The _Daily Commercial_ and _Evening Scimitar_ of Memphis, Tenn., are owned
by leading business men of that city, and yet, in spite of the fact that
there had been no white woman in Memphis outraged by an Afro-American, and
that Memphis possessed a thrifty law-abiding, property-owning class of
Afro-Americans the _Commercial_ of May 17, under the head of "More Rapes,
More Lynchings" gave utterance to the following:

The lynching of three Negro scoundrels reported in our dispatches from
Anniston, Ala., for a brutal outrage committed upon a white woman will
be a text for much comment on "Southern barbarism" by Northern
newspapers; but we fancy it will hardly prove effective for campaign
purposes among intelligent people. The frequency of these lynchings
calls attention to the frequency of the crimes which causes lynching.
The "Southern barbarism" which deserves the serious attention of all
people North and South, is the barbarism which preys upon weak and
defenseless women. Nothing but the most prompt, speedy and extreme
punishment can hold in check the horrible and beastial propensities of
the Negro race. There is a strange similarity about a number of cases of
this character which have lately occurred.

In each case the crime was deliberately planned and perpetrated by
several Negroes. They watched for an opportunity when the women were
left without a protector. It was not a sudden yielding to a fit of
passion, but the consummation of a devilish purpose which has been
seeking and waiting for the opportunity. This feature of the crime not
only makes it the most fiendishly brutal, but it adds to the terror of
the situation in the thinly settled country communities. No man can
leave his family at night without the dread that some roving Negro