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
"He'll get ten days in jail and suspended sentence."
Then there were voices:
"Let's go hang Mower and Miller"--the two judges.
This threat indeed, was frequently repeated both on the night of the
lynching and on the day following.
So the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail with a railroad
rail. This jail is said to be the strongest in Ohio, and having seen it, I
can well believe that the report is true. But steel bars have never yet
kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage
backed up by the consciousness of being right.
They murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they
dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a
telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots.
_Lesson of a Hanging Negro_
That was the end of that! Mob justice administered! And there the Negro
hung until daylight the next morning--an unspeakably grizzly, dangling
horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked
to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his
bare body: he dripped blood. And, with the crowds of men both here and at
the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys in
knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified but
curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: "A dead
nigger is a good nigger." And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most
despicable of all, was congratulating the public:
"It'll save the county a lot of money!"
Significant lessons, these, for the young!
But the mob wasn't through with its work. Easy people imagine that, having
hanged a Negro, the mob goes quietly about its business; but that is never
the way of the mob. Once released, the spirit of anarchy spreads and
spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished its full measure of evil.
_Mob Burning of Negro Saloons_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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