Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
History
Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
All the stored-up racial animosity came seething to the surface; all the
personal grudges and spite. As I have already related, two Negro women
were whipped on the Sunday night before the lynching. On the day following
the lynching the father of the women was found seeking legal punishment
for the men who whipped his daughters, and he himself was taken out and
frightfully beaten. On the same day two other young Negroes, of the
especially hated "smart nigger" type, were caught and whipped--one for
riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, the other, as several citizens told me,
"on general principles." But this was not the worst. On Wednesday night an
old Negro man and his son--Negroes of the better class--were sitting in
their cabin some miles from Statesboro, when they were both shot at
through the window and badly wounded. Another respectable Negro, named
McBride, was visited in his home by a white mob, which first whipped his
wife, who was confined with a baby three days old, and then beat, kicked,
and shot McBride himself so horribly that he died the next day. The better
class of citizens, the same men who would, perhaps, condone the burning of
Reed and Cato, had no sympathy with this sort of thing. Some of them took
McBride's dying statement, and four white men were arrested and charged
with the murder; but never punished.
Indeed, the mob led directly to a general increase of crime in Bulloch
County. As Judge Daley said in his charge to a subsequent grand jury:
"Mob violence begets crime. Crime has been more prevalent since this
lynching than ever before. In the middle circuit the courts have been so
badly crowded with murder trials that it has been almost impossible to
attend to civil business."
Another evil result of the lynching was that it destroyed valuable
evidence. The prosecutors had hoped to learn from the convicted Reed and
Cato whether or not they had any companions and thereby bring to justice
all the other Negroes suspected of complicity in the murder of the Hodges.
If the Before Day Club ever existed and had a criminal purpose (which is
doubtful) most of the members who composed it were left at large, awaiting
the next opportunity to rob and murder.
_Mob Justice and the Cotton Crop_
Mob-law has not only represented a moral collapse in this community, but
it struck, also, at the sensitive pocket of the business interests of the
county. Frightened by the threatening attitude of the whites, the Negroes
began to leave the county. It was just at the beginning of the
cotton-picking season, when labour of every sort was much needed, Negro
labour especially. It would not do to frighten away all the Negroes. On
Thursday some of the officials and citizens of Statesboro got together,
appointed extra marshals, and gave notice that there were to be no more
whippings, and the mob spirit disappeared--until next time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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