The Memphis Ledger for June 8 has the following: 

If Lillie Bailey, a rather pretty white girl seventeen years of age, who is now at the City Hospital, would be somewhat less reserved about her disgrace there would be some very nauseating details in the story of her life.  She is the mother of a little coon.  The truth might reveal fearful depravity or it might reveal the evidence of a rank outrage.  She will not divulge the name of the man who has left such black evidence of her disgrace, and, in fact, says it is a matter in which there can be no interest to the outside world.  She came to Memphis nearly three months ago and was taken in at the Woman’s Refuge in the southern part of the city.  She remained there until a few weeks ago, when the child was born.  The ladies in charge of the Refuge were horified.  The girl was at once sent to the City Hospital, where she has been since May 30.  She is a country girl.  She came to Memphis from her fathers farm, a short distance from Hernando, Miss.  Just when she left there she would not say.  In fact she says she came to Memphis from Arkansas, and says her home is in that State.  She is rather good looking, has blue eyes, a low forehead and dark red hair.  The ladies at the Woman’s Refuge do not know anything about the girl further than what they learned when she was an inmate of the institution; and she would not tell much.  When the child was born an attempt was made to get the girl to reveal the name of the Negro who had disgraced her, she obstinately refused and it was impossible to elicit any information from her on the subject.

Note the wording.  “The truth might reveal fearful depravity or rank outrage.”  If it had been a white child or Lillie Bailey had told a pitiful story of Negro outrage, it would have been a case of woman’s weakness or assault and she could have remained at the Woman’s Refuge.  But a Negro child and to withhold its father’s name and thus prevent the killing of another Negro “rapist.”  A case of “fearful depravity.”

The very week the “leading citizens” of Memphis were making a spectacle of themselves in defense of all white women of every kind, an Afro-American, M. Stricklin, was found in a white woman’s room in that city.  Although she made no outcry of rape, he was jailed and would have been lynched, but the woman stated she bought curtains of him (he was a furniture dealer) and his business in her room that night was to put them up.  A white woman’s word was taken as absolutely in this case as when the cry of rape is made, and he was freed.

What is true of Memphis is true of the entire South.  The daily papers last year reported a farmer’s wife in Alabama had given birth to a Negro child.  When the Negro farm hand who was plowing in the field heard it he took the mule from the plow and fled.  The dispatches also told of a woman in South Carolina who gave birth to a Negro child and charged three men with being its father, every one of whom has since disappeared.  In Tuscumbia, Ala., the colored boy who was lynched there last year for assaulting a white girl told her before his accusers that he had met her there in the woods often before.