The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
History
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
Since Mr. Brann's assassination I have seen it charged
in some papers, notably one bearing the word Christian
at its head, that he was killed because he had slandered
his slayer's daughter, and then follows a lot of hypocritical
rot about regretting bloodshed, but that there was an
unwritten law that required the death of a man who
would slander the female relatives of another. A greater
falsehood was never published in even a pious Christian
weekly. He never mentioned the name of any woman connected
with Baylor except the Brazilian girl, and her case
was in the courts, and while his friends deeply regretted
his unfortunate expression it neither justified his mobbing
or his murder. And in the judgment of all fair-minded
men, under the circumstances could have been more readily
construed to mean Antonio Tiexera than any other woman
on earth, for within Baylor's sacred precincts she had
been reduced to that condition to which, when a woman
arrives, men call her a Magdalene. If this was the motive
that prompted his slayer, I ask why he did not appeal
to the unwritten law sooner; he who appeals to it must
do so at the first information has been conveyed to him
that the wrong has been done and he cannot wait for
months and then use it as a defense, and I do not hesitate
to say that hundreds besides myself in this city do not
believe that this prompted his assassin, except to be used
as an excuse.
Mr. Brann loved Waco as he never loved any other
place; for he knew that within its borders could be found
as many brave, liberal-hearted men, pure and noble women
as could be found in any other spot on earth with the same
population. He loved it, for he said that here was the
first place he ever found a real home, and here was the
place he had for the first time been recompensed for his
toil by receiving over a bare subsistence. Now, did Waco
love Mr. Brann, or did it hold him the foul slanderer
of her purest and best, as some claimed him to be? Let
us see. Every effort was made to throw cold water on
any turnout to his funeral; it was told around the city
that no women would attend and that no flowers would
be sent, but what was the result? From his home to the
cemetery the sidewalks were crowded, save at Baylor
University, the place that is responsible for his death, and
hundreds of men and women who had no carriages walked
from his home over two miles to the cemetery, and when
the long funeral cortege passed within the gates, around
his grave was a sea of human faces unequaled in numbers
ever before gathered around any other grave in Waco.
Yet Waco had lately laid to rest within that cemetery
a man whom she dearly loved and on whom Texas had
been proud to confer her high places, a man who in bygone
years had so gallantly led her sons on so many bloody
fields. As to the flowers, no greater profusion was ever
seen on any other grave in Waco, or, perhaps, in Texas,
a tribute that the pure and stainless women of Waco paid
to the martyred dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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