Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
Deadly affrays, duels, murders, lynchings, &c., are, in proportion to the white population, as frequent and as rarely punished in lower Virginia as in Kentucky and Missouri; in North Carolina and South Carolina as in Tennessee; and in Georgia and Florida as in Alabama.
At once, and with little ceremony, the Mexican with the cattle was "strung up" to the cross of a gatepost, his body being left to sway in the wind until somebody came along with sufficient decency to cut it down. Talking about lynchings, reminds me of an incident that had almost slipped my mind.
One of the most serious things in this phase of national immorality is showing itself in what are termed "lynchings"; that is, a negro commits a crime against a white woman, and instead of permitting the law to run its course, the people rise, seized with a savage craze for revenge, batter in the jails, take the criminal, and burn him at the stake.
Thus the most characteristic lynchings in the South are not those in which a confessed criminal is done to death for a definite crime, but those in which, in sheer high spirits, some convenient African is taken at random and lynched, as the newspapers say, "on general principles."
Reader, have you ever seen the look in a man's eyes after he has been condemned by that Court of Last Appeal his fellow-men? I have, many times. It is a look without a shadow of hope left, a look of dread at the ferocity of the mob, a look of fear at what is to come afterwards; and seldom a hint of defiance lurks in such a man's expression. I have seen and figured in many lynchings.
He calls attention to the fact that whereas it has been charged that lynchings find their excuse in rape, it has been shown again and again that this crime is the excuse for only one-fourth or one-fifth of the cases of violence.
Non-assimilation shows itself in labor riots, in the murder of two Presidents Garfield and Lincoln in socialistic outbreaks in every quarter, and in signal outbreaks in various sections, at lynchings, and other unlawful performances.
"Some people try and make you believe that a newspaper should not devote its space to long and dramatic accounts of murders, railroad wrecks, fires, lynchings, political corruption, embezzlements, frauds, graft, divorces, what you will. I tell you they are wrong, and I believe that if they thought the thing out they would see that they are wrong.
Such transactions were those of the most responsible and substantial citizens, laboring to maintain social order in the face of the law's desuetude. A mere step further in that direction, however, lay outright lynch law. Lynchings, indeed, while far from habitual, were frequent enough to link the South with the frontier West of the time.
As for us, let us cease to furnish the inhuman brutes whose deeds suggest inhuman punishments. "But, I am aware that in a large majority of cases where lynchings occur, outrages upon women are not even mentioned. This fact but serves as an argument against all lynchings; for when lawlessness breaks forth, no man can set a limit where it will stop.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking