Ebenzer Fowler, the wealthiest colored man in Issaquena County, Miss., was
shot down on the street in Mayersville, January 30, 1885, just before dark
by an armed body of white men who filled his body with bullets. They
charged him with writing a note to a white woman of the place, which they
intercepted and which proved there was an intimacy existing between them.

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