The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 9, September, 1887Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 9, September, 1887
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
Here is a part of the account which a reporter of the Augusta
_Chronicle_ gives of a convict camp, in Richmond County, which he
has recently visited on a tour of investigation for his paper.
“Leaving the hospital the reporter went into a barn 80 by 20,
divided into two compartments, and they divided by a 10 foot alley.
The barn would not be given as a resting-place to a beast that is
prized by its owner, as the rain or sun could easily gain admission
through the top, and the openings in the sides so affected the
house that it gave no protection from the weather. On looking into
this place it was horrible to realize that a commonwealth like the
State of Georgia would allow the offenders against her laws to be
kept in so dirty and filthy a place as that in which the eighty
convicts at the camp of the A. and K. Railroad are placed. Along
the narrow aisles in the barn smouldering fires were burning, and
on the beds sat the prisoners. All of the convicts were seen.
They begged that their names would not be used, for they would be
lashed if it were known that they told of the treatment. They state
that Captain Starns uses the lash freely. Several testify that,
overcome with the heat, they stopped to rest and were taken out
and whipped. Attention was called to the cruel whipping of Chuck
Cooper, a mulatto about twenty-five years old, who was quartered
in the hospital. The reporter, without being noticed, repaired to
the hospital, and, being assured that the guards were not near at
hand, Chuck Cooper disrobed himself and showed huge scars left from
the lash, the skin being badly lacerated. Returning to the barn
the reporter inquired of Mr. Smith the cause of the filthy beds on
which the convicts slept. They were caked in dirt and as black and
as filthy as could be imagined. Mr. Smith, the guard, admitted that
the blankets and bedding had not been washed for several months,
although Mr. Shubrick had notified Captain Starns, and he had
promised two months ago to have new straw put in the beds and have
them washed. ‘It is seven months,’ Smith said, ‘since we left the
brick-yard, and the bedding has not been touched since.’”
And this is the kind of place to which the Georgia Legislature is
ready to send the trustees and teachers of Atlanta University!
WHAT THE PRESS HAS TO SAY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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