Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases — John Shaqi
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
Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss
Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of
her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed
dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape
as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. The case went to
the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men and they were
acquitted.
In Nashville, Tenn., there is a white man, Pat Hanifan, who outraged a
little Afro-American girl, and, from the physical injuries received, she
has been ruined for life. He was jailed for six months, discharged, and is
now a detective in that city. In the same city, last May, a white man
outraged an Afro-American girl in a drug store. He was arrested, and
released on bail at the trial. It was rumored that five hundred
Afro-Americans had organized to lynch him. Two hundred and fifty white
citizens armed themselves with Winchesters and guarded him. A cannon was
placed in front of his home, and the Buchanan Rifles (State Militia)
ordered to the scene for his protection. The Afro-American mob did not
materialize. Only two weeks before Eph. Grizzard, who had only been
_charged_ with rape upon a white woman, had been taken from the jail, with
Governor Buchanan and the police and militia standing by, dragged through
the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step, and
with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise, he was at last
swung out on the bridge with hands cut to pieces as he tried to climb up
the stanchions. A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the
nineteenth-century civilization of the Athens of the South! No cannon or
military was called out in his defense. He dared to visit a white woman.
At the very moment these civilized whites were announcing their
determination "to protect their wives and daughters," by murdering
Grizzard, a white man was in the same jail for raping eight-year-old
Maggie Reese, an Afro-American girl. He was not harmed. The "honor" of
grown women who were glad enough to be supported by the Grizzard boys and
Ed Coy, as long as the liaison was not known, needed protection; they were
white. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this
case; she was black.
A white man in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, two months ago inflicted such
injuries upon another Afro-American child that she died. He was not
punished, but an attempt was made in the same town in the month of June to
lynch an Afro-American who visited a white woman.
In Memphis, Tenn., in the month of June, Ellerton L. Dorr, who is the
husband of Russell Hancock's widow, was arrested for attempted rape on
Mattie Cole, a neighbors cook; he was only prevented from accomplishing
his purpose, by the appearance of Mattie's employer. Dorr's friends say he
was drunk and not responsible for his actions. The grand jury refused to
indict him and he was discharged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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