Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching StatisticsWells-Barnett, Ida B.
History
Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
Lynching
The Atlanta Constitution, in speaking of the murder of Cranford, said that
the Negro who was suspected would be burned alive. Not only this, but it
offered $500 reward for his capture. After he had been apprehended, it was
publicly announced that he would be burned alive. Excursion trains were
run and bulletins were put up in the small towns. The Governor of Georgia
was in Atlanta while excursion trains were being made up to take visitors
to the burning. Many fair ladies drove out in their carriages on Sunday
afternoon to witness the torture and burning of a human being. Hose's ears
were cut off, then his toes and fingers, and passed round to the crowd.
His eyes were put out, his tongue torn out and flesh cut in strips by
knives. Finally they poured coal oil on him and burned him to death. They
dragged his half-consumed trunk out of the flames, cut it open, extracted
his heart and liver, and sold slices for ten cents each for souvenirs, all
of which was published most promptly in the daily papers of Georgia and
boasted over by the people of that section.
Oct. 19, 1889, at Canton, Miss., Joseph Leflore was burned to death. A
house had been entered and its occupants murdered during the absence of
the husband and father. When the discovery was made, it was immediately
supposed that the crime was the work of a Negro, and the motive that of
assaulting white women.
Bloodhounds were procured and they made a round of the village and
discovered only one colored man absent from his home. This was taken to be
proof sufficient that he was the perpetrator of the deed. When he returned
home he was apprehended, taken into the yard of the house that had been
burned down, tied to a stake, and was slowly roasted to death.
Dec. 6, 1899, at Maysville, Ky., Wm. Coleman also was burned to death. He
was slowly roasted, first one foot and then the other, and dragged out of
the fire so that the torture might be prolonged. All of this without a
shadow of proof or scintilla of evidence that the man had committed the
crime.
Thus have the mobs of this country taken the lives of their victims within
the past ten years. In every single instance except one these burnings
were witnessed by from two thousand to fifteen thousand people, and no one
person in all these crowds throughout the country had the courage to raise
his voice and speak out against the awful barbarism of burning human
beings to death.
Men and women of America, are you proud of this record which the
Anglo-Saxon race has made for itself? Your silence seems to say that you
are. Your silence encourages a continuance of this sort of horror. Only by
earnest, active, united endeavor to arouse public sentiment can we hope to
put a stop to these demonstrations of American barbarism.
+LYNCHING RECORD+
The following table of lynchings has been kept year by year by the Chicago
Tribune, beginning with 1882, and shows the list of Negroes that have been
lynched during that time:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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