Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American’s company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.

There is hardly a town in the South which has not an instance of the kind which is well known, and hence the assertion is reiterated that “nobody in the South believes the old thread bare lie that negro men rape white women.”  Hence there is a growing demand among Afro-Americans that the guilt or innocence of parties accused of rape be fully established.  They know the men of the section of the country who refuse this are not so desirous of punishing rapists as they pretend.  The utterances of the leading white men show that with them it is not the crime but the class.  Bishop Fitzgerald has become apologist for lynchers of the rapists of white women only.  Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, in the month of June, standing under the tree in Barnwell, S.C., on which eight Afro-Americans were hung last year, declared that he would lead a mob to lynch a negro who raped a white woman.  So say the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the South.  But when the victim is a colored woman it is different.

Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race.  They held her escort and outraged the girl.  It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American.  The case went to the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men and they were acquitted.

In Nashville, Tenn., there is a white man, Pat Hanifan, who outraged a little Afro-American girl, and, from the physical injuries received, she has been ruined for life.  He was jailed for six months, discharged, and is now a detective in that city.  In the same city, last May, a white man outraged an Afro-American girl in a drug store.  He was arrested, and released on bail at the trial.  It was rumored that five hundred Afro-Americans had organized to lynch him.  Two hundred and fifty white citizens armed themselves with Winchesters and guarded him.  A cannon was placed in front of his home, and the Buchanan Rifles (State Militia) ordered to the scene for his protection.  The Afro-American mob did not materialize.  Only two weeks before Eph.  Grizzard, who had only been charged with rape upon a white woman, had been taken from the jail, with Governor Buchanan and the police and militia standing by, dragged through the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step, and with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise, he was at last swung out on the bridge with hands cut to pieces as he tried to climb up the stanchions.  A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth-century civilization of the Athens of the South!  No cannon or military was called out in his defense.  He dared to visit a white woman.