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[Transcriber's Note: This pamphlet was first published in 1892 but was
subsequently reprinted. It's not apparent if the curiosities in spelling
date back to the original or were introduced later; they have been
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Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

1892, 1893, 1894

By Ida B. Wells-Barnett




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 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




To the Afro-American women of New York and Brooklyn, whose race love,
earnest zeal and unselfish effort at Lyric Hall, in the City of New York,
on the night of October 5, 1892--made possible its publication, this
pamphlet is gratefully dedicated by the author.




HON. FRED. DOUGLASS'S LETTER


_Dear Miss Wells:_

Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination
now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has
been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word
is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual
knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity
and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.

Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can
neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half
alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if
American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of
outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and
indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.

But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions
favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by
earth and Heaven yet we must still think, speak and work, and trust in the
power of a merciful God for final deliverance.

Very truly and gratefully yours,
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
_Cedar Hill, Anacostia, D.C._, Oct. 25, 1892




1 _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 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 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.

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 miscegnation 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.




2

_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.

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.

In the same city last year a white girl in the dusk of evening screamed at
the approach of some parties that a Negro had assaulted her on the street.
He was captured, tried by a white judge and jury, that acquitted him of
the charge. It is needless to add if there had been a scrap of evidence on
which to convict him of so grave a charge he would have been convicted.

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 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 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. 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 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.




3 _The_ NEW CRY


The appeal of Southern whites to Northern sympathy and sanction, the
adroit, insiduous 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 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
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.




4 _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 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 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 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.




5 _The_ SOUTH'S POSITION


Henry W. Grady in his well-remembered speeches in New England and New York
pictured the Afro-American as incapable of self-government. Through him
and other leading men the cry of the South to the country has been "Hands
off! Leave us to solve our problem." To the Afro-American the South says,
"the white man must and will rule." There is little difference between the
Antebellum South and the New South.

Her white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure
however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race.
They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or
redress therefor in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his
labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him.

The result is a growing disregard of human life. Lynch law has spread its
insiduous influence till men in New York State, Pennsylvania and on the
free Western plains feel they can take the law in their own hands with
impunity, especially where an Afro-American is concerned. The South is
brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very
foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

Public sentiment has had a slight "reaction" though not sufficient to stop
the crusade of lawlessness and lynching. The spirit of christianity of the
great M.E. Church was aroused to the frequent and revolting crimes against
a weak people, enough to pass strong condemnatory resolutions at its
General Conference in Omaha last May. The spirit of justice of the grand
old party asserted itself sufficiently to secure a denunciation of the
wrongs, and a feeble declaration of the belief in human rights in the
Republican platform at Minneapolis, June 7. Some of the great dailies and
weeklies have swung into line declaring that lynch law must go. The
President of the United States issued a proclamation that it be not
tolerated in the territories over which he has jurisdiction. Governor
Northern and Chief Justice Bleckley of Georgia have proclaimed against it.
The citizens of Chattanooga, Tenn., have set a worthy example in that they
not only condemn lynch law, but her public men demanded a trial for Weems,
the accused rapist, and guarded him while the trial was in progress. The
trial only lasted ten minutes, and Weems chose to plead guilty and accept
twenty-one years sentence, than invite the certain death which awaited him
outside that cordon of police if he had told the truth and shown the
letters he had from the white woman in the case.

Col. A.S. Colyar, of Nashville, Tenn., is so overcome with the horrible
state of affairs that he addressed the following earnest letter to the
_Nashville American_.

  Nothing since I have been a reading man has so impressed me with the
  decay of manhood among the people of Tennessee as the dastardly
  submission to the mob reign. We have reached the unprecedented low
  level; the awful criminal depravity of substituting the mob for the
  court and jury, of giving up the jail keys to the mob whenever they are
  demanded. We do it in the largest cities and in the country towns; we do
  it in midday; we do it after full, not to say formal, notice, and so
  thoroughly and generally is it acquiesced in that the murderers have
  discarded the formula of masks. They go into the town where everybody
  knows them, sometimes under the gaze of the governor, in the presence of
  the courts, in the presence of the sheriff and his deputies, in the
  presence of the entire police force, take out the prisoner, take his
  life, often with fiendish glee, and often with acts of cruelty and
  barbarism which impress the reader with a degeneracy rapidly approaching
  savage life. That the State is disgraced but faintly expresses the
  humiliation which has settled upon the once proud people of Tennessee.
  The State, in its majesty, through its organized life, for which the
  people pay liberally, makes but one record, but one note, and that a
  criminal falsehood, "was hung by persons to the jury unknown." The
  murder at Shelbyville is only a verification of what every intelligent
  man knew would come, because with a mob a rumor is as good as a proof.

These efforts brought forth apologies and a short halt, but the lynching
mania was raged again through the past three months with unabated fury.

The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe
punishment, but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public
sentiment demands and sustains such action.

The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain
silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis,
accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with
the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that
neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.




6 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 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 oil
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.

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.

A lynching occurred at Port Jarvis, N.Y., the first week in June. A white
and colored man were implicated in the assault upon a white girl. It was
charged that the white man paid the colored boy to make the assault, which
he did on the public highway in broad day time, and was lynched. This, too
was done by "parties unknown." The white man in the case still lives. He
was imprisoned and promises to fight the case on trial. At the preliminary
examination, it developed that he had been a suitor of the girl's. She had
repulsed and refused him, yet had given him money, and he had sent
threatening letters demanding more.

The day before this examination she was so wrought up, she left home and
wandered miles away. When found she said she did so because she was afraid
of the man's testimony. Why should she be afraid of the prisoner! Why
should she yield to his demands for money if not to prevent him exposing
something he knew! It seems explainable only on the hypothesis that a
_liaison_ existed between the colored boy and the girl, and the white man
knew of it. The press is singularly silent. Has it a motive? We owe it to
ourselves to find out.

The story comes from Larned, Kansas, Oct. 1, that a young white lady held
at bay until daylight, without alarming any one in the house, "a burly
Negro" who entered her room and bed. The "burly Negro" was promptly
lynched without investigation or examination of inconsistant stories.

A house was found burned down near Montgomery, Ala., in Monroe County,
Oct. 13, a few weeks ago; also the burned bodies of the owners and melted
piles of gold and silver.

These discoveries led to the conclusion that the awful crime was not
prompted by motives of robbery. The suggestion of the whites was that
"brutal lust was the incentive, and as there are nearly 200 Negroes living
within a radius of five miles of the place the conclusion was inevitable
that some of them were the perpetrators."

Upon this "suggestion" probably made by the real criminal, the mob acted
upon the "conclusion" and arrested ten Afro-Americans, four of whom, they
tell the world, confessed to the deed of murdering Richard L. Johnson and
outraging his daughter, Jeanette. These four men, Berrell Jones, Moses
Johnson, Jim and John Packer, none of them twenty-five years of age, upon
this conclusion, were taken from jail, hanged, shot, and burned while yet
alive the night of Oct. 12. The same report says Mr. Johnson was on the
best of terms with his Negro tenants.

The race thus outraged must find out the facts of this awful hurling of
men into eternity on supposition, and give them to the indifferent and
apathetic country. We feel this to be a garbled report, but how can we
prove it?

Near Vicksburg, Miss., a murder was committed by a gang of burglars. Of
course it must have been done by Negroes, and Negroes were arrested for
it. It is believed that two men, Smith Tooley and John Adams belonged to a
gang controlled by white men and, fearing exposure, on the night of July
4, they were hanged in the Court House yard by those interested in
silencing them. Robberies since committed in the same vicinity have been
known to be by white men who had their faces blackened. We strongly
believe in the innocence of these murdered men, but we have no proof. No
other news goes out to the world save that which stamps us as a race of
cutthroats, robbers and lustful wild beasts. So great is Southern hate and
prejudice, they legally(?) hung poor little thirteen-year-old Mildrey
Brown at Columbia, S.C., Oct. 7, on the circumstantial evidence that she
poisoned a white infant. If her guilt had been proven unmistakably, had
she been white, Mildrey Brown would never have been hung.

The country would have been aroused and South Carolina disgraced forever
for such a crime. The Afro-American himself did not know as he should have
known as his journals should be in a position to have him know and act.

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."





End of Project Gutenberg's Southern Horrors, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett