lynched them, the whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city.  On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record.  Henry Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received, seized the officer’s three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore her body to pieces.  He was tortured by the child’s father, her uncles, and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons before he was burned.  His stepson, who had refused to tell where he could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets.  Thus the lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people.  In February, 1893, the average was very nearly one a day.  At the same time injuries inflicted on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether.  Thus at Dickson, Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars.  A fortune-teller told him that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a relative.  Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house.  At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes were lynched after the real murderer had escaped.  Any relative or other Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike, whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man being shot before he had chance to say anything at all.  Meanwhile the White Caps or “Regulators” took charge of the neighboring counties, terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the holding of court as useless.

Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward.  On May 29, 1895, moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida approved “An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught in the same Schools.”  Said one section:  “It shall be a penal offense for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the same time by the same teacher.”  Religious organizations were not to be left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist Young People’s Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of the organization and the editor of the Baptist Union, in behalf of the Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.