Southern Horrors eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 35 pages of information about Southern Horrors.

Southern Horrors eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 35 pages of information about Southern Horrors.

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.

4 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 terror of the situation in the
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Southern Horrors from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.