The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United StatesWells-Barnett, Ida B.
History
The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
African Americans -- History -- 1877-1964; Lynching -- United States; Lynching -- United States -- Statistics
The citizens determined to kill him. The mob gathered, went to the jail,
met with no resistance, took the suspected man, dragged him out tearing
every stitch of clothing from his body, then hanged him to a telegraph
pole. The grand jury refused to indict the lynchers though the names of
over twenty persons who were leaders in the mob were well known. In fact
twenty-two persons were indicted, but the grand jurors and the prosecuting
attorney disagreed as to the form of the indictments, which caused the
jurors to change their minds. All indictments were reconsidered and the
matter was dropped. Not one of the dozens of men prominent in that murder
have suffered a whit more inconvenience for the butchery of that man, than
they would have suffered for shooting a dog.
COLOR LINE JUSTICE
In Baltimore, Maryland, a gang of white ruffians assaulted a respectable
colored girl who was 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 a colored woman. The case went to the courts and
they were acquitted.
In Nashville, Tennessee, there was a white man, Pat Hanifan, who outraged
a little colored girl, and from the physical injuries received she was
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 a
colored girl in a drug store. He was arrested and released on bail at the
trial. It was rumored that five hundred colored men 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 colored mob did not show up. 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 that 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 bloodthirstiness of the nineteenth-century civilization of the Athens
of the South! No cannon nor military were called out in his defense. He
dared to visit a white woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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