Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present CenturyGibbs, Mifflin Wistar
History
Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century
Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar
African Americans
story window, used for hoisting merchandise, the convicted criminals
were executed.
The means resorted to for the purification of the municipality were
drastic, but the ensuing feeling of personal safety and confidence in a
new administration appeared to be ample justification. Much has been
said and written in defense and in condemnation of revolutionary methods
for the reformation of government. It cannot but be apparent that when
it is impossible to execute the virtuous purposes of government, the
machinery having passed to notorious violators, who use it solely for
vicious purpose, there seems nothing left for the votaries of order than
to seize the reins with strong right arm and restore a status of justice
that should be the pride and glory of all civilized people.
But what a paradox is presented in the disregard for law and life today
in our common country, including much in our Southland! It is a sad
commentary on the weakness and inconsistencies of human nature and often
starts the inquiry in many honest minds, as a remedial agency, is a
republican form of government the most conducive in securing the
blessings of liberty of which protection to human life is the chief?
For the actual reverse of conditions that existed in California in those
early days are present in others of our States today. All the machinery
and ability for the just administration of the law are in the hands of
those appointed mainly by the ballot of the intelligence and virtue of
these States, who, if not participants, are quite as censurable for
their "masterly inactivity" in having allowed thousands of the most
defenceless to be lynched by hanging or burning at the stake. That there
have been cases of assault on women by Negroes for which they have been
lynched, it is needless to deny. That they have been lynched for
threatening to do bodily harm to white men for actual assaults on the
Negro wife and daughter is equally true. The first should be denounced
and arrested (escape being impossible) and by forms of law suffer its
extreme penalty. The other for the cause they were murdered should have
the highest admiration and the most sincere plaudits from every honest
man. Is it true that "he is a slave most base whose love of right is for
himself and not for all the race," and that the measure you mete out to
others--the same shall be your portion. All human history verifies these
aphorisms; and that the perpetrators and silent abettors of this
barbarism have sowed to the winds a dire penalty, already being reaped,
is evidenced by disregard of race or color of the victim when mob law is
in the ascendant. And further, as a salvo for their own acts, white men
are allowing bad Negroes to lynch others of their kind without enforcing
the law.
The Negro, apish in his affinity to his prototype in a "lynching bee,"
is beneath contempt.
[Illustration: HON. GEORGE H. WHITE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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