Violence breeds violence, and two or three outstanding events are yet to be recorded.  On August 23, 1899, at Darien, Ga., hundreds of Negroes, who for days had been aroused by rumors of a threatened lynching, assembled at the ringing of the bell of a church opposite the jail and by their presence prevented the removal of a prisoner.  They were later tried for insurrection and twenty-one sent to the convict farms for a year.  The general circumstances of the uprising excited great interest throughout the country.  In May, 1900, in Augusta, Ga., an unfortunate street car incident resulted in the death of the aggressor, a young white man named Whitney, and in the lynching of the colored man, Wilson, who killed him.  In this instance the victim was tortured and mutilated, parts of his body and of the rope by which he was hanged being passed around as souvenirs.  A Negro organization at length recovered the body, and so great was the excitement at the funeral that the coffin was not allowed to be opened.  Two months later, in New Orleans, there was a most extraordinary occurrence, the same being important because the leading figure was very frankly regarded by the Negroes as a hero and his fight in his own defense a sign that the men of the race would not always be shot down without some effort to protect themselves.

One night in July, an hour before midnight, two Negroes Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce, who had recently come into the city from Mississippi and whose movements had interested the police, were found by three officers on the front steps of a house in Dryades Street.  Being questioned they replied that they had been in the town two or three days and had secured work.  In the course of the questioning the larger of the Negroes, Charles, rose to his feet; he was seized by one of the officers, Mora, who began to use his billet; and in the struggle that resulted Charles escaped and Mora was wounded in each hand and the hip.  Charles now took refuge in a small house on Fourth Street, and when he was surrounded, with deadly aim he shot and instantly killed the first two officers who appeared.[1] The other men advancing, retreated and waited until daylight for reenforcement, and Charles himself withdrew to other quarters, and for some days his whereabouts were unknown.  With the new day, however, the city was wild with excitement and thousands of men joined in the search, the newspapers all the while stirring the crowd to greater fury.  Mobs rushed up and down the streets assaulting Negroes wherever they could be found, no effort to check them being made by the police.  On the second night a crowd of nearly a thousand was addressed at the Lee Monument by a man from Kenner, a town a few miles above the city.  Said he:  “Gentlemen, I am from Kenner, and I have come down here to-night to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson.  I have killed a Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours I am willing to kill