A Social History of the American Negro eBook

Benjamin Griffith Brawley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 546 pages of information about A Social History of the American Negro.

A Social History of the American Negro eBook

Benjamin Griffith Brawley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 546 pages of information about A Social History of the American Negro.
county that the massacre had started, and for days there was murder and rioting, in the course of which not less than five white men and twenty-five Negroes were killed, though some estimates placed the number of fatalities a great deal higher.  Negroes were arrested and disarmed; some were shot on the highways; homes were fired into; and at one time hundreds of men and women were in a stockade under heavy guard and under the most unwholesome conditions, while hundreds of white men, armed to the teeth, rushed to the vicinity from neighboring cities and towns.  Governor Charles H. Brough telegraphed to Camp Pike for Federal troops, and five hundred were mobilized at once “to repel the attack of the black army.”  Worse than any other feature was the wanton slaying of the four Johnston brothers, whose father had been a prominent Presbyterian minister and whose mother was formerly a school-teacher.  Dr. D.A.E.  Johnston was a successful dentist and owned a three-story building in Helena.  Dr. Louis Johnston was a physician who lived in Oklahoma and who had come home on a visit.  A third brother had served in France and been wounded and gassed at Chateau-Thierry.

Altogether one thousand Negroes were arrested and one hundred and twenty-two indicted.  A special committee of seven gathered evidence and is charged with having used electric connections on the witness chair in order to frighten the Negroes.  Twelve men were sentenced to death (though up to the end of 1920 execution had been stayed), and fifty-four to penitentiary terms.  The trials lasted from five to ten minutes each.  No witnesses for the defense were called; no Negroes were on the juries; no change of venue was given.  Meanwhile lawyers at Helena were preparing to reap further harvest from Negroes who would be indicted and against whom there was no evidence, but who had saved money and Liberty Bonds.

Governor Brough in a statement to the press blamed the Crisis and the Chicago Defender for the trouble.  He had served for a number of years as a professor of economics before becoming governor and had even identified himself with the forward-looking University Commission on Southern Race Questions; and it is true that he postponed the executions in order to allow appeals to be filed in behalf of the condemned men.  That he should thus attempt to shift the burden of blame and overlook the facts when in a position of grave responsibility was a keen disappointment to the lovers of progress.

Reference to the monthly periodical and the weekly paper just mentioned, however, brings us to still another matter—­the feeling on the part of the Negro that, in addition to the outrages visited on the race, the Government was now, under the cloak of wartime legislation, formally to attempt to curtail its freedom of speech.  For some days the issue of the Crisis for May, 1919, was held up in the mail; a South Carolina representative in Congress quoted by way of denunciation from the editorial “Returning

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A Social History of the American Negro from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.