVE EFFECTIVE FOR CAMPAIGN PURPOSES AMONG INTELLIGENT PEOPLE. THE FREQUENCY OF THESE LYNCHINGS CALLS ATTENTION TO THE FREQUENCY OF THE CRIMES WHICH CAUSES LYNCHING. THE ‘SOUTHERN BARBARISM’ WHICH DESERVES THE SERIOUS ATTENTION OF ALL PEOPLE NORTH AND SOUTH, IS THE BARBARISM WHICH PREYS UPON WEAK AND DEFENSELESS WOMEN. NOTHING BUT THE MOST PROMPT, SPEEDY AND EXTREME PUNISHMENT CAN HOLD IN CHECK THE HORRIBLE AND BESTIAL PROPENSITIES OF THE NEGRO RACE. THERE IS A STRANGE SIMILARITY ABOUT A NUMBER OF CASES OF THIS CHARACTER WHICH HAVE LATELY OCCURRED.

IN EACH CASE THE CRIME WAS DELIBERATELY PLANNED AND PERPETRATED BY SEVERAL NEGROES. THEY WATCHED FOR AN OPPORTUNITY WHEN THE WOMEN WERE LEFT WITHOUT A PROTECTOR. IT WAS NOT A SUDDEN YIELDING TO A FIT OF PASSION, BUT THE CONSUMMATION OF A DEVILISH PURPOSE WHICH HAS BEEN SEEKING AND WAITING FOR THE OPPORTUNITY. THIS FEATURE OF THE CRIME NOT ONLY MAKES IT THE MOST FIENDISHLY BRUTAL, BUT IT ADDS TO THE TERROR OF THE SITUATION IN THE THINLY SETTLED COUNTRY COMMUNITIES. NO MAN CAN LEAVE HIS FAMILY AT NIGHT WITHOUT THE DREAD THAT SOME ROVING NEGRO RUFFIAN IS WATCHING AND WAITING FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY. THE SWIFT PUNISHMENT WHICH INVARIABLY FOLLOWS THESE HORRIBLE CRIMES DOUBTLESS ACTS AS A DETERRING EFFECT UPON THE NEGROES IN THAT IMMEDIATE NEIGHBORHOOD FOR A SHORT TIME. BUT THE LESSON IS NOT WIDELY LEARNED NOR LONG REMEMBERED. THEN SUCH CRIMES, EQUALLY ATROCIOUS, HAVE HAPPENED IN QUICK SUCCESSION, ONE IN TENNESSEE, ONE IN ARKANSAS, AND ONE IN ALABAMA. THE FACTS OF THE CRIME APPEAR TO APPEAL MORE TO THE NEGRO’S LUSTFUL IMAGINATION THAN THE FACTS OF THE PUNISHMENT DO TO HIS FEARS. HE SETS ASIDE ALL FEAR OF DEATH IN ANY FORM WHEN OPPORTUNITY IS FOUND FOR THE GRATIFICATION OF HIS BESTIAL DESIRES.

THERE IS SMALL REASON TO HOPE FOR ANY CHANGE FOR THE BETTER. THE COMMISSION OF THIS CRIME GROWS MORE FREQUENT EVERY YEAR. THE GENERATION OF NEGROES WHICH HAVE GROWN UP SINCE THE WAR HAVE LOST IN LARGE MEASURE THE TRADITIONAL AND WHOLESOME AWE OF THE WHITE RACE WHICH KEPT THE NEGROES IN SUBJECTION, EVEN WHEN THEIR MASTERS WERE IN THE ARMY, AND THEIR FAMILIES LEFT UNPROTECTED EXCEPT BY THE SLAVES THEMSELVES. THERE IS NO LONGER A RESTRAINT UPON THE BRUTE PASSION OF THE NEGRO.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? THE CRIME OF RAPE IS ALWAYS HORRIBLE, BUT THE SOUTHERN MAN THERE IS NOTHING WHICH SO FILLS THE SOUL WITH HORROR, LOATHING AND FURY AS THE OUTRAGING OF A WHITE WOMAN BY A NEGRO. IT IS THE RACE QUESTION IN THE UGLIEST, VILEST, MOST DANGEROUS ASPECT. THE NEGRO AS A POLITICAL FACTOR CAN BE CONTROLLED. BUT NEITHER LAWS NOR LYNCHINGS CAN SUBDUE HIS LUSTS. SOONER OR LATER IT WILL FORCE A CRISIS. WE DO NOT KNOW IN WHAT FORM IT WILL COME.

In its issue of June 4th, the Memphis “Evening Scimitar” gives the following excuse for lynch law:

ASIDE FROM THE VIOLATION OF WHITE WOMEN BY NEGROES, WHICH IS THE OUTCROPPING OF A BESTIAL PERVERSION OF INSTINCT, THE CHIEF CAUSE OF TROUBLE BETWEEN THE RACES IN THE SOUTH IS THE NEGRO’S LACK OF MANNERS. IN THE STATE OF SLAVERY HE LEARNED POLITENESS FROM ASSOCIATION WITH WHITE PEOPLE, WHO TOOK PAINS TO TEACH HIM. SINCE THE EMANCIPATION CAME AND THE TIE OF MUTUAL INTEREST AND REGARD BETWEEN MASTER AND SERVANT WAS BROKEN, THE NEGRO HAS DRIFTED AWAY INTO A STATE WHICH IS NEITHER FREEDOM NOR BONDAGE. LACKING THE PROPER INSPIRATION OF THE ONE AND THE RESTRAINING FORCE OF THE OTHER HE HAS TAKEN UP THE IDEA THAT BOORISH INSOLENCE IS INDEPENDENCE, AND THE EXERCISE OF A DECENT DEGREE OF BREEDING TOWARD WHITE PEOPLE IS IDENTICAL WITH SERVILE SUBMISSION. IN CONSEQUENCE OF THE PREVALENCE OF THIS NOTION THERE ARE MANY NEGROES WHO USE EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE THEMSELVES OFFENSIVE, PARTICULARLY WHEN THEY THINK IT CAN BE DONE WITH IMPUNITY.

WE HAVE HAD TOO MANY INSTANCES RIGHT HERE IN MEMPHIS TO DOUBT THIS, AND OUR EXPERIENCE IS NOT EXCEPTIONAL. THE WHITE PEOPLE WON'T STAND THIS SORT OF THING, AND WHETHER THEY BE INSULTED AS INDIVIDUALS OR AS A RACE, THE RESPONSE WILL BE PROMPT AND EFFECTUAL. THE BLOODY RIOT OF 1866, IN WHICH SO MANY NEGROES PERISHED, WAS BROUGHT ON PRINCIPALLY BY THE OUTRAGEOUS CONDUCT OF THE BLACKS TOWARD THE WHITES ON THE STREETS. IT IS ALSO A REMARKABLE AND DISCOURAGING FACT THAT THE MAJORITY OF SUCH SCOUNDRELS ARE NEGROES WHO HAVE RECEIVED EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES AT THE HANDS OF THE WHITE TAXPAYERS. THEY HAVE GOT JUST ENOUGH OF LEARNING TO MAKE THEM REALIZE HOW HOPELESSLY THEIR RACE IS BEHIND THE OTHER IN EVERYTHING THAT MAKES A GREAT PEOPLE, AND THEY ATTEMPT TO ‘GET EVEN’ BY INSOLENCE, WHICH IS EVER THE RESENTMENT OF INFERIORS. THERE ARE WELL-BRED NEGROES AMONG US, AND IT IS TRULY UNFORTUNATE THAT THEY SHOULD HAVE TO PAY, EVEN IN PART, THE PENALTY OF THE OFFENSES COMMITTED BY THE BASER SORT, BUT THIS IS THE WAY OF THE WORLD. THE INNOCENT MUST SUFFER FOR THE GUILTY. IF THE NEGROES AS A PEOPLE POSSESSED A HUNDREDTH PART OF THE SELF-RESPECT WHICH IS EVIDENCED BY THE COURTEOUS BEARING OF SOME THAT THE “SCIMITAR” COULD NAME, THE FRICTION BETWEEN THE RACES WOULD BE REDUCED TO A MINIMUM. IT WILL NOT DO TO BEG THE QUESTION BY PLEADING THAT MANY WHITE MEN ARE ALSO STIRRING UP STRIFE. THE CAUCASIAN BLACKGUARD SIMPLY OBEYS THE PROMPTINGS OF A DEPRAVED DISPOSITION, AND HE IS SELDOM DELIBERATELY ROUGH OR OFFENSIVE TOWARD STRANGERS OR UNPROTECTED WOMEN.

THE NEGRO TOUGH, ON THE CONTRARY, IS GIVEN TO JUST THAT KIND OF OFFENDING, AND HE ALMOST INVARIABLY SINGLES OUT WHITE PEOPLE AS HIS VICTIMS.

On March 9th, 1892, there were lynched in this same city three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic businessmen.

They believed the problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man named Barrett had one on the opposite corner. After a personal difficulty which Barrett sought by going into the “People's Grocery” drawing a pistol and was Page 268 →thrashed by Calvin McDowell, he (Barrett) threatened to “clean them out.” These men were a mile beyond the city limits and police protection; hearing that Barrett’s crowd was coming to attack them Saturday night, they mustered forces and prepared to defend themselves against the attack.

When Barrett came he led a posse of officers, twelve in number, who afterward claimed to be hunting a man for whom they had a warrant. That twelve men in citizen’s clothes should think it necessary to go in the night to hunt one man who had never before been arrested, or made any record as a criminal has never been explained. When they entered the back door the young men thought the threatened attack was on, and fired into them. Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending party found it was the officers of the law upon whom they had fired, they ceased and got away.

Thirty-one men were arrested and thrown in jail as “conspirators,” although they all declared more than once they did not know they were firing on officers. Excitement was at fever heat until the morning papers, two days after, announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out of danger. This hindered rather than helped the plans of the whites. There was no law on the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the “unwritten law” did. Three of these men, the president, the manager and clerk of the grocery—“the leaders of the conspiracy” —were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly brutal manner. “The Negroes are getting too independent,” they say, “we must teach them a lesson.”

What lesson? The lesson of subordination. “Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares to shoot a white man, even in self-defense.”

Although the race was wild over the outrage, the mockery of law and justice which disarmed men and locked them up in jails where they could be easily and safely reached by the mob—the Afro-American ministers, newspapers and leaders counselled obedience to the law which did not protect them.

Their counsel was heeded and not a hand was uplifted to resent the outrage; following the advice of the “Free Speech,” people left the city in great numbers.

The dailies and associated press reports heralded these men to the country as “toughs,” and “Negro desperadoes who kept a low dive.” This same press service printed that the Negro who was lynched at Indianola, Miss., in May, had outraged the sheriff’s eight-year-old daughter. The girl was more than eighteen years old, and was found by her father in this man's room, who was a servant on the place.

Not content with misrepresenting the race, the mob-spirit was not to be satisfied until the paper which was doing all it could to counteract this impression was silenced. The colored people were resenting their bad treatment in a way to make itself felt, yet gave the mob no excuse for further murder, until the appearance of the editorial which is construed as a reflection on the “honor” of the Southern white women. It is not half so libelous as that of the “Commercial” which appeared four days before, and which has been given in these pages. They would have lynched the manager of the “Free Speech” for exercising the right of free speech if they had found him as quickly as they would have hung a rapist, and glad of the excuse to do so. The owners were ordered not to return, “The Free Speech” was suspended with as little compunction as the business of the “People’s Grocery” broken up and the proprietors murdered.

Chapter V. The South’s Position

Henry W. Grady in his well-remembered speeches in New England and New York pictured the Afro-American as incapable of self-government. Through him and other leading men the cry of the South to the country has been “Hands off! Leave us to solve our problem.” To the Afro-American the South says, “the white man must and will rule.” There is little difference between the Ante-bellum South and the New South.

Her white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or redress therefore in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him.

The result is a growing disregard of human life. Lynch law has spread its insiduous influence till men in New York State, Pennsylvania and on the free Western plains feel they can take the law in their own hands with impunity, especially where an Afro-American is concerned. The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

Public sentiment has had a slight “reaction” though not sufficient to stop the crusade of lawlessness and lynching. The spirit of Christianity of the great M. E. Church was aroused to the frequent and revolting crimes against a weak people, enough to pass strong condemnatory resolutions at its General Conference in Omaha last May. The spirit of justice of the grand old party asserted itself sufficiently to secure a denunciation Page 269 →of the wrongs, and a feeble declaration of the belief in human rights in the Republican platform at Minneapolis, June 7th. Some of the great dailies and weeklies have swung into line declaring that lynch law must go. The President of the United States issued a proclamation that it be not tolerated in the territories over which he has jurisdiction. Governor Northern and Chief Justice Bleckley of Georgia have proclaimed against it. The citizens of Chattanooga, Tenn., have set a worthy example in that they not only condemn lynch law, but her public men demanded a trial for Weems, the accused rapist, and guarded him while the trial was in progress. The trial only lasted ten minutes, and Weems chose to plead guilty and accept twenty-one years sentence, than invite the certain death which awaited him outside that cordon of police if he had told the truth and shown the letters he had from the white woman in the case.

Col. A.S. Colyar, of Nashville, Tenn., is so overcome with the horrible state of affairs that he addressed the following earnest letter to the Nashville “American.” “Nothing since I have been a reading man has so impressed me with the decay of manhood among the people of Tennessee as the dastardly submission to the mob reign. We have reached the unprecedented low level; the awful criminal depravity of substituting the mob for the court and jury, of giving up the jail keys to the mob whenever they are demanded. We do it in the largest cities and in the country towns; we do it in midday; we do it after frill, not to say formal, notice, and so thoroughly and generally is it acquiesced in that the murderers have discarded the formula of masks. They go into the town where everybody knows them, sometimes under the gaze of the governor, in the presence of the courts, in the presence of the sheriff and his deputies, in the presence of the entire police force, take out the prisoner, take his life, often with fiendish glee, and often with acts of cruelty and barbarism which impress the reader with a degeneracy rapidly approaching savage life. That the State is disgraced but faintly expresses the humiliation which has settled upon the once proud people of Tennessee. The State, in its majesty, through its organized life, for which the people pay liberally, makes but one record, but one note, and that a criminal falsehood, 'was hung by persons to the jury unknown.' The murder at Shelbyville is only a verification of what every intelligent man knew would come, because with a mob a rumor is as good as a proof.”

These efforts brought forth apologies and a short halt, but the lynching mania was raged again through the past three months with unabated fury.

The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe punishment, but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public sentiment demands and sustains such action.

The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual law-breakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.

Chapter VI. Self Help

In the creation of this healthier public sentiment, the Afro-American can do for himself what no one else can do for him. The world looks on with wonder that we have conceded so much and remain law-abiding under such great outrage and provocation.

To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The white man’s dollar is his god and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.

The Afro-Americans of Memphis denounced the lynching of three of their best citizens, and urged and waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice. No attempt was made to do so, and the black men left the city by thousands, bringing about great stagnation in every branch of business. Those who remained so injured the business of the street car company by staying off the cars, that the superintendent, manager and treasurer called personally on the editor of the “Free Speech,” asked them to urge our people to give them their patronage again. Other business men became alarmed over the situation and the “Free Speech” was run away that the colored people might be more easily controlled. A meeting of white citizens in June, three months after the lynching, passed resolutions for the first time, condemning it. But they did not punish the lynchers. Every one of them was known by name, because they had been selected to do the dirty work, by some of the very citizens who passed these resolutions. Memphis is fast losing her black population, who proclaim as they go that there is not protection for the life and property of any Afro-American citizen in Memphis who is not a slave.

The Afro-American citizens of Kentucky, whose intellectual and financial improvement has been phenomenal, have never had a separate car law until now. Page 270 →Delegations and petitions poured into the Legislation against it, yet the bill passed and the Jim Crow Car of Kentucky is a legalized institution. Will the great mass of Negroes continue to patronize the railroad? A special from Covington, Ky., says:

COVINGTON, JUNE 13TH. —THE RAILROADS OF THE STATE ARE BEGINNING TO FEEL VERY MARKEDLY, THE EFFECTS OF THE SEPARATE COACH BILL RECENTLY PASSED BY THE LEGISLATURE. NO CLASS OF PEOPLE IN THE STATE HAVE SO MANY AND SO LARGELY ATTENDED EXCURSIONS AS THE BLACKS. ALL THESE HAVE BEEN ABANDONED, AND REGULAR TRAVEL IS REDUCED TO A MINIMUM. A COMPETENT AUTHORITY SAYS THE LOSS TO THE VARIOUS ROADS WILL REACH $1,000,000 THIS YEAR.

A call to a State Conference in Lexington, Ky., last June had delegates from every county in the State. Those delegates, the ministers, teachers, heads of secret and others orders, and the head of every family should pass the word around for every member of the race in Kentucky to stay off railroads unless obliged to ride. If they did so, and their advice was followed persistently the convention would not need to petition the Legislature to repeal the law or raise money to file a suit. The railroad corporations would be so affected they would in self-defense lobby to have the separate car law repealed. On the other hand, as long as the railroads can get Afro-American excursions they will always have plenty of money to fight all the suits brought against them. They will be aided in so doing by the same partisan public sentiment which passed the law. White men passed the law, and white judges and juries would pass upon the suits against the law, and render judgment in line with their prejudices and in deference to the greater financial power.

The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be gained by a further sacrifice of manhood and self-respect. By the right exercise of his power as the industrial factor of the South, the Afro-American can demand and secure his rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a fair trial for accused rapists.

Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky., and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

The assertion has been substantiated throughout these pages that the press contains unreliable and doctored reports of lynchings, and one of the most necessary things for the race to do is to get these facts before the public. The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.

The Afro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation.

A lynching occurred at Port Jarvis, N.Y., the first week in June. A white and colored man were implicated in the assault upon a white girl. It was charged that the white man paid the colored boy to make the assault, which he did on the public highway in broad day time, and was lynched. This, too was done by "parties unknown.” The white man in the case still lives. He was imprisoned and promises to fight the case on trial. At the preliminary examination, it developed that he had been a suitor of the girl’s. She had repulsed and refused him, yet had given him money, and he had sent threatening letters demanding more.

The day before this examination she was so wrought up, she left home and wandered miles away. When found she said she did so because she was afraid of the man’s testimony. Why should she be afraid of the prisoner? Why should she yield to his demands for money if not to prevent him exposing something he knew? It seems explainable only on the hypothesis that a liaison existed between the colored boy and the girl, and the white man knew of it. The press is singularly silent. Has it a motive? We owe it to ourselves to find out.

The story comes from Larned, Kansas, Oct. 1st, that a young white lady held at bay until daylight, without alarming any one in the house, "a burly Negro” who entered her room and bed. The "burly Negro” was promptly lynched without investigation or examination of inconsistent stories.

A house was found burned down near Montgomery, Ala., in Monroe County, Oct. 13th, a few weeks ago; also the burned bodies of the owners and melted piles of gold and silver.

These discoveries led to the conclusion that the Page 271 →awful crime was not prompted by motives of robbery. The suggestion of the whites was that “brutal lust was the incentive, and as there are nearly 200 Negroes living within a radius of five miles of the place the conclusion was inevitable that some of them were the perpetrators.”

Upon this “suggestion” probably made by the real criminal, the mob acted upon the “conclusion” and arrested ten Afro-Americans, four of whom, they tell the world, confessed to the deed of murdering Richard L. Johnson and outraging his daughter, Jeanette. These four men, Berrell Jones, Moses Johnson, Jim and John Packer, none of them 25 years of age, upon this conclusion, were taken from jail, hanged, shot, and burned while yet alive the night of Oct. 12th. The same report says Mr. Johnson was on the best terms with his Negro tenants.

The race thus outraged must find out the facts of this awful hurling of men into eternity on supposition, and give them to the indifferent and apathetic country. We feel this to be a garbled report, but how can we prove it?

Near Vicksburg, Miss., a murder was committed by a gang of burglars. Of course it must have been done by Negroes, and Negroes were arrested for it. It is believed that 2 men, Smith Tooley and John Adams belonged to a gang controlled by white men and, fearing exposure, on the night of July 4th, they were hanged in the Courthouse yard by those interested in silencing them. Robberies since committed in the same vicinity have been known to be by white men who had their faces blackened. We strongly believe in the innocence of these murdered men, but we have no proof. No other news goes out to the world save that which stamps us as a race of cutthroats, robbers and lustful wild beasts. So great is Southern hate and prejudice, they legally (?) hung poor little thirteen-year-old Mildrey Brown at Columbia, S.C., Oct. 7th, on the circumstantial evidence that she poisoned a white infant. If her guilt had been proven unmistakably, had she been white, Mildrey Brown would never have been hung.

The country would have been aroused and South Carolina disgraced forever for such a crime. The Afro-American himself did not know as he should have known as his journals should be in a position to have him know and act.

Nothing is more definitely settled than he must act for himself. I have shown how he may employ the boycott, emigration and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery. “The gods help those who help themselves.”

Chapter I. The Case Stated

The student of American sociology will find the year 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land.

Beginning with the emancipation of the Negro, the inevitable result of unbridled power exercised for two and a half centuries, by the white man over the Negro, began to show itself in acts of conscienceless outlawry. During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body. Vested with unlimited power over his slave, to subject him to any and all kinds of physical punishment, the white man was still restrained from such punishment as tended to injure the slave by abating his physical powers and thereby reducing his financial worth. While slaves were scourged mercilessly, and in countless cases inhumanly treated in other respects, still the white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars. The slave was rarely killed, he was too valuable; it was easier and quite as effective, for discipline or revenge, to sell him “Down South.”

But Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro’s body were lost. The white man had no right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still less has he a right to kill him. But the Southern white people had been educated so long in that school of practice, in which might makes right, that they disdained to draw strict lines of action in dealing with the Negro. In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.

Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men during the past thirty years in the South, have come to light, but the statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the Page 272 →same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders only three white men have been tried, convicted, and executed. As no white man has been lynched for the murder of colored people, these three executions are the only instances of the death penalty being visited upon white men for murdering Negroes.

Naturally enough the commission of these crimes began to tell upon the public conscience, and the Southern white man, as a tribute to the nineteenth century civilization, was in a manner compelled to give excuses for his barbarism. His excuses have adapted themselves to the emergency, and are aptly outlined by that greatest of all Negroes, Frederick Douglass, in an article of recent date, in which he shows that there have been three distinct eras of Southern barbarism, to account for which three distinct excuses have been made.

The first excuse given to the civilized world for the murder of unoffending Negroes was the necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged “race riots.” For years immediately succeeding the war there was an appalling slaughter of colored people, and the wires usually conveyed to northern people and the world the intelligence, first, that an insurrection was being planned by Negroes, which, a few hours later, would prove to have been vigorously resisted by white men, and controlled with a resulting loss of several killed and wounded. It was always a remarkable feature in these insurrections and riots that only Negroes were killed during the rioting, and that all the white men escaped unharmed.

From 1865 to 1872, hundreds of colored men and women were mercilessly murdered and the almost invariable reason assigned was that they met their death by being alleged participants in an insurrection or riot. But this story at last wore itself out. No insurrection ever materialized; no Negro rioter was ever apprehended and proven guilty, and no dynamite ever recorded the black man's protest against oppression and wrong. It was too much to ask thoughtful people to believe this transparent story, and the southern white people at last made up their minds that some other excuse must be had.

Then came the second excuse, which had its birth during the turbulent times of reconstruction. By an amendment to the Constitution the Negro was given the right of franchise, and, theoretically at least, his ballot became his invaluable emblem of citizenship. In a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” the Negro’s vote became an important factor in all matters of state and national politics. But this did not last long. The southern white man would not consider that the Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and the idea of a republican form of government in the southern states grew into general contempt. It was maintained that This is a white man’s government,” and regardless of numbers the white man should rule. “No Negro domination” became the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South, and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best. It was a long, gory campaign; the blood chills and the heart almost loses faith in Christianity when one thinks of Yazoo, Hamburg, Edgefield, Copiah, and the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes, whose only crime was the attempt to exercise their right to vote.

But it was a bootless strife for colored people. The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right. Scourged from his home; hunted through the swamps; hung by midnight raiders, and openly murdered in the light of day, the Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would have wrung admiration from the hearts of savages. He believed that in that small white ballot there was a subtle something which stood for manhood as well as citizenship, and thousands of brave black men went to their graves, exemplifying the one by dying for the other.

The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder. The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be a “barren ideality,” and regardless of numbers, the colored people found themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to rule. With no longer the fear of “Negro Domination” before their eyes, the white man’s second excuse became valueless. With the Southern governments all subverted and the Negro actually eliminated from all participation in state and national elections, there could be no longer an excuse for killing Negroes to prevent “Negro Domination.”

Brutality still continued; Negroes were whipped, scourged, exiled, shot and hung whenever and wherever it pleased the white man so to treat them, and as the civilized world with increasing persistency held the white people of the South to account for its outlawry, the murderers invented the third excuse—that Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women. There could be framed no possible excuse more harmful to the Negro and more unanswerable if true in its sufficiency for the white man.

Humanity abhors the assailant of womanhood, and this charge upon the Negro at once placed him beyond the pale of human sympathy. With such unanimity, earnestness and apparent candor was this charge Page 273 →made and reiterated that the world has accepted the story that the Negro is a monster which the Southern white man has painted him. And today, the Christian world feels, that while lynching is a crime, and lawlessness and anarchy the certain precursors of a nation’s fall, it can not by word or deed, extend sympathy or help to a race of outlaws, who might mistake their plea for justice and deem it an excuse for their continued wrongs.

The Negro has suffered much and is willing to suffer more. He recognizes that the wrongs of two centuries can not be righted in a day, and he tries to bear his burden with patience for to-day and be hope-fill for to-morrow. But there comes a time when the veriest worm will turn, and the Negro feels to-day that after all the work he has done, all the sacrifices he has made, and all the suffering he has endured, if he did not, now, defend his name and manhood from this vile accusation, he would be unworthy even of the contempt of mankind. It is to this charge he now feels he must make answer.

If the Southern people in defense of their lawlessness, would tell the truth and admit that colored men and women are lynched for almost any offense, from murder to a misdemeanor, there would not now be the necessity for this defense. But when they intentionally, maliciously and constantly belie the record and bolster up these falsehoods by the words of legislators, preachers, governors and bishops, then the Negro must give to the world his side of the awful story.

A word as to the charge itself. In considering the third reason assigned by the Southern white people for the butchery of blacks, the question must be asked, what the white man means when he charges the black man with rape. Does he mean the crime which the statutes of the civilized states describe as such? Not by any means. With the Southern white man, any mesalliance existing between a white woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge of rape. The Southern white man says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force. In numerous instances where colored men have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained.

It was for the assertion of this fact, in the defense of her own race, that the writer hereof became an exile; her property destroyed and her return to her home forbidden under penalty of death, for writing the following editorial which was printed in her paper, the “Free Speech,” in Memphis, Tenn., May 21, 1892:

EIGHT NEGROES LYNCHED SINCE LAST ISSUE OF THE “FREE SPEECH" ONE AT LITTLE ROCK, ARK., LAST SATURDAY MORNING WHERE THE CITIZENS BROKE (?) INTO THE PENITENTIARY AND GOT THEIR MAN; THREE NEAR ANNISTON, ALA., ONE NEAR NEW ORLEANS; AND THREE AT CLARKSVILLE, GA., THE LAST THREE FOR KILLING A WHITE MAN, AND FIVE ON THE SAME OLD RACKET—THE NEW ALARM ABOUT RAPING WHITE WOMEN. THE SAME PROGRAMME OF HANGING, THEN SHOOTING BULLETS INTO THE LIFELESS BODIES WAS CARRIED OUT TO THE LETTER. NOBODY IN THIS SECTION OF THE COUNTRY BELIEVES THE OLD THREADBARE LIE THAT NEGRO MEN RAPE WHITE WOMEN. IF SOUTHERN WHITE MEN ARE NOT CAREFUL, THEY WILL OVERREACH THEMSELVES AND PUBLIC SENTIMENT WILL HAVE A REACTION; A CONCLUSION WILL THEN BE REACHED WHICH WILL BE VERY DAMAGING TO THE MORAL REPUTATION OF THEIR WOMEN.

But threats cannot suppress the truth, and while the Negro suffers the soul deformity, resultant from two and a half centuries of slavery, he is no more guilty of this vilest of all vile charges than the white man who would blacken his name.

During all the years of slavery, no such charge was ever made, not even during the dark days of the rebellion, when the white man, following the fortunes of war went to do battle for the maintenance of slavery. While the master was away fighting to forge the fetters upon the slave, he left his wife and children with no protectors save the Negroes themselves. And yet during those years of trust and peril, no Negro proved recreant to his trust and no white man returned to a home that had been dispoiled.

Likewise during the period of alleged “insurrection,” and alarming “race riots,” it never occurred to the white man, that his wife and children were in danger of assault. Nor in the Reconstruction era, when the hue and cry was against “Negro Domination,” was there ever a thought that the domination would ever contaminate a fireside or strike to death the virtue of womanhood. It must appear strange indeed, to every thoughtful and candid man, that more than a quarter of a century elapsed before the Negro began to show signs of such infamous degeneration.

In his remarkable apology for lynching, Bishop Haygood [Atticus Haygood, former president of Emory University], of Georgia, says: “No race, not the most savage, tolerates the rape of woman, but it may be said without reflection upon any other people that the Southern people are now and always have been most sensitive concerning the honor of their women—their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.” It is not the purpose of this defense to say one word against the white women of the South. Such need not be said, but it is their misfortune that the chivalrous white men of Page 274 →that section, in order to escape the deserved execration of the civilized world, should shield themselves by their cowardly and infamously false excuse, and call into question that very honor about which their distinguished priestly apologist claims they are most sensitive. To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power. That chivalry which is “most sensitive concerning the honor of women” can hope for but little respect from the civilized world, when it confines itself entirely to the women who happen to be white. Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect.

When emancipation came to the Negroes, there arose in the northern part of the United States an almost divine sentiment among the noblest, purest and best white women of the North, who felt called to a mission to educate and Christianize the millions of southern ex-slaves. From every nook and corner of the North, brave young white women answered that call and left their cultured homes, their happy associations and their lives of ease, and with heroic determination went to the South to carry light and truth to the benighted blacks. It was a heroism no less than that which calls for volunteers for India, Africa and the Isles of the sea. To educate their unfortunate charges; to teach them the Christian virtues and to inspire in them the moral sentiments manifest in their own lives, these young women braved dangers whose record reads more like fiction than fact. They became social outlaws in the South. The peculiar sensitiveness of the southern white men and women, never shed its protecting influence about them. No friendly word from their own race cheered them in their work; no hospitable doors gave them the companionship like that from which they had come. No chivalrous white man doffed his hat in honor or respect. They were “Nigger teachers”—unpardonable offenders in the social ethics of the South, and were insulted, persecuted and ostracized, not by Negroes, but by the white manhood which boasts of its chivalry toward women.

And yet these northern women worked on, year after year, unselfishly, with a heroism which amounted almost to martyrdom. Threading their way through dense forests, working in schoolhouse, in the cabin and in the church, thrown at all times and in all places among the unfortunate and lowly Negroes, whom they had come to find and to serve, these northern women, thousands and thousands of them, have spent more than a quarter of a century in giving to the colored people their splendid lessons for home and heart and soul. Without protection, save that which innocence gives to every good woman, they went about their work, fearing no assault and suffering none. Their chivalrous protectors were hundreds of miles away in their northern homes, and yet they never feared any “great dark faced mobs,” they dared night or day to “go beyond their own roof trees.” They never complained of assaults, and no mob was ever called into existence to avenge crimes against them. Before the world adjudges the Negro a moral monster, a vicious assailant of womanhood and a menace to the sacred precincts of home, the colored people ask the consideration of the silent record of gratitude, respect, protection and devotion of the millions of the race in the South, to the thousands of northern white women who have served as teachers and missionaries since the war.

The Negro may not have known what chivalry was, but he knew enough to preserve inviolate the womanhood of the South which was entrusted to his hands during the war. The finer sensibilities of his soul may have been crushed out by years of slavery, but his heart was full of gratitude to the white women of the North, who blessed his home and inspired his soul in all these years of freedom. Faithful to his trust in both of these instances, he should now have the impartial ear of the civilized world, when he dares to speak for himself as against the infamy wherewith he stands charged.

It is his regret, that, in his own defense, he must disclose to the world that degree of dehumanizing brutality which fixes upon America the blot of a national crime. Whatever faults and failings other nations may have in their dealings with their own subjects or with other people, no other civilized nation stands condemned before the world with a series of crimes so peculiarly national. It becomes a painful duty of the Negro to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.

These pages are written in no spirit of vindictiveness, for all who give the subject consideration must concede that far too serious is the condition of that civilized government in which the spirit of unrestrained outlawry constantly increases in violence, and casts its blight over a continually growing area of territory. We plead not for the colored people alone, but for all victims of the terrible injustice which puts men and women to death without form of law. During the year 1894, there were 132 persons executed in the United States by due form of law, while in the same year, 197 Page 275 →persons were put to death by mobs who gave the victims no opportunity to make a lawful defense. No comment need be made upon a condition of public sentiment responsible for such alarming results.

The purpose of the pages which follow shall be to give the record which has been made, not by colored men, but that which is the result of compilations made by white men, of reports sent over the civilized world by white men in the South. Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned. For a number of years the Chicago Tribune, admittedly one of the leading journals of America, has made a specialty of the compilation of statistics touching upon lynching. The data compiled by that journal and published to the world January 1st, 1894, up to the present time has not been disputed. In order to be safe from the charge of exaggeration, the incidents hereinafter reported have been confined to those vouched for by the Tribune.

Chapter VI. History of Some Cases of Rape

It has been claimed that the Southern white women have been slandered because, in defending the Negro race from the charge that all colored men, who are lynched, only pay penalty for assaulting women. It is certain that lynching mobs have not only refused to give the Negro a chance to defend himself, but have killed their victim with a full knowledge that the relationship of the alleged assailant with the woman who accused him, was voluntary and clandestine. As a matter of fact, one of the prime causes of the Lynch Law agitation has been a necessity for defending the Negro from this awful charge against him. This defense has been necessary because the apologists for outlawry insist that in no case has the accusing woman been a willing consort of her paramour, who is lynched because overtaken in wrong. It is well known, however, that such is the case. In July of this year, 1894, John Paul Bocock, a Southern white man living in New York, and assistant editor of the New York Tribune, took occasion to defy the publication of any instance where the lynched Negro was the victim of a white womans falsehood. Such cases are not rare, but the press and people conversant with the facts, almost invariably suppress them.

The New York Sun of July 30th, 1894, contained a synopsis of interviews with leading congressmen and editors of the South. Speaker Crisp, of the House of Representatives, who was recently a Judge of the Supreme Court of Georgia, led in declaring that lynching seldom or never took place, save for vile crime against women and children. Dr. Hoss, editor of the leading organ of the Methodist Church South, published in its columns that it was his belief that more than three hundred women had been assaulted by Negro men within three months. When asked to prove his charges, or give a single case upon which his “belief’ was founded, he said that he could do so, but the details were unfit for publication. No other evidence but his “belief” could be adduced to substantiate this grave charge, yet Bishop Haygood, in the Forum of October, 1893, quotes this “belief” in apology for lynching, and voluntarily adds: “It is my opinion that this is an underestimate.” The “opinion” of this man, based upon a “belief,” had greater weight coming from a man who has posed as a friend to “Our Brother in Black,” and was accepted as authority. An interview of Miss Frances E. Willard, the great apostle of temperance, the daughter of abolitionists and a personal friend and helper of many individual colored people, has been quoted in support of the utterance of this calumny against a weak and defenseless race. In the New York Voice of October 23, 1890, after a tour in the South, where she was told all these things by the “best white people,” she said: “The grogshop is the Negro’s center of power. Better whisky and more of it is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grogshop is its center of power. The safety of woman, of childhood, the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.”

These charges so often reiterated, have had the effect of fastening the odium upon the race of a peculiar propensity for this foul crime. The Negro is thus forced to a defense of his good name.... He is not the aggressor in this fight, but the situation demands that the facts be given, and they will speak for themselves. Of the 1, 115 Negro men, women and children hanged, shot and roasted alive from January 1st, 1882, to January 1st, 1894, inclusive, only 348 of that number were charged with rape. Nearly 700 of these persons were lynched for any other reason which could be manufactured by a mob wishing to indulge in a lynching bee....

Chapter VIII. Miss Willard’s Attitude

No class of American citizens stands in greater need of the humane and thoughtful consideration of all sections of our country than do the colored people, nor does any class exceed us in the measure of grateful regard for acts of kindly interest in our behalf. It is, therefore, to us, a matter of keen regret that a Christian organization so large and influential as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, should refuse to give its sympathy and support to our oppressed people who ask no further favor than the promotion of public sentiment which shall guarantee to every person accused of Page 276 →crime the safeguard of a fair and impartial trial, and protection from butchery by brutal mobs. Accustomed as we are to the indifference and apathy of Christian people, we would bear this instance of ill fortune in silence, had not Miss Willard gone out of her way to antagonize the cause so dear to our hearts by including in her Annual Address to the W.C.T.U. Convention at Cleveland, November 5, 1894, a studied, unjust and wholly unwarranted attack upon our work.

In her address Miss Willard said:

THE ZEAL FOR HER RACE OF MISS IDA B. WELLS, A BRIGHT YOUNG COLORED WOMAN, HAS, IT SEEMS TO ME, CLOUDED HER PERCEPTION AS TO WHO WERE HER FRIENDS AND WELL-WISHERS IN ALL HIGH-MINDED AND LEGITIMATE EFFORTS TO BANISH THE ABOMINATION OF LYNCHING AND TORTURE FROM THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE. IT IS MY FIRM BELIEF THAT IN THE STATEMENTS MADE BY MISS WELLS CONCERNING WHITE WOMEN HAVING TAKEN THE INITIATIVE IN NAMELESS ACTS BETWEEN THE RACES SHE HAS PUT AN IMPUTATION UPON HALF THE WHITE RACE IN THIS COUNTRY THAT IS UNJUST, AND, SAVE IN THE RAREST EXCEPTIONAL INSTANCES, WHOLLY WITHOUT FOUNDATION. THIS IS THE UNANIMOUS OPINION OF THE MOST DISINTERESTED AND OBSERVANT LEADERS OF OPINION WHOM I HAVE CONSULTED ON THE SUBJECT, AND I DO NOT FEAR TO SAY THAT THE LAUDABLE EFFORTS SHE IS MAKING ARE GREATLY HANDICAPPED BY STATEMENTS OF THIS KIND, NOR TO URGE HER AS A FRIEND AND WELL-WISHER TO BANISH FROM HER VOCABULARY ALL SUCH ALLUSIONS AS A SOURCE OF WEAKNESS TO THE CAUSE SHE HAS AT HEART.

This paragraph, brief as it is, contains two statements which have not the slightest foundation in fact. At no time, nor in any place, have I made statements “concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races.” Further, at no time, or place nor under any circumstance, have I directly or inferentially “put an imputation upon half the white race in this country” and I challenge this “friend and well-wisher” to give proof of the truth of her charge. Miss Willard protests against lynching in one paragraph and then, in the next, deliberately misrepresents my position in order that she may criticise a movement, whose only purpose is to protect our oppressed race from vindictive slander and Lynch Law.

What I have said and what I now repeat—in answer to her first charge—is, that colored men have been lynched for assault upon women, when the facts were plain that the relationship between the victim lynched and the alleged victim of his assault was voluntary, clandestine and illicit. For that very reason we maintain, that, in every section of our land, the accused should have a fair, impartial trial, so that a man who is colored shall not be hanged for an offense, which, if he were white, would not be adjudged a crime. Facts cited in another chapter—“History of Some Cases of Rape” —amply maintain this position. The publication of these facts in defense of the good name of the race casts no “imputation upon half the white race in this country” and no such imputation can be inferred except by persons deliberately determined to be unjust.

But this is not the only injury which this cause has suffered at the hands of our “friend and well-wisher.” It has been said that the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the most powerful organization of women in America, was misrepresented by me while I was in England. Miss Willard was in England at the time and-knowing that no such misrepresentation came to her notice, she has permitted that impression to become fixed and widespread, when a word from her would have made the facts plain.

I never at any time or place or in any way misrepresented that organization. When asked what concerted action had been taken by churches and great moral agencies in America to put down Lynch Law, I was compelled in truth to say that no such action had occurred, that pulpit, press and moral agencies in the main were silent and for reasons known to themselves, ignored the awful conditions which to the English people appeared so abhorrent. Then the question was asked what the great moral reformers like Miss Frances Willard and Mr. Moody had done to suppress Lynch Law and again I answered—nothing. That Mr. Moody had never said a word against lynching in any of his trips to the South, or in the North either, so far as was known, and that Miss Willards only public utterance on the situation had condoned lynching and other unjust practices of the South against the Negro. When proof of these statements was demanded, I sent a letter containing a copy of the New York Voice, Oct, 23, 1890, in which appeared Miss Willards own words of wholesale slander against the colored race and condonation of Southern white people's outrages against us. My letter in part reads as follows:

But Miss Willard, the great temperance leader, went even further in putting the seal of her approval upon the southerners' method of dealing with the Negro. In October, 1890, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union held its national meeting at Atlanta, Georgia. It was the first time in the history of the organization that it had gone south for a national meeting, and met the southerners in their own homes. They were welcomed with open arms. The governor of the state and the legislature gave special audiences in the halls of state legislation to the temperance workers. They set out to capture the northerners to their way of seeing things, and without troubling to hear the Negro side of the question, these temperance people accepted the white man's story of the problem with which he had to deal. State organizers were appointed that year, Page 277 →who had gone through the southern states since then, but in obedience to southern prejudices have confined their work to white persons only. It is only after Negroes are in prison for crimes that efforts of these temperance women are exerted without regard to "race, color, or previous condition.” No "ounce of prevention” is used in their case; they are black, and if these women went among the Negroes for this work, the whites would not receive them. Except here and there, are found no temperance workers of the Negro race; "the great dark-faced mobs” are left the easy prey of the saloonkeepers.

There was pending in the National Congress at this time a Federal Election Bill, the object being to give the National Government control of the national elections in the several states. Had this bill become a law, the Negro, whose vote has been systematically suppressed since 1875 in the southern states, would have had the protection of the National Government, and his vote counted. The South would have been no longer "solid”; the Southerners saw that the balance of power which they unlawfully held in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, based on the Negro population, would be wrested from them. So they nick-named the pending elections law the "Force Bill”—probably because it would force them to disgorge their ill-gotten political gains—and defeated it. While it was being discussed, the question was submitted to Miss Willard: "What do you think of the race problem and the Force Bill?”

Said Miss Willard: "Now, as to the 'race problem’ in its minified, current meaning, I am a true lover of the southern people—have spoken and worked in, perhaps, 200 of their towns and cities; have been taken into their love and confidence at scores of hospitable firesides; have heard them pour out their hearts in the splendid frankness of their impetuous natures. And I have said to them at such times: 'When I go North there will be wafted to you no word from pen or voice that is not loyal to what we are saying here and now.’ Going South, a woman, a temperance woman, and a Northern temperance woman—three great barriers to their good will yonder—I was received by them with a confidence that was one of the most delightful surprises of my life. I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean to do so. The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by putting no safeguards on the ballot box at the North that would sift out alien illiterates. They rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their sceptre. It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it fair that a plantation Negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule, should be entrusted with the ballot. We ought to have put an educational test upon that ballot from the first. The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be dominated by the Negro so long as his altitude reaches no higher than the personal liberty of the saloon, and the power of appreciating the amount of liquor that a dollar will buy. New England would no more submit to this than South Carolina. 'Better whisky and more of it’ has been the rallying cry of great dark-faced mobs in the Southern localities where local option was snowed under by the colored vote. Temperance has no enemy like that, for it is unreasoning and unreasonable. Tonight it promises in a great congregation to vote for temperance at the polls tomorrow; but tomorrow twenty-five cents changes that vote in favor of the liquor-seller.

"I pity the southerners, and I believe the great mass of them are as conscientious and kindly-intentioned toward the colored man as an equal number of white church-members of the North. Would-be demagogues lead the colored people to destruction. Half-drunken white roughs murder them at the polls, or intimidate them so that they do not vote. But the better class of people must not be blamed for this, and a more thoroughly American population than the Christian people of the South does not exist. They have the traditions, the kindness, the probity, the courage of our forefathers. The problem on their hands is immeasurable. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grogshop is its center of power. 'The safety of woman, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that the men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.’ How little we know of all this, seated in comfort and affluence here at the North, descanting upon the rights of every man to cast one vote and have it fairly counted; that well-worn shibboleth invoked once more to dodge a living issue.

"The fact is that illiterate colored men will not vote at the South until the white population chooses to have them do so; and under similar conditions they would not at the North.” Here we have Miss Willard’s words in full, condoning fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hanging and burning; for all these things are done and being done now by the Southern white people. She does not stop there, but goes a step further to aid them in blackening the good name of an entire race, as shown by the sentences quoted in the paragraph above. These utterances, for which the colored people have never forgiven Miss Willard, and which Frederick Douglass has denounced as false, are to be found in full in the Voice of October 23, 1890, a temperance organ published at New York City.

This letter appeared in the May number of Fraternity, the organ of the first Anti-Lynching society of Great Britain. When Lady Henry Somerset learned through Miss Florence Balgarnie that this letter had been published she informed me that if the interview was published she would take steps to let the public know that my statements must be received with caution. As I had no money to pay the printer to suppress the edition which was already published and these ladies did not care to do so, the May number of Fraternity was sent to its subscribers as usual. Three days later there appeared in the daily Westminster Gazette an “interview” with Miss Willard, written by Lady Henry Somerset, which was so subtly unjust in its wording that I was forced to reply in my own defense. In that reply I made only statements which, like those concerning Miss Willard’s Voice interview, have not been and cannot be denied. It was as follows:

LADY HENRY SOMERSET’S INTERVIEW WITH MISS WILLARD

To THE EDITOR OF THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE: SIR— THE INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN YOUR COLUMNS TODAY HARDLY MERITS A REPLY, BECAUSE OF THE INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING MANIFESTED. TWO LADIES ARE REPRESENTED SITTING UNDER A TREE AT REIGATE, AND, AFTER SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THE TERRIBLE SUBJECT OF LYNCHING, MISS WILLARD LAUGHINGLY REPLIES BY CRACKING A JOKE. AND THE CONCLUDING SENTENCE OF THE INTERVIEW SHOWS THE OBJECT IS NOT TO DETERMINE HOW BEST THEY MAY HELP THE NEGRO WHO IS BEING HANGED, SHOT AND BURNED, BUT “TO GUARD MISS WILLARD’S REPUTATION.”

WITH ME IT IS NOT MYSELF NOR MY REPUTATION, BUT THE LIFE OF MY PEOPLE, WHICH IS AT STAKE AND I AFFIRM THAT THIS IS THE FIRST TIME TO MY KNOWLEDGE THAT MISS WILLARD HAS SAID A SINGLE WORD IN DENUNCIATION OF LYNCHING OR DEMAND FOR LAW. THE YEAR 1890, THE ONE IN WHICH THE INTERVIEW APPEARS, HAD A LARGER LYNCHING RECORD THAN ANY PREVIOUS YEAR, AND THE NUMBER AND TERRITORY HAVE INCREASED, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE HUMAN BEINGS BURNT ALIVE.

IF SO EARNEST AS SHE WOULD HAVE THE ENGLISH PUBLIC BELIEVE HER TO BE, WHY WAS SHE SILENT WHEN FIVE MINUTES WERE GIVEN ME TO SPEAK LAST JUNE AT PRINCES’ HALL, AND IN HOLBORN TOWN HALL THIS MAY? I SHOULD SAY IT WAS AS PRESIDENT OF THE WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION OF AMERICA SHE IS TIMID, BECAUSE ALL THESE UNIONS IN THE SOUTH EMPHASIZE THE HATRED OF THE NEGRO BY EXCLUDING HIM. THERE IS NOT A SINGLE COLORED WOMAN ADMITTED TO THE SOUTHERN W.C.T.U., BUT STILL MISS WILLARD BLAMES THE NEGRO FOR THE DEFEAT OF PROHIBITION IN THE SOUTH. MISS WILLARD QUOTES FROM FRATERNITY, BUT FORGETS TO ADD MY IMMEDIATE RECOGNITION OF HER PRESENCE ON THE PLATFORM AT HOLBORN TOWN HALL, WHEN, AMIDST MANY OTHER RESOLUTIONS ON TEMPERANCE AND OTHER SUBJECTS IN WHICH SHE IS INTERESTED, TIME WAS GRANTED TO CARRY AN ANTI-LYNCHING RESOLUTION. I WAS SO THANKFUL FOR THIS CRUMB OF HER SPEECHLESS PRESENCE THAT I HURRIED OFF TO THE EDITOR OF FRATERNITY AND ADDED A POSTSCRIPT TO MY ARTICLE BLAZONING FORTH THAT FACT.

ANY STATEMENTS I HAVE MADE CONCERNING MISS WIL-LARD ARE CONFIRMED BY THE HON. FREDERICK DOUGLASS (LATE UNITED STATES MINISTER TO HAYTI) IN A SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIM IN WASHINGTON IN JANUARY OF THIS YEAR, WHICH HAS SINCE BEEN PUBLISHED IN A PAMPHLET. THE FACT IS, MISS WILLARD IS NO BETTER OR WORSE THAN THE GREAT BULK OF WHITE AMERICANS ON THE NEGRO QUESTIONS. THEY ARE ALL AFRAID TO SPEAK OUT, AND IT IS ONLY BRITISH PUBLIC OPINION WHICH WILL MOVE THEM, AS I AM THANKFUL TO SEE IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN TO MOVE MISS WILLARD. I AM, ETC.,

MAY 21.         IDA B. WELLS.

Unable to deny the truth of these assertions, the charge has been made that I have attacked Miss Willard and misrepresented the W.C.T.U. If to state facts is misrepresentation, then I plead guilty to the charge.

I said then and repeat now, that in all the ten terrible years of shooting, hanging and burning of men, women and children in America, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union never suggested one plan or made one move to prevent those awful crimes. If this statement is untrue the records of that organization would disprove it before the ink is dry. It is clearly an issue of fact and in all fairness this charge of misrepresentation should either be substantiated or withdrawn.

It is not necessary, however, to make any representation concerning the W.C.T.U. and the lynching question. The record of that organization speaks for itself. During all the years prior to the agitation begun against Lynch Law, in which years men, women and children were scourged, hanged, shot and burned, the W.C.T.U. had no word, either of pity or protest; its great heart, which concerns itself about humanity the world over, was, toward our cause, pulseless as a stone. Let those who deny this speak by the record. Not until after the first British campaign, in 1893, was even a resolution passed by the body which is the self-constituted guardian for “God, home and native land.”

Nor need we go back to other years. The annual session of that organization held in Cleveland in November, 1894, made a record which confirms and emphasizes the silence charged against it. At that session, earnest efforts were made to secure the adoption of a resolution of protest against lynching. At that very time two men were being tried for the murder of six colored men who were arrested on charge of barn burning, chained together, and on pretense of being taken to jail, were driven into the woods where they were ambushed and all six shot to death. The six widows of the butchered men had just finished the most pathetic recital ever heard in any court room, and the mute appeal of twenty-seven orphans for justice touched the stoutest hearts. Only two weeks prior to the session, Gov. Jones of Alabama, in his last message to the retiring state legislature, cited the fact that in the two years just past, nine colored men had been taken from the legal authorities by lynching mobs and butchered Page 279 →in cold blood—and not one of these victims was even charged with an assault upon womanhood.

It was thought that this great organization, in face of these facts, would not hesitate to place itself on record in a resolution of protest against this awful brutality towards colored people. Miss Willard gave assurance that such a resolution would be adopted, and that assurance was relied on. The record of the session shows in what good faith that assurance was kept. After recommending an expression against Lynch Law, the President attacked the anti-lynching movement, deliberately misrepresenting my position, and in her annual address, charging me with a statement I never made.

Further than that, when the committee on resolutions reported their work, not a word was said against lynching. In the interest of the cause I smothered the resentment I felt because of the unwarranted and unjust attack of the President, and labored with members to secure an expression of some kind, tending to abate the awful slaughter of my race. A resolution against lynching was introduced by Mrs. Fessenden and read, and then that great Christian body, which in its resolutions had expressed itself in opposition to the social amusement of card playing, athletic sports and promiscuous dancing; had protested against the licensing of saloons, inveighed against tobacco, pledged its allegiance to the Prohibition party, and thanked the Populist party in Kansas, the Republican party in California and the Democratic party in the South, wholly ignored the seven millions of colored people of this country whose plea was for a word of sympathy and support for the movement in their behalf. The resolution was not adopted, and the convention adjourned.

In the Union Signal Dec. 6, 1894, among the resolutions is found this one:

RESOLVED, THAT THE NATIONAL W.C.T.U., WHICH HAS FOR YEARS COUNTED AMONG ITS DEPARTMENTS THAT OF PEACE AND ARBITRATION, IS UTTERLY OPPOSED TO ALL LAWLESS ACTS IN ANY AND ALL PARTS OF OUR COMMON LANDS AND IT URGES THESE PRINCIPLES UPON THE PUBLIC, PRAYING THAT THE TIME MAY SPEEDILY COME WHEN NO HUMAN BEING SHALL BE CONDEMNED WITHOUT DUE PROCESS OF LAW; AND WHEN THE UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGES WHICH HAVE SO OFTEN PROVOKED SUCH LAWLESSNESS SHALL BE BANISHED FROM THE WORLD, AND CHILDHOOD, MAIDENHOOD AND WOMANHOOD SHALL NO MORE BE THE VICTIMS OF ATROCITIES WORSE THAN DEATH.

This is not the resolution offered by Mrs. Fessenden. She offered the one passed last year by the W.C.T.U. which was a strong unequivocal denunciation of lynching. But she was told by the chairman of the committee on resolutions, MTS. Rounds, that there was already a lynching resolution in the hands of the committee. Mrs. Fessenden yielded the floor on that assurance, and no resolution of any kind against lynching was submitted and none was voted upon, not even the one above, taken from the columns of the Union Signal, the organ of the national W.C.T.U.!

Even the wording of this resolution which was printed by the W.C.T.U., reiterates the false and unjust charge which has been so often made as an excuse for lynchers. Statistics show that less than one-third of the lynching victims are hanged, shot and burned alive for "unspeakable outrages against womanhood, maidenhood and childhood"; and that nearly a thousand, including women and children, have been lynched upon any pretext whatsoever; and that all have met death upon the unsupported word of white men and women. Despite these facts this resolution which was printed, cloaks an apology for lawlessness, in the same paragraph which affects to condemn it, where it speaks of "the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness.”

Miss Willard told me the day before the resolutions were offered that the Southern women present had held a caucus that day. This was after I, as fraternal delegate from the Woman’s Mite Missionary Society of the A.M.E. Church at Cleveland, O., had been introduced to tender its greetings. In so doing I expressed the hope of the colored women that the W.C.T.U. would place itself on record as opposed to lynching which robbed them of husbands, fathers, brothers and sons and in many cases of women as well. No note was made either in the daily papers or the Union Signal of that introduction and greeting, although every other incident of that morning was published. The failure to submit a lynching resolution and the wording of the one above appears to have been the result of that Southern caucus.

On the same day I had a private talk with Miss Willard and told her she had been unjust to me and the cause in her annual address, and asked that she correct the statement that I had misrepresented the W.C.T.U., or that I had "put an imputation on one-half the white race in this country.” She said that somebody in England told her it was a pity that I attacked the white women of America. "Oh,” said I, "then you went out of your way to prejudice me and my cause in your annual address, not upon what you had heard me say, but what somebody had told you I said?” Her reply was that I must not blame her for her rhetorical expressions—that I had my way of expressing things and she had hers. I told her I most assuredly did blame her when those expressions were calculated to do such harm. I waited for an honest, an unequivocal retraction of her statements based on "hearsay.” Not a word of retraction or explanation was said in the convention and I remained misrepresented before that body through her connivance and consent.

The editorial notes in the Union Signal, Dec. 6, 1894, however, contains the following:

IN HER REPUDIATION OF THE CHARGES BROUGHT BY MISS IDA WELLS AGAINST WHITE WOMEN AS HAVING TAKEN THE INITIATIVE IN NAMELESS CRIMES BETWEEN THE RACES, MISS WILLARD SAID IN HER ANNUAL ADDRESS THAT ‘THIS STATEMENT PUT AN UNJUST IMPUTATION UPON HALF THE WHITE RACE’. BUT AS THIS EXPRESSION HAS BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD SHE DESIRES TO DECLARE THAT SHE DID NOT INTEND A LITERAL INTERPRETATION TO BE GIVEN TO THE LANGUAGE USED, BUT EMPLOYED IT TO EXPRESS A TENDENCY THAT MIGHT ENSUE IN PUBLIC THOUGHT AS A RESULT OF UTTERANCES SO SWEEPING AS SOME THAT HAVE BEEN MADE BY MISS WELLS.

Because this explanation is as unjust as the original offense, I am forced in self-defense to submit this account of differences. I desire no quarrel with the W.C.T.U., but my love for the truth is greater than my regard for an alleged friend who, through ignorance or design misrepresents in the most harmful way the cause of a long suffering race, and then unable to maintain the truth of her attack excuses herself as it were by the wave of the hand, declaring that “she did not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used.” When the lives of men, women and children are at stake, when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the obloque of the most infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today and tomorrow to repudiate the apology by declaring it a figure of speech.

Chapter X. The Remedy

It is a well established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy. Herein rests our respect for law. The Negro does not claim that all of the one thousand black men, women and children, who have been hanged, shot and burned alive during the past ten years, were innocent of the charges made against them. We have associated too long with the white man not to have copied his vices as well as his virtues. But we do insist that the punishment is not the same for both classes of criminals. In lynching, opportunity is not given the Negro to defend himself against the unsupported accusations of white men and women. The word of the accuser is held to be true and the excited blood-thirsty mob demands that the rule of law be reversed and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the victim of their hate and revenge must prove himself innocent. No evidence he can offer will satisfy the mob; he is bound hand and foot and swung into eternity. Then to excuse its infamy, the mob almost invariably reports the monstrous falsehood that its victim made a full confession before he was hanged.

With all military, legal and political power in their hands, only two of the lynching States have attempted a check by exercising the power which is theirs. Mayor Trout, of Roanoke, Virginia, called out the militia in 1893, to protect a Negro prisoner, and in so doing nine men were killed and a number wounded. Then the mayor and militia withdrew, left the Negro to his fate and he was promptly lynched. The business men realized the blow to the town’s financial interests, called the mayor home, the grand jury indicted and prosecuted the ringleaders of the mob. They were given light sentences, the highest being one of twelve months in State prison. The day he arrived at the penitentiary, he was pardoned by the governor of the State.

The only other real attempt made by the authorities to protect a prisoner of the law, and which was more successful, was that of Gov. McKinley, of Ohio, who sent the militia to Washington Courthouse, O., in October, 1894, and five men were killed and twenty wounded in maintaining the principle that the law must be upheld.

In South Carolina, in April, 1893, Gov. Tillman aided the mob by yielding up to be killed, a prisoner of the law, who had voluntarily placed himself under the Governor’s protection. Public sentiment by its representatives has encouraged Lynch Law, and upon the revolution of this sentiment we must depend for its abolition.

Therefore, we demand a fair trial by law for those accused of crime, and punishment by law after honest conviction. No maudlin sympathy for criminals is solicited, but we do ask that the law shall punish all alike. We earnestly desire those that control the forces which make public sentiment to join with us in the demand. Surely the humanitarian spirit of this country which reaches out to denounce the treatment of the Russian Jews, the Armenian Christians, the laboring poor of Europe, the Siberian exiles and the native women of India—will not longer refuse to lift its voice on this subject. If it were known that the cannibals or the savage Indians had burned three human beings alive in the past two years, the whole of Christendom would be roused, to devise ways and means to put a stop to it. Can you remain silent and inactive when such things are done in our own community and country? Is your duty to humanity in the United States less binding?

What can you do, reader, to prevent lynching, to thwart anarchy and promote law and order throughout our land?

1^st. You can help disseminate the facts contained in this book by bringing them to the knowledge of every one with whom you come in contact, to the end that public sentiment may be revolutionized. Let the facts speak for themselves, with you as a medium.

2d. You can be instrumental in having churches, Page 281 →missionary societies, Y. M. C. A.’s, W.C.T.U’s and all Christian and moral forces in connection with your religious and social life, pass resolutions of condemnation and protest every time a lynching takes place; and see that they are sent to the place where these outrages occur.

3d. Bring to the intelligent consideration of Southern people the refusal of capital to invest where lawlessness and mob violence hold sway. Many labor organizations have declared by resolution that they would avoid lynch infested localities as they would the pestilence when seeking new homes. If the South wishes to build up its waste places quickly, there is no better way than to uphold the majesty of the law by enforcing obedience to the same, and meting out the same punishment to all classes of criminals, white as well as black. "Equality before the law,” must become a fact as well as a theory before America is truly the "land of the free and the home of the brave.”

4^th. Think and act on independent lines in this behalf, remembering that after all, it is the white man's civilization and the white man's government which are on trial. This crusade will determine whether that civilization can maintain itself by itself, or whether anarchy shall prevail; whether this Nation shall write itself down a success at self government, or in deepest humiliation admit its failure complete; whether the precepts and theories of Christianity are professed and practiced by American white people as Golden Rules of thought and action, or adopted as a system of morals to be preached to heathen until they attain to the intelligence which needs the system of Lynch Law.

5^th. Congressman Blair offered a resolution in the House of Representatives, August, 1894. The organized life of the country can speedily make this a law by sending resolutions to Congress indorsing Mr. Blair’s bill and asking Congress to create the commission. In no better way can the question be settled, and the Negro does not fear the issues. The following is the resolution:

"Resolved, By the House of Representatives and Senate in congress assembled, That the committee on labor be instructed to investigate and report the number, location and date of all alleged assaults by males upon females throughout the country during the ten years last preceding the passing of this joint resolution, for or on account of which organized but unlawful violence has been inflicted or attempted to be inflicted. Also to ascertain and report all facts of organized but unlawful violence to the person, with the attendant facts and circumstances, which have been inflicted upon accused persons alleged to have been guilty of crimes punishable by due process of law which have taken place in any part of the country within the ten years last preceding the passage of this resolution. Such investigation shall be made by the usual methods and agencies of the Department of Labor, and report made to Congress as soon as the work can be satisfactorily done, and the sum of $25,000, or so much thereof as may be necessary, is hereby appropriated to pay the expenses out of any money in the treasury not otherwise appropriated.”

The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade....