Part 5 (2/2)
In a county in Mississippi during the month of July the a.s.sociated Press dispatches sent out a report that the sheriff's eight-year-old daughter had been a.s.saulted by a big, black, burly brute who had been promptly lynched. The facts which have since been investigated show that the girl was more than eighteen years old and that she was discovered by her father in this young man's room who was a servant on the place. But these facts the a.s.sociated Press has not given to the world, nor did the same agency acquaint the world with the fact that a Negro youth who was lynched in Tusc.u.mbia, Ala., the same year on the same charge told the white girl who accused him before the mob, that he had met her in the woods often by appointment. There is a young mulatto in one of the State prisons of the South today who is there by charge of a young white woman to screen herself. He is a college graduate and had been corresponding with, and clandestinely visiting her until he was surprised and run out of her room en deshabille by her father. He was put in prison in another town to save his life from the mob and his lawyer advised that it were better to save his life by pleading guilty to charges made and being sentenced for years, than to attempt a defense by exhibiting the letters written him by this girl. In the latter event, the mob would surely murder him, while there was a chance for his life by adopting the former course. Names, places and dates are not given for the same reason.
The excuse has come to be so safe, it is not surprising that a Philadelphia girl, beautiful and well educated, and of good family, should make a confession published in all the daily papers of that city October, 1894, that she had been stealing for some time, and that to cover one of her thefts, she had said she had been bound and gagged in her father's house by a colored man, and money stolen therefrom by him. Had this been done in many localities, it would only have been necessary for her to ”identify” the first Negro in that vicinity, to have brought about another lynching bee.
A VILE SLANDER WITH SCANT RETRACTION
The following published in the Cleveland (Ohio) Leader of Oct. 23, 1894, only emphasizes our demand that a fair trial shall be given those accused of crime, and the protection of the law be extended until time for a defense be granted.
The sensational story sent out last night from Hicksville that a Negro had outraged a little four-year-old girl proves to be a base canard. The correspondents who went into the details should have taken the pains to investigate, and the officials should have known more of the matter before they gave out such grossly exaggerated information.
The Negro, Charles O'Neil, had been working for a couple of women and, it seems, had worked all winter without being remunerated. There is a little girl, and the girl's mother and grandmother evidently started the story with idea of frightening the Negro out of the country and thus balancing accounts. The town was considerably wrought up and for a time things looked serious. The accused had a preliminary hearing today and not an iota of evidence was produced to indicate that such a crime had been committed, or that he had even attempted such an outrage. The village marshal was frightened nearly out of his wits and did little to quiet the excitement last night.
The affair was an outrage on the Negro, at the expense of innocent childhood, a brainless fabrication from start to finish.
The original story was sent throughout this country and England, but the Cleveland Leader, so far as known, is the only journal which has published these facts in refutation of the slander so often published against the race. Not only is it true that many of the alleged cases of rape against the Negro, are like the foregoing, but the same crime committed by white men against Negro women and girls, is never punished by mob or the law. A leading journal in South Carolina openly said some months ago that ”it is not the same thing for a white man to a.s.sault a colored woman as for a colored man to a.s.sault a white woman, because the colored woman had no finer feelings nor virtue to be outraged!” Yet colored women have always had far more reason to complain of white men in this respect than ever white women have had of Negroes.
ILLINOIS HAS A LYNCHING
In the month of June, 1893, the proud commonwealth of Illinois joined the ranks of Lynching States. Illinois, which gave to the world the immortal heroes, Lincoln, Grant and Logan, trailed its banner of justice in the dust-dyed its hands red in the blood of a man not proven guilty of crime.
June 3,1893, the country about Decatur, one of the largest cities of the state was startled with the cry that a white woman had been a.s.saulted by a colored tramp. Three days later a colored man named Samuel Bush was arrested and put in jail. A white man testified that Bush, on the day of the a.s.sault, asked him where he could get a drink and he pointed to the house where the farmer's wife was subsequently said to have been a.s.saulted. Bush said he went to the well but did not go near the house, and did not a.s.sault the woman. After he was arrested the alleged victim did not see him to identify him-he was presumed to be guilty.
The citizens determined to kill him. The mob gathered, went to the jail, met with no resistance, took the suspected man, dragged him out tearing every st.i.tch of clothing from his body, then hanged him to a telegraph pole. The grand jury refused to indict the lynchers though the names of over twenty persons who were leaders in the mob were well known. In fact twenty-two persons were indicted, but the grand jurors and the prosecuting attorney disagreed as to the form of the indictments, which caused the jurors to change their minds. All indictments were reconsidered and the matter was dropped. Not one of the dozens of men prominent in that murder have suffered a whit more inconvenience for the butchery of that man, than they would have suffered for shooting a dog.
COLOR LINE JUSTICE
In Baltimore, Maryland, a gang of white ruffians a.s.saulted a respectable colored girl who was 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 a colored woman. The case went to the courts and they were acquitted.
In Nashville, Tennessee, there was a white man, Pat Hanifan, who outraged a little colored girl, and from the physical injuries received she was 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 a colored girl in a drug store. He was arrested and released on bail at the trial. It was rumored that five hundred colored men 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 colored mob did not show up. 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 that 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, b.l.o.o.d.y example of the bloodthirstiness of the nineteenth-century civilization of the Athens of the South! No cannon nor military were called out in his defense. He dared to visit a white woman.
At the very moment when these civilized whites were announcing their determination ”to protect their wives and daughters,” by murdering Grizzard, a white man was in the same jail for raping eight-year-old Maggie Reese, a colored girl. He was not harmed. The ”honor” of grown women who were glad enough to be supported by the Grizzard boys and Ed. Coy, as long as the liaison was not known, needed protection; they were white. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black.
A white man in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, two months after inflicted such injuries upon another colored girl that she died. He was not punished, but an attempt was made in the same town in the month of June to lynch a colored man who visited a white woman.
In Memphis, Tennessee, in the month of June, Ellerton L. Dorr, who is the husband of Russell Hanc.o.c.k's widow, was arrested for attempted rape on Mattie Cole, a neighbor's cook; he was only prevented from accomplis.h.i.+ng his purpose by the appearance of Mattie's employer. Dorr's friends say he was drunk and, not responsible for his actions. The grand jury refused to indict him and he was discharged.
In Tallaha.s.see, Florida, a colored girl, Charlotte Gilliam, was a.s.saulted by white men. Her father went to have a warrant for their arrest issued, but the judge refused to issue it.
In Bowling Green, Virginia, Moses Christopher, a colored lad, was charged with a.s.sault, September 10. He was indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in one day. In the same state at Danville, two weeks before-August 29, Thomas J. Penn, a white man, committed a criminal a.s.sault upon Lina Hanna, a twelve-year-old colored girl, but he has not been tried, certainly not killed either by the law or the mob.
In Surrey county, Virginia, C.L. Brock, a white man, criminally a.s.saulted a ten-year-old colored girl, and threatened to kill her if she told. Notwithstanding, she confessed to her aunt, Mrs. Alice Bates, and the white brute added further crime by killing Mrs. Bates when she upbraided him about his crime upon her niece. He emptied the contents of his revolver into her body as she lay. Brock has never been apprehended, and no effort has been made to do so by the legal authorities.
But even when punishment is meted out by law to white villians for this horrible crime, it is seldom or never that capital punishment is invoked. Two cases just clipped from the daily papers will suffice to show how this crime is punished when committed by white offenders and black.
LOUISVILLE, KY., October 19.-Smith Young, colored, was today sentenced to be hanged. Young criminally a.s.saulted a six-year-old child about six months ago.
Jacques Blucher, the Pontiac Frenchman who was arrested at that place for a criminal a.s.sault on his daughter f.a.n.n.y on July 29 last, pleaded nolo contendere when placed on trial at East Greenwich, near Providence, R.I., Tuesday, and was sentenced to five years in State Prison.
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