African American study

 

Select ONE (1) of the following questions to answer. Make sure to incorporate evidence from this week’s readings to support your argument:

1. One of the core elements of the African American community after the end of slavery was education. Generally, African Americans hungered for learning and placed a high value on education. What evidence supports this claim? Additionally, discuss the various ways that African Americans viewed education in the first 3-4 decades after slavery ended. Make sure to discuss the conflict/disagreement that is seen in the writings of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Explain both sides and evaluate how both can be seen as specific strategies and not compromises in light of the restrictions in Jim Crow America.
2. According to Ida B. Wells, “Our country’s national crime is lynching.” Evaluate this statement. Why and when did African American lynchings become widespread? What was the stated and, perhaps most importantly, underlying purpose of lynching? How did racial terror lynchings shape life for African American communities across the South?

resources:

https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau#toc-state-records-of-assistant-commissioners-and-superintendents-of-education

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/bill-of-rights

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1899-reverend-d-graham-some-facts-about-southern-lynchings/

http://mwp.olemiss.edu//dir/wells-barnett_ida/

https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/antebellum/landmark_plessy.html

 

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/washington-booker-t-1856-1915-2/

https://www.theroot.com/who-really-invented-the-talented-tenth-1790895289

Chapter2 from The book The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois is in the public domain in the United States. UMGC has

modified this work.

II

Of the Dawn of Freedom

Careless seems the great Avenger;

History’s lessons but record

One death-grapple in the darkness

‘Twixt old systems and the Word;

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne;

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

And behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above His own.

LOWELL.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker

to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a

phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South

and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a

shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real

cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the

surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than

this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes?

Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation

Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments

made the Negro problems of to-day.

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to

the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government

of men called the Freedmen’s Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts

made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no

sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves

appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast

unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with

frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a

horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two

methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben

Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm

work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler’s action was

approved, but Fremont’s was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things

differently. “Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at

all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them.” Such a

policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others

showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and

plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the Confederacy, and were being

used as laborers and producers. “They constitute a military resource,” wrote Secretary Cameron,

late in 1861; “and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to

discuss.” So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of

fugitives, and Butler’s “contrabands” were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated

rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which

flowed faster as the armies marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the

inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year’s, 1863. A month later Congress

called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed

to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled

to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: “What must be done with slaves, arriving

almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?”

It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a sense the founder of the

Freedmen’s Bureau. He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of

slaves and abandoned lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed

from the ranks to study the conditions. First, he cared for the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and

then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port Royal

experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his experiment was barely started,

however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from the

hands of the over-burdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already

centres of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans,

Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains

found here new and fruitful fields; “superintendents of contrabands” multiplied, and some

attempt at systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving work to the

others.

Then came the Freedmen’s Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from

these other centres of distress. There was the American Missionary Association, sprung from the

Amistad, and now full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the National

Freedmen’s Relief Association, the American Freedmen’s Union, the Western Freedmen’s Aid

Commission,—in all fifty or more active organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-

books, and teachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of the freedmen was

often reported as “too appalling for belief,” and the situation was daily growing worse rather than

better.

And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a

national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood

idle, or, if they worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received

pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and other ways were camp-life and the

new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The broader economic organization thus clearly

demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined. Here it was that

Pierce’s Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough way. In

Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened confiscated

estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black

farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on,

South and West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation,

and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew,

here and there, into strange little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its

ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annual budget of one

hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all

freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established

a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee and

Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres

of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with

his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited

estates, leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that

terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp followers.

Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid through Georgia, which threw

the new situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all

significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause.

But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud

that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size,

almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn

from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah,

a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the characteristic military

remedy: “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty

miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved and

set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war.” So read the celebrated

“Field-order Number Fifteen.”

All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and perplex the government and

the nation. Directly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a

bill creating a Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a

committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor of a temporary

bureau for the “improvement, protection, and employment of refugee freedmen,” on much the

same lines as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from

distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of

dealing with the freedmen, under a bureau which should be “charged with the study of plans and

execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely aiding, the

passage of our emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced

labor to their new state of voluntary industry.”

Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by putting the whole matter again

in charge of the special Treasury agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of

and lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to “provide in such

leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general welfare” of the freedmen. Most of the army

officers greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing “Negro affairs,” and Secretary

Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations, which were afterward

closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were

leased in the Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864, the

new regulations were suspended for reasons of “public policy,” and the army was again in

control.

Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March the House passed a bill

by a majority of two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles

Sumner, who had charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands

ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute for the House bill attaching the

Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too late for action by the House. The

debates wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general question of

slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the

national election took place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the

country, addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of

Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of

Sumner’s bill, but made the proposed organization a department independent of both the War and

the Treasury officials. The bill was conservative, giving the new department “general

superintendence of all freedmen.” Its purpose was to “establish regulations” for them, protect

them, lease them lands, adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their “next

friend.” There were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and the organization

was made permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference

committee was appointed. This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled

through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865 establishing in the War

Department a “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.”

This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain in outline. A Bureau

was created, “to continue during the present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” to

which was given “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the control of all

subjects relating to refugees and freedmen,” under “such rules and regulations as may be

presented by the head of the Bureau and approved by the President.” A Commissioner, appointed

by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not exceeding ten

clerks. The President might also appoint assistant commissioners in the seceded States, and to all

these offices military officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could issue

rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the hands of

the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.

Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated Negro as the

ward of the nation. It was a tremendous undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a

government of millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a

peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come

into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered

population of their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated to assume charge of such

a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited resources. Probably no one but a

soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could be

called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.

Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his successor assigned Major-

Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then

only thirty-five years of age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at

Gettysburg, and but the year before had been assigned to the command of the Department of

Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for business and

intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of

the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that “no approximately correct

history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the

great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the

Freedmen’s Bureau.”

On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his office promptly on

the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A curious mess he looked upon: little

despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized

charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all

enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men. On May

19 the new government—for a government it really was—issued its constitution; commissioners

were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who were to take charge of “all subjects

relating to refugees and freedmen,” and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent

alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent societies, and declared: “It will

be the object of all commissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated labor,” and

to establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed. They were to

hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the

destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were

not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep

records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts

for them; and finally, the circular said: “Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for

those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve the assistant

commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the

general welfare.”

No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local organization in some

measure begun, than two grave difficulties appeared which changed largely the theory and

outcome of Bureau work. First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the

more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation

might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of

poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale

confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not

appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the

eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau melted

quickly away. The second difficulty lay in perfecting the local organization of the Bureau

throughout the wide field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly

ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child’s task; but this task was even

harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but

already existing system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work

must be sought for in an army still busy with war operations,—men in the very nature of the case

ill fitted for delicate social work,—or among the questionable camp followers of an invading

host. Thus, after a year’s work, vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more

difficult to grasp and solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year’s work did,

well worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven

thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the

crusade of the New England schoolma’am.

The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a mission that seemed to our

age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and

rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field

guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved

now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in

planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their

work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more.

Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized Bureau, which had so

quickly grown into wide significance and vast possibilities. An institution such as that was well-

nigh as difficult to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator

Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge its powers. This measure

received, at the hands of Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention than its

predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of

Emancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen’s Bureau

was still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth

Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government.

The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war measures

past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time

of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of

possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed

unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of

all citizens; and the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly must be

done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical reenslavement. The

bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was promptly

vetoed by President Johnson as “unconstitutional,” “unnecessary,” and “extrajudicial,” and failed

of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between Congress and the President

began to broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over the President’s

second veto, July 16.

The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen’s Bureau its final form,—the form by which it will be known

to posterity and judged of men. It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it

authorized additional assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of

regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of

Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and

cognizance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands

of the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military commander was

now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-

fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and

collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated

such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends.

Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as

General Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society

failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau.”

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of

things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress

were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the

Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of

war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as

from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing

neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-

sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when to

the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of

conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside

Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large

part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for

two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply

unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to

narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better

than the worst, it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged

from slavery,—not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable,

rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but

withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black

man and the ox together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions

may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery under

which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed

freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the

friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for

driving the recalcitrant South back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South

grew. Idle to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were pitiable.

Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other,—the North, the

government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was white,

whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the

human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that

day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like

men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition

threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with

hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with

the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love

over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye,

too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only

to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “damned

Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these

two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating,

their children’s children live today.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it

was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole.

There were, in 1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling,

directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven

heads: the relief of physical suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying

and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of

justice, and the financiering of all these activities.

Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by Bureau physicians and

surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one

million free rations were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficult

question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the refuges and relief

stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions

went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of

wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but

where local agents differed toto caelo in capacity and character, where the personnel was

continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of success lay in

the fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts

were written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised, wages guaranteed, and

employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a vast labor bureau,—not perfect, indeed,

notably defective here and there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful

men. The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler,—the

slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under another name; and, the freedman

who regarded freedom as perpetual rest,—the Devil and the Deep Sea.

In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the Bureau was from the first

handicapped and at last absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things were

planned; abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a

total revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some other lands to

which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for

settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of “forty acres and

a mule”—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had

all but categorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most cases to bitter

disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the

Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity

of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of

the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their

years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake—somewhere. If by 1874 the

Georgia Negro alone owned three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his

thrift rather than by bounty of the government.

The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among

Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only

called the school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it

helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel

Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first

bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to

be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of

men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of

dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of this

paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to

human training which still to-day lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta,

Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were expended for

educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of which the freedmen themselves

gave of their poverty.

Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other enterprises, showed that

the ex-slave was handling some free capital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in

the army, and his pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first

complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that the quotas of colored regiments

from Northern States were largely filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow

soldiers. Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint

resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In two years six

million dollars was thus distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded

eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; but still the work put needed

capital in the hands of practical paupers, and some, at least, was well spent.

The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau’s work lay in the exercise of its

judicial functions. The regular Bureau court consisted of one representative of the employer, one

of the Negro, and one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicial

attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gained confidence; but

the nature of its other activities and the character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor

of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance. On the other hand,

to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted land where

slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from

gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The

former masters of the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and

punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves were

intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to

become centres simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become

solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity

could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them

the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were

found striving to put the “bottom rail on top,” and gave the freedmen a power and independence

which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation to wax wise with

advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man

who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by “mules and niggers,”

was really benefited by the passing of slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young

freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen his father’s head beaten to a jelly and his own

mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more

convenient than to heap on the Freedmen’s Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it

utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.

All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had blundered, but that was long

before Oliver Howard was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without

some system of control there would have been far more than there was. Had that control been

from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and purposes. Coming as the

control did from without, perfect men and methods would have bettered all things; and even with

imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work accomplished was not undeserving of

commendation.

uch was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the

Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen

million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this

Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship,

secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common

school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between

ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which

discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to

furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the

aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local

agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.

Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and

generally conspicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a

searching Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives

and few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy transferred from Howard’s control, in

his absence, to the supervision of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary’s

recommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the

Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both of these

trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful

misdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to

light,—the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of

defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there were some business

transactions which savored of dangerous speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the

smirch of the Freedmen’s Bank.

Morally and practically, the Freedmen’s Bank was part of the Freedmen’s Bureau, although it had

no legal connection with it. With the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board

of unusual respectability and national reputation, this banking institution had made a remarkable

start in the development of that thrift among black folk which slavery had kept them from

knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash,—all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen

disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,—all the faith in saving went too, and much of the

faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has

never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to

throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings

banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to

say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends or

the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies unwritten

history.

Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not so much its conduct or

policy under the law as the necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily

from the Border States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky,

when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill “to promote strife and conflict between the white

and black races … by a grant of unconstitutional power.” The argument gathered tremendous

strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common-

sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand

guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to make those wards

their own guardians by arming them with the ballot. Moreover, the path of the practical politician

pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South

with white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joined hands.

The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else

every sensible man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice

between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage

away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to

the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a

system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South

who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In

such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a

guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept

the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some

felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national

integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.

Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government guardianship of

Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well

imagine a far better policy,—a permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national system of Negro

schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection

before the regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and

building associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brains

might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet

solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the Freedmen’s

Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final

answer to all present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it

far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came

easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So

the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a

single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is

the heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to

strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly

and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is

not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the

plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by

law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary.

In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste,

with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a

different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And

the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large

legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like

passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King’s Highways sat and sits a figure

veiled and bowed, by which the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods

fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and

now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is

the problem of the color-line.

SouthernHorrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells-Barnett comprises public domain material

in the United States. UMGC has modified this work.

1

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

By Ida B. Wells-Barnett

1892, 1893, 1894

PREFACE

HON. FRED. DOUGLASS’S LETTER

THE OFFENSE

THE BLACK AND WHITE OF IT

THE NEW CRY

THE MALICIOUS AND UNTRUTHFUL WHITE PRESS

THE SOUTH’S POSITION

SELF-HELP

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm

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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

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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

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

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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

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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.

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

6

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

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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.

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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 anegro 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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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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

13

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.

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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.

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

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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.

SELF-HELP

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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

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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.

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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.”