Those negroes who are attempting to make the lynching of individuals of their race a means for arousing the worst passions of their kind are playing with a dangerous sentiment.  The negroes may as well understand that there is no mercy for the negro rapist and little patience with his defenders.  A negro organ printed in this city, in a recent issue publishes the following atrocious paragraph:  “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that negro men rape white women.  If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves, and public sentiment will have a reaction; and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

  The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such
  loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the
  wonderful patience of Southern whites.  But we have had enough of it.

  There are some things that the Southern white man will not tolerate, and
  the obscene intimations of the foregoing have brought the writer to the
  very outermost limit of public patience.  We hope we have said enough.

The Evening Scimitar of same date, copied the Commercial’s editorial with these words of comment: 

Patience under such circumstances is not a virtue.  If the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.

Acting upon this advice, the leading citizens met in the Cotton Exchange Building the same evening, and threats of lynching were freely indulged, not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—­but by the leading business men, in their leading business centre.  Mr. Fleming, the business manager and owning a half interest the Free Speech, had to leave town to escape the mob, and was afterwards ordered not to return; letters and telegrams sent me in New York where I was spending my vacation advised me that bodily harm awaited my return.  Creditors took possession of the office and sold the outfit, and the Free Speech was as if it had never been.

The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish lynchings of Afro-Americans which have recently taken place and was meant as a warning.  Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape!  The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.