was in an advanced state of pregnancy.  Her ankles were tied together and she was hung to a tree, head downward.  Gasoline and oil from the automobiles near were thrown on her clothing and a match applied.  While she was yet alive her abdomen was cut open with a large knife and her unborn babe fell to the ground.  It gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel.  Hundreds of bullets were then fired into the woman’s body.  As a result of these events not less than five hundred Negroes left the immediate vicinity of Valdosta immediately, and hundreds of others prepared to leave as soon as they could dispose of their land, and this they proceeded to do in the face of the threat that any Negro who attempted to leave would be regarded as implicated in the murder of Smith and dealt with accordingly.  At the end of this same year—­on December 20, 1918—­four young Negroes—­Major Clark, aged twenty; Andrew Clark, aged fifteen; Maggie Howze, aged twenty, and Alma Howze, aged sixteen—­were taken from the little jail at Shubuta, Mississippi, and lynched on a bridge near the town.  They were accused of the murder of E.L.  Johnston, a white dentist, though all protested their innocence.  The situation that preceded the lynching was significant.  Major Clark was in love with Maggie Howze and planned to marry her.  This thought enraged Johnston, who was soon to become the father of a child by the young woman, and who told Clark to leave her alone.  As the two sisters were about to be killed, Maggie screamed and fought, crying, “I ain’t guilty of killing the doctor and you oughtn’t to kill me”; and to silence her cries one member of the mob struck her in the mouth with a monkey wrench, knocking her teeth out.  On May 24, 1919, at Milan, Telfair County, Georgia, two young white men, Jim Dowdy and Lewis Evans, went drunk late at night to the Negro section of the town and to the home of a widow who had two daughters.  They were refused admittance and then fired into the house.  The girls, frightened, ran to another home.  They were pursued, and Berry Washington, a respectable Negro seventy-two years of age, seized a shotgun, intending to give them protection; and in the course of the shooting that followed Dowdy was killed.  The next night, Saturday the 25th, Washington was taken to the place where Dowdy was killed and his body shot to pieces.

It remained for the capital of the nation, however, largely to show the real situation of the race in the aftermath of a great war conducted by a Democratic administration.  Heretofore the Federal Government had declared itself powerless to act in the case of lawlessness in an individual state; but it was now to have an opportunity to deal with violence in Washington itself.  On July 19, 1919, a series of lurid and exaggerated stories in the daily papers of attempted assaults of Negroes on white women resulted in an outbreak that was intended to terrorize the popular Northwest section, in which lived a large proportion