Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its PhasesWells-Barnett, Ida B.
History
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
Lynching
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 thread-bare 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; 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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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