Ida B.

Wells (1862-1931)
Excerpts from Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm

The daughter of former slaves, Ida B. Wells was a black woman journalist who, with two male
co-workers, edited the Free Speech and Headlight, an African American newspaper in Memphis,
Tenn., at the end of the 19th Century. Wells was one of many black and white pro-civil rights
journalists, writers, and activists who argued that white racial violence against blacks was not
the result of black rape of white women. Rather, as Wells argued below, the epidemic of anti-
black violence that swept the United States from just after the Civil War until well into the early
20th Century had to do with a range of other things,
including resentment of the political and economic
gains that should have been theoretically possible for
ex-slaves after emancipation.

In June of 1892, after she had published an unsigned

editorial in the Free Speech condemning the white
charge of rape against black men, Wells left town on
business. Later she heard that offended whites of
Memphis burned her paper to the ground and
threatened to lynch her. Her life now in danger Wells
fled to New York City, where she continued to write
and publish articles in absentia about race relations
and violence in the South. In her pamphlet Southern
Horrors Wells not only narrated her own ordeal, but
she also collected stories from white newspapers so
as to point out gaps and assumptions about African
Americans, based not on facts but on white
assumptions of black guilt.
____________________________________________________________________________
Preface
The greater part of what is contained in these pages was published in the New York Age June
25, 1892, in explanation of the editorial which the Memphis whites considered sufficiently
infamous to justify the destruction of my paper, the Free Speech.

Since the appearance of that statement, requests have come from all parts of the country that
"Exiled" (the name under which it then appeared) be issued in pamphlet form. Some donations
were made, but not enough for that purpose. The noble effort of the ladies of New York and
Brooklyn Oct. 5 have enabled me to comply with this request and give the world a true,
unvarnished account of the causes of lynch law in the South.

This statement is not a shield for the despoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor
 2

blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs. It is a

contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great
American Republic to demand that justice be done though the heavens fall.

It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must
show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have
fallen upon me to do so. The awful death-roll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling,
not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because
of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race.
The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving
this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for
justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a
service. Other considerations are of minor importance.

IDA B. WELLS
New York City, Oct. 26, 1892

THE OFFENSE
Wednesday evening May 24, 1892, the city of Memphis was filled with excitement. Editorials in
the daily papers of that date caused a meeting to be held in the Cotton Exchange Building; a
committee was sent for the editors of the Free Speech an Afro-American journal published in
that city, and the only reason the open threats of lynching that were made were not carried out
was because they could not be found. The cause of all this commotion was the following
editorial published in the Free Speech May 21, 1892, the Saturday previous.

“Eight negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech, one at
Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday morning where the citizens broke(?) into
the penitentiary and got their man; three near Anniston, Ala., one near
New Orleans; and three at Clarksville, Ga., the last three for killing a
white man, and five on the same old racket—the new alarm about
raping white women. The same programme of hanging, then shooting
bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter.
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; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very
damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

The Daily Commercial of Wednesday following, May 25, contained the following leader:

“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
 3

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
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of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.

Since my business has been destroyed and I am an exile from home because of that editorial,
the issue has been forced, and as the writer of it I feel that the race and the public generally
should have a statement of the facts as they exist. They will serve at the same time as a defense
for the Afro-Americans Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.

The whites of Montgomery, Ala., knew J.C. Duke sounded the keynote of the situation—which
they would gladly hide from the world, when he said in his paper, the Herald, five years ago:
"Why is it that white women attract negro men now more than in former days? There was a
time when such a thing was unheard of. There is a secret to this thing, and we greatly suspect it
is the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos." Mr. Duke, like the Free Speech
proprietors, was forced to leave the city for reflecting on the "honah" of white women and his
paper suppressed; but the truth remains that Afro-American men do not always rape(?) white
women without their consent.1

Mr. Duke, before leaving Montgomery, signed a card disclaiming any intention of slandering
Southern white women. The editor of the Free Speech has no disclaimer to enter, but asserts
instead that there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such
an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the
law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the
races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the
colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women.
White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but
because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

THE BLACK AND WHITE OF IT

The Cleveland Gazette of January 16, 1892, publishes a case in point. Mrs. J.S. Underwood, the
wife of a minister of Elyria, Ohio, accused an Afro-American of rape. She told her husband that
during his absence in 1888, stumping the State for the Prohibition Party, the man came to the
kitchen door, forced his way in the house and insulted her. She tried to drive him out with a
heavy poker, but he overpowered and chloroformed her, and when she revived her clothing
was torn and she was in a horrible condition. She did not know the man but could identify him.
She pointed out William Offett, a married man, who was arrested and, being in Ohio, was
granted a trial.

1
In this instance, Wells uses the word “rape” to indicate illicit sex generally. She is not claiming
that there are no instances of rape that occur, but that black men are accused of rape in cases
where sexual encounters were consensual. Often white women whose sexual encounters with
black men were discovered were pressured to accuse their lovers of rape. See esp. Martha
Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th Century South (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997).
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The prisoner vehemently denied the charge of rape, but confessed he went to Mrs.
Underwood's residence at her invitation and was criminally intimate with her at her request.
This availed him nothing against the sworn testimony of a ministers wife, a lady of the highest
respectability. He was found guilty, and entered the penitentiary, December 14, 1888, for
fifteen years. Some time afterwards the woman's remorse led her to confess to her husband
that the man was innocent.

These are her words:

I met Offett at the Post Office. It was raining. He was polite to me, and
as I had several bundles in my arms he offered to carry them home for
me, which he did. He had a strange fascination for me, and I invited
him to call on me. He called, bringing chestnuts and candy for the
children. By this means we got them to leave us alone in the room.
Then I sat on his lap. He made a proposal to me and I readily
consented. Why I did so, I do not know, but that I did is true. He visited
me several times after that and each time I was indiscreet. I did not
care after the first time. In fact I could not have resisted, and had no
desire to resist.

When asked by her husband why she told him she had been outraged, she said: "I had several
reasons for telling you. One was the neighbors saw the fellows here, another was, I was afraid I
had contracted a loathsome disease, and still another was that I feared I might give birth to a
Negro baby. I hoped to save my reputation by telling you a deliberate lie." Her husband
horrified by the confession had Offett, who had already served four years, released and secured
a divorce.

There are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern
white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-
Americans who consort with their women. A few instances to substantiate the assertion that
some white women love the company of the Afro-American will not be out of place. Most of
these cases were reported by the daily papers of the South.

In the winter of 1885-86 the wife of a practicing physician in Memphis, in good social standing
whose name has escaped me, left home, husband and children, and ran away with her black
coachman. She was with him a month before her husband found and brought her home. The
coachman could not be found. The doctor moved his family away from Memphis, and is living in
another city under an assumed name.

Sarah Clark of Memphis loved a black man and lived openly with him. When she was indicted
last spring for miscegenation, she swore in court that she was not a white woman. This she did
to escape the penitentiary and continued her illicit relation undisturbed. That she is of the
lower class of whites, does not disturb the fact that she is a white woman." The leading
 6

citizens" of Memphis are defending the "honor" of all white women, demi-monde included.

Since the manager of the Free Speech has been run away from Memphis by the guardians of
the honor of Southern white women, a young girl living on Poplar St., who was discovered in
intimate relations with a handsome mulatto young colored man, Will Morgan by name, stole
her father's money to send the young fellow away from that father's wrath. She has since
joined him in Chicago.

The Memphis Ledger for June 8 has the following:

“If Lillie Bailey, a rather pretty white girl seventeen years of age, who
is now at the City Hospital, would be somewhat less reserved about her
disgrace there would be some very nauseating details in the story of
her life. She is the mother of a little coon. The truth might reveal
fearful depravity or it might reveal the evidence of a rank outrage. She
will not divulge the name of the man who has left such black evidence
of her disgrace, and, in fact, says it is a matter in which there can be
no interest to the outside world. She came to Memphis nearly three
months ago and was taken in at the Woman's Refuge in the southern
part of the city. She remained there until a few weeks ago, when the
child was born. The ladies in charge of the Refuge were horified. The
girl was at once sent to the City Hospital, where she has been since
May 30. She is a country girl. She came to Memphis from her fathers
farm, a short distance from Hernando, Miss. Just when she left there
she would not say. In fact she says she came to Memphis from
Arkansas, and says her home is in that State. She is rather good
looking, has blue eyes, a low forehead and dark red hair. The ladies at
the Woman's Refuge do not know anything about the girl further than
what they learned when she was an inmate of the institution; and she
would not tell much. When the child was born an attempt was made to
get the girl to reveal the name of the Negro who had disgraced her,
she obstinately refused and it was impossible to elicit any information
from her on the subject.”

Note the wording. "The truth might reveal fearful depravity or rank outrage." If it had been a
white child or Lillie Bailey had told a pitiful story of Negro outrage, it would have been a case of
woman's weakness or assault and she could have remained at the Woman's Refuge. But a
Negro child and to withhold its father's name and thus prevent the killing of another Negro
"rapist." A case of "fearful depravity."

The very week the "leading citizens" of Memphis were making a spectacle of themselves in
defense of all white women of every kind, an Afro-American, M. Stricklin, was found in a white
woman's room in that city. Although she made no outcry of rape, he was jailed and would have
been lynched, but the woman stated she bought curtains of him (he was a furniture dealer) and
his business in her room that night was to put them up. A white woman's word was taken as
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absolutely in this case as when the cry of rape is made, and he was freed.

What is true of Memphis is true of the entire South. The daily papers last year reported a
farmer's wife in Alabama had given birth to a Negro child. When the Negro farm hand who was
plowing in the field heard it he took the mule from the plow and fled. The dispatches also told
of a woman in South Carolina who gave birth to a Negro child and charged three men with
being its father, every one of whom has since disappeared. In Tuscumbia, Ala., the colored boy
who was lynched there last year for assaulting a white girl told her before his accusers that he
had met her there in the woods often before.

Frank Weems of Chattanooga who was not lynched in May only because the prominent citizens
became his body guard until the doors of the penitentiary closed on him, had letters in his
pocket from the white woman in the case, making the appointment with him. Edward Coy who
was burned alive in Texarkana, January 1, 1892, died protesting his innocence. Investigation
since as given by the Bystander in the Chicago Inter Ocean, October 1, proves:

1. The woman who was paraded as a victim of violence was of bad character; her husband was
a drunkard and a gambler.
2. She was publicly reported and generally known to have been criminally intimate with Coy for
more than a year previous.
3. She was compelled by threats, if not by violence, to make the charge against the victim.
4. When she came to apply the match Coy asked her if she would burn him after they had
"been sweethearting" so long.
5. A large majority of the "superior" white men prominent in the affair are the reputed fathers
of mulatto children.

These are not pleasant facts, but they are illustrative of the vital phase of the so-called race
question, which should properly be designated an earnest inquiry as to the best methods by
which religion, science, law and political power may be employed to excuse injustice, barbarity
and crime done to a people because of race and color. There can be no possible belief that
these people were inspired by any consuming zeal to vindicate God's law against
miscegnationists of the most practical sort. The woman was a willing partner in the victim's
guilt, and being of the "superior" race must naturally have been more guilty.

In Natchez, Miss., Mrs. Marshall, one of the creme de la creme of the city, created a
tremendous sensation several years ago. She has a black coachman who was married, and had
been in her employ several years. During this time she gave birth to a child whose color was
remarked, but traced to some brunette ancestor, and one of the fashionable dames of the city
was its godmother. Mrs. Marshall's social position was unquestioned, and wealth showered
every dainty on this child which was idolized with its brothers and sisters by its white papa. In
course of time another child appeared on the scene, but it was unmistakably dark. All were
alarmed, and "rush of blood, strangulation" were the conjectures, but the doctor, when asked
the cause, grimly told them it was a Negro child. There was a family conclave, the coachman
heard of it and leaving his own family went West, and has never returned. As soon as Mrs.
 8

Marshall was able to travel she was sent away in deep disgrace. Her husband died within the
year of a broken heart.

Ebenzer Fowler, the wealthiest colored man in Issaquena County, Miss., was shot down on the
street in Mayersville, January 30, 1885, just before dark by an armed body of white men who
filled his body with bullets. They charged him with writing a note to a white woman of the
place, which they intercepted and which proved there was an intimacy existing between them.
Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that
there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American's company even as there are
white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.

There is hardly a town in the South which has not an instance of the kind which is well known,
and hence the assertion is reiterated that "nobody in the South believes the old thread bare lie
that negro men rape white women." Hence there is a growing demand among Afro-Americans
that the guilt or innocence of parties accused of rape be fully established. They know the men
of the section of the country who refuse this are not so desirous of punishing rapists as they
pretend. The utterances of the leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but
the class. Bishop Fitzgerald has become apologist for lynchers of the rapists of white women
only.

Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, in the month of June, standing under the tree in Barnwell,
S.C., on which eight Afro-Americans were hung last year, declared that he would lead a mob to
lynch a negro who raped a white woman. So say the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the
South. But when the victim is a colored woman it is different.

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
 9

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.

THE NEW CRY

The appeal of Southern whites to Northern sympathy and sanction, the adroit, insidious plea
made by Bishop Fitzgerald for suspension of judgment because those "who condemn lynching
express no sympathy for the white woman in the case," falls to the ground in the light of the
foregoing.

From this exposition of the race issue in lynch law, the whole matter is explained by the well-
known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race. This is crystalized in the
oft-repeated slogan: "This is a white man's country and the white man must rule." The South
resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law. The
raids of the Ku-Klux and White Liners to subvert reconstruction government, the Hamburg and
Ellerton, S.C., the Copiah County, Miss., and the Layfayette Parish, La., massacres were excused
as the natural resentment of intelligence against government by ignorance.

Honest white men practically conceded the necessity of intelligence murdering ignorance to
correct the mistake of the general government, and the race was left to the tender mercies of
the solid South. Thoughtful Afro-Americans with the strong arm of the government withdrawn
and with the hope to stop such wholesale massacres urged the race to sacrifice its political
rights for sake of peace. They honestly believed the race should fit itself for government, and
when that should be done, the objection to race participation in politics would be removed.

But the sacrifice did not remove the trouble, nor move the South to justice. One by one the
Southern States have legally(?) disfranchised the Afro-American, and since the repeal of the
Civil Rights Bill nearly every Southern State has passed separate car laws with a penalty against
their infringement. The race regardless of advancement is penned into filthy, stifling partitions
 10

cut off from smoking cars. All this while, although the political cause has been removed, the
butcheries of black men at Barnwell, S.C., Carrolton, Miss., Waycross, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn.,
have gone on; also the flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the
hanging of a fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana, a woman in Jackson, Tenn., and one in Hollendale,
Miss., until the dark and bloody record of the South shows 728 Afro-Americans lynched during
the past eight years. Not fifty of these were for political causes; the rest were for all manner of
accusations from that of rape of white women, to the case of the boy Will Lewis who was
hanged at Tullahoma, Tenn., last year for being drunk and "sassy" to white folks.

These statistics compiled by the Chicago Tribune were given the first of this year (1892). Since
then, not less than one hundred and fifty have been known to have met violent death at the
hands of cruel bloodthirsty mobs during the past nine months.

To palliate this record (which grows worse as the Afro-American becomes intelligent) and
excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country, the South is
shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women. This, too, in
the face of the fact that only one-third of the 728 victims to mobs have been charged with rape,
to say nothing of those of that one-third who were innocent of the charge. A white
correspondent of the Baltimore Sun declares that the Afro-American who was lynched in
Chestertown, Md., in May for assault on a white girl was innocent; that the deed was done by a
white man who had since disappeared. The girl herself maintained that her assailant was a
white man. When that poor Afro-American was murdered, the whites excused their refusal of a
trial on the ground that they wished to spare the white girl the mortification of having to testify
in court.

This cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment
and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this "land of
liberty." Men who stand high in the esteem of the public for Christian character, for moral and
physical courage, for devotion to the principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great
sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outrage. They do
not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of
lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.

Men who, like Governor Tillman, start the ball of lynch law rolling for a certain crime, are
powerless to stop it when drunken or criminal white toughs feel like hanging an Afro-American
on any pretext.

Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too often
taken the white man's word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it
deserved.

They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes
the right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the cry of rape now raised) it is
in a fair way to stamp us a race of rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on hoping and
 11

believing that general education and financial strength would solve the difficulty, and are
devoting their energies to the accumulation of both.

The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American. It has left the
out-of-the-way places where ignorance prevails, has thrown off the mask and with this new cry
stalks in broad daylight in large cities, the centers of civilization, and is encouraged by the
"leading citizens" and the press.

THE MALICIOUS AND UNTRUTHFUL WHITE PRESS

The Daily Commercial and Evening Scimitar of Memphis, Tenn., are owned by leading business
men of that city, and yet, in spite of the fact that there had been no white woman in Memphis
outraged by an Afro-American, and that Memphis possessed a thrifty law-abiding, property-
owning class of Afro-Americans the Commercial of May 17, under the head of "More Rapes,
More Lynchings" gave utterance to the following:

The lynching of three Negro scoundrels reported in our dispatches from

Anniston, Ala., for a brutal outrage committed upon a white woman will
be a text for much comment on "Southern barbarism" by Northern
newspapers; but we fancy it will hardly prove effective for campaign
purposes among intelligent people. The frequency of these lynchings
calls attention to the frequency of the crimes which causes lynching.
The "Southern barbarism" which deserves the serious attention of all
people North and South, is the barbarism which preys upon weak and
defenseless women. Nothing but the most prompt, speedy and
extreme punishment can hold in check the horrible and beastial
propensities of the Negro race. There is a strange similarity about a
number of cases of this character which have lately occurred.

In each case the crime was deliberately planned and perpetrated by

several Negroes. They watched for an opportunity when the women
were left without a protector. It was not a sudden yielding to a fit of
passion, but the consummation of a devilish purpose which has been
seeking and waiting for the opportunity. This feature of the crime not
only makes it the most fiendishly brutal, but it adds to the terror of the
situation in the thinly settled country communities. No man can leave
his family at night without the dread that some roving Negro ruffian is
watching and waiting for this opportunity. The swift punishment which
invariably follows these horrible crimes doubtless acts as a deterring
effect upon the Negroes in that immediate neighborhood for a short
time. But the lesson is not widely learned nor long remembered. Then
such crimes, equally atrocious, have happened in quick succession,
one in Tennessee, one in Arkansas, and one in Alabama. The facts of
 12

the crime appear to appeal more to the Negro's lustful imagination

than the facts of the punishment do to his fears. He sets aside all fear
of death in any form when opportunity is found for the gratification of
his bestial desires.

There is small reason to hope for any change for the better. The
commission of this crime grows more frequent every year. The
generation of Negroes which have grown up since the war have lost in
large measure the traditional and wholesome awe of the white race
which kept the Negroes in subjection, even when their masters were in
the army, and their families left unprotected except by the slaves
themselves. There is no longer a restraint upon the brute passion of
the Negro.

What is to be done? The crime of rape is always horrible, but the

Southern man there is nothing which so fills the soul with horror,
loathing and fury as the outraging of a white woman by a Negro. It is
the race question in the ugliest, vilest, most dangerous aspect. The
Negro as a political factor can be controlled. But neither laws nor
lynchings can subdue his lusts. Sooner or later it will force a crisis. We
do not know in what form it will come.

In its issue of June 4, the Memphis Evening Scimitar gives the following excuse for lynch law:

Aside from the violation of white women by Negroes, which is the

outcropping of a bestial perversion of instinct, the chief cause of
trouble between the races in the South is the Negro's lack of manners.
In the state of slavery he learned politeness from association with
white people, who took pains to teach him. Since the emancipation
came and the tie of mutual interest and regard between master and
servant was broken, the Negro has drifted away into a state which is
neither freedom nor bondage. Lacking the proper inspiration of the one
and the restraining force of the other he has taken up the idea that
boorish insolence is independence, and the exercise of a decent
degree of breeding toward white people is identical with servile
submission. In consequence of the prevalence of this notion there are
many Negroes who use every opportunity to make themselves
offensive, particularly when they think it can be done with impunity.

We have had too many instances right here in Memphis to doubt this,
and our experience is not exceptional. The white people won't stand
this sort of thing, and whether they be insulted as individuals are as a
race, the response will be prompt and effectual. The bloody riot of
1866, in which so many Negroes perished, was brought on principally
by the outrageous conduct of the blacks toward the whites on the
streets. It is also a remarkable and discouraging fact that the majority
 13

of such scoundrels are Negroes who have received educational

advantages at the hands of the white taxpayers. They have got just
enough of learning to make them realize how hopelessly their race is
behind the other in everything that makes a great people, and they
attempt to "get even" by insolence, which is ever the resentment of
inferiors. There are well-bred Negroes among us, and it is truly
unfortunate that they should have to pay, even in part, the penalty of
the offenses committed by the baser sort, but this is the way of the
world. The innocent must suffer for the guilty. If the Negroes as a
people possessed a hundredth part of the self-respect which is
evidenced by the courteous bearing of some that the Scimitar could
name, the friction between the races would be reduced to a minimum.
It will not do to beg the question by pleading that many white men are
also stirring up strife. The Caucasian blackguard simply obeys the
promptings of a depraved disposition, and he is seldom deliberately
rough or offensive toward strangers or unprotected women.

The Negro tough, on the contrary, is given to just that kind of

offending, and he almost invariably singles out white people as his
victims.

On March 9, 1892, there were lynched in this same city three of the best specimens of young
since-the-war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic
business men.

They believed the problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the
purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in a thickly populated suburb of Memphis,
and a white man named Barrett had one on the opposite corner. After a personal difficulty
which Barrett sought by going into the "People's Grocery" drawing a pistol and was thrashed by
Calvin McDowell, he (Barrett) threatened to "clean them out." These men were a mile beyond
the city limits and police protection; hearing that Barrett's crowd was coming to attack them
Saturday night, they mustered forces, and prepared to defend themselves against the attack.

When Barrett came he led a posse of officers, twelve in number, who afterward claimed to be
hunting a man for whom they had a warrant. That twelve men in citizen's clothes should think it
necessary to go in the night to hunt one man who had never before been arrested, or made any
record as a criminal has never been explained. When they entered the back door the young
men thought the threatened attack was on, and fired into them. Three of the officers were
wounded, and when the defending party found it was officers of the law upon whom they had
fired, they ceased and got away.

Thirty-one men were arrested and thrown in jail as "conspirators," although they all declared
more than once they did not know they were firing on officers. Excitement was at fever beat
until the morning papers, two days after, announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were
out of danger. This hindered rather than helped the plans of the whites. There was no law on
 14

the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the
"unwritten law" did. Three of these men, the president, the manager and clerk of the grocery
—"the leaders of the conspiracy"—were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly
brutal manner. "The Negroes are getting too independent," they say, "we must teach them a
lesson."

What lesson? The lesson of subordination. "Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares
to shoot a white man, even in self-defense."

Although the race was wild over the outrage, the mockery of law and justice which disarmed
men and locked them up in jails where they could be easily and safely reached by the mob—-
the Afro-American ministers, newspapers and leaders counselled obedience to the law which
did not protect them.

Their counsel was heeded and not a hand was uplifted to resent the outrage; following the
advice of the Free Speech, people left the city in great numbers.

The dailies and associated press reports heralded these men to the country as "toughs," and
"Negro desperadoes who kept a low dive." This same press service printed that the Negro who
was lynched at Indianola, Miss., in May, had outraged the sheriff's eight-year-old daughter. The
girl was more than eighteen years old, and was found by her father in this man's room, who
was a servant on the place.

Not content with misrepresenting the race, the mob-spirit was not to be satisfied until the
paper which was doing all it could to counteract this impression was silenced. The colored
people were resenting their bad treatment in a way to make itself felt, yet gave the mob no
excuse for further murder, until the appearance of the editorial which is construed as a
reflection on the "honor" of the Southern white women. It is not half so libelous as that of the
Commercial which appeared four days before, and which has been given in these pages. They
would have lynched the manager of the Free Speech for exercising the right of free speech if
they had found him as quickly as they would have hung a rapist, and glad of the excuse to do
so. The owners were ordered not to return, the Free Speech was suspended with as little
compunction as the business of the "People's Grocery" broken up and the proprietors
murdered.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

SELF-HELP
In the creation of this healthier public sentiment, the Afro-American can do for himself what no
one else can do for him. The world looks on with wonder that we have conceded so much and
remain law-abiding under such great outrage and provocation.

To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is
withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A
 15

thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times
effect a bloodless revolution. The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop
outrages in many localities.

The Afro-Americans of Memphis denounced the lynching of three of their best citizens, and
urged and waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice. No
attempt was made to do so, and the black men left the city by thousands, bringing about great
stagnation in every branch of business. Those who remained so injured the business of the
street car company by staying off the cars, that the superintendent, manager and treasurer
called personally on the editor of the Free Speech, asked them to urge our people to give them
their patronage again. Other business men became alarmed over the situation and the Free
Speech was run away that the colored people might be more easily controlled. A meeting of
white citizens in June, three months after the lynching, passed resolutions for the first time,
condemning it. But they did not punish the lynchers. Every one of them was known by name,
because they had been selected to do the dirty work, by some of the very citizens who passed
these resolutions. Memphis is fast losing her black population, who proclaim as they go that
there is no protection for the life and property of any Afro-American citizen in Memphis who is
not a slave.

The Afro-American citizens of Kentucky, whose intellectual and financial improvement has been
phenomenal, have never had a separate car law until now. Delegations and petitions poured
into the Legislature against it, yet the bill passed and the Jim Crow Car of Kentucky is a legalized
institution. Will the great mass of Negroes continue to patronize the railroad? A special from
Covington, Ky., says:

Covington, June 13.—The railroads of the State are beginning to feel very markedly, the
effects of the separate coach bill recently passed by the Legislature. No class of people
in the State have so many and so largely attended excursions as the blacks. All these
have been abandoned, and regular travel is reduced to a minimum. A competent
authority says the loss to the various roads will reach $1,000,000 this year.

A call to a State Conference in Lexington, Ky., last June had delegates from every county in the
State. Those delegates, the ministers, teachers, heads of secret and others orders, and the head
of every family should pass the word around for every member of the race in Kentucky to stay
off railroads unless obliged to ride. If they did so, and their advice was followed persistently the
convention would not need to petition the Legislature to repeal the law or raise money to file a
suit. The railroad corporations would be so effected they would in self-defense lobby to have
the separate car law repealed. On the other hand, as long as the railroads can get Afro-
American excursions they will always have plenty of money to fight all the suits brought against
them. They will be aided in so doing by the same partisan public sentiment which passed the
law. White men passed the law, and white judges and juries would pass upon the suits against
the law, and render judgment in line with their prejudices and in deference to the greater
financial power.
 16

The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever
made to his conscience. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be gained by a further sacrifice of
manhood and self-respect. By the right exercise of his power as the industrial factor of the
South, the Afro-American can demand and secure his rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a
fair trial for accused rapists.

Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching
did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky, and
prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he
had a gun and used it in self-defense.

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a
Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for
that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor
knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will
have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and
begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

The assertion has been substantiated throughout these pages that the press contains unreliable
and doctored reports of lynchings, and one of the most necessary things for the race to do is to
get these facts before the public. The people must know before they can act, and there is no
educator to compare with the press.

The Afro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to
employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the
support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nothing is more definitely settled than he must act for himself. I have shown how he may
employ the boycott, emigration and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these
agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery. "The
gods help those who help themselves."