Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Mob Rule in New Orleans - Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning - Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics by Ida B. Wells-Barnett
page 70 of 73 (95%)
house had been entered and its occupants murdered during the absence of
the husband and father. When the discovery was made, it was immediately
supposed that the crime was the work of a Negro, and the motive that of
assaulting white women.

Bloodhounds were procured and they made a round of the village and
discovered only one colored man absent from his home. This was taken to be
proof sufficient that he was the perpetrator of the deed. When he returned
home he was apprehended, taken into the yard of the house that had been
burned down, tied to a stake, and was slowly roasted to death.

Dec. 6, 1899, at Maysville, Ky., Wm. Coleman also was burned to death. He
was slowly roasted, first one foot and then the other, and dragged out of
the fire so that the torture might be prolonged. All of this without a
shadow of proof or scintilla of evidence that the man had committed the
crime.

Thus have the mobs of this country taken the lives of their victims within
the past ten years. In every single instance except one these burnings
were witnessed by from two thousand to fifteen thousand people, and no one
person in all these crowds throughout the country had the courage to raise
his voice and speak out against the awful barbarism of burning human
beings to death.

Men and women of America, are you proud of this record which the
Anglo-Saxon race has made for itself? Your silence seems to say that you
are. Your silence encourages a continuance of this sort of horror. Only by
earnest, active, united endeavor to arouse public sentiment can we hope to
put a stop to these demonstrations of American barbarism.

DigitalOcean Referral Badge