A squad of twenty men took the negro Smith from three policemen just before five o’clock this morning and hanged him to a hickory limb on Ninth Avenue, in the residence section of the city.  They riddled his body with bullets and put a placard on it saying:  “This is Mayor Trout’s friend.”  A coroner’s jury of Bismel was summoned and viewed the body and rendered a verdict of death at the hands of unknown men.  Thousands of persons visited the scene of the lynching between daylight and eight o’clock when the body was cut down.  After the jury had completed its work the body was placed in the hands of officers, who were unable to keep back the mob.  Three hundred men tried to drag the body through the streets of the town, but the Rev. Dr. Campbell of the First Presbyterian church and Capt.  R.B.  Moorman, with pleas and by force prevented them.

Capt.  Moorman hired a wagon and the body was put in it.  It was then conveyed to the bank of the Roanoke, about two miles from the scene of the lynching.  Here the body was dragged from the wagon by ropes for about 200 yards and burned.  Piles of dry brushwood were brought, and the body was placed upon it, and more brushwood piled on the body, leaving only the head bare.  The whole pile was then saturated with coal oil and a match was applied.  The body was consumed within an hour.  The cremation was witnessed by several thousand people.  At one time the mob threatened to burn the Negro in Mayor Trout’s yard.

Thus did the people of Roanoke, Va., add this measure of proof to maintain our contention that it is only necessary to charge a Negro with a crime in order to secure his certain death.  It was well known in the city before he was killed that he had not assaulted the woman with whom he had had the trouble, but he dared to have an altercation with a white woman, and he must pay the penalty.  For an offense which would not in any civilized community have brought upon him a punishment greater than a fine of a few dollars, this unfortunate Negro was hung, shot and burned.

SUSPECTED, INNOCENT AND LYNCHED

Five persons, Benjamin Jackson, his wife, Mahala Jackson, his mother-in-law, Lou Carter, Rufus Bigley, were lynched near Quincy, Miss., the charge against them being suspicion of well poisoning.  It appears from the newspaper dispatches at that time that a family by the name of Woodruff was taken ill in September of 1892.  As a result of their illness one or more of the family are said to have died, though that matter is not stated definitely.  It was suspected that the cause of their illness was the existence of poison in the water, some miscreant having placed poison in the well.  Suspicion pointed to a colored man named Benjamin Jackson who was at once arrested.  With him also were arrested his wife and mother-in-law and all were held on the same charge.