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Updated: June 13, 2025
Then, it may be asked, why do lynchings occur. I have treated this subject at considerable length in former issues of the ICONOCLAST, hence will but recapitulate here and add a few observations suggested by Mr. Johnson's very able but sadly mistaken article.
It denied that most lynchings were for the offense most generally charged as their justification, and declared that, even of those seemingly traced to this cause, many were not for crimes at all, but for voluntary acts which might naturally be expected to follow from the miscegenation laws by which it was sought, in all the Southern States, to destroy liberty of contract, and, for the purpose of maintaining a fanciful purity of race, to make crimes of marriages to which neither nature nor religion nor the laws of other states interposed any insurmountable barrier.
It is true we have pirates and criminals, but the horrible features of the lynchings in America during the last ten years I believe have no counterpart in the history of China in the last five hundred. In Washington the servants are blacks; irresponsible, childlike, aping the vanities of the white people.
Understand" the Mayor spoke now with determined earnestness "we must have no lynchings; but I believe the police will need help in the search, and I think you are the man to stir up the public conscience and secure that aid. If you can help in apprehending the criminals we shall see that the courts do their part. I can trust you in so delicate a matter where I couldn't trust some others."
On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received, seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore her body to pieces.
In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, in 1842, a young girl was dragged into the woods, beaten and violated. Her injuries caused her death next day. The criminal had been caught when the report went to press. Other examples will show that lynchings were not altogether lacking in those days in sequel to such crimes.
Nevertheless, we have had many bitter manifestations of race hatred in this country, not a few of which have been attended by mass violence. When I reflect upon the savage race riots which have occurred in this country, and the numerous lynchings of negroes by infuriated mobs, I cannot bring myself to accept the easy optimism of the anonymous Jew-baiter.
How true is it that "the mobs, the riots, the burnings, the lynchings perpetrated by the men of the present day, are perpetrated because of their vicious or defective education when children! We see and feel the havoc and the ravage of their tiger passions now, when they are full grown, but it was years ago that they were whelped and suckled."
He was a printer and an editor, and after the war, he suddenly won national fame as the author of the Petroleum V. Naseby letters. These were satires of the old proslavery spirit which retarded the reconstruction of the South and harried the freedmen by mobs and lynchings. Their humor gave Locke a place in our literature which no history of it can ignore.
These guaranties must be sacredly preserved and wisely strengthened. The constituted authorities must be cheerfully and vigorously upheld. Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States; courts, not mobs, must execute the penalties of the law.
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