conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral
reputation of their women.

But threats cannot suppress the truth, and while the Negro suffers the
soul deformity, resultant from two and a half centuries of slavery, he is
no more guilty of this vilest of all vile charges than the white man who
would blacken his name.

During all the years of slavery, no such charge was ever made, not even
during the dark days of the rebellion, when the white man, following the
fortunes of war went to do battle for the maintenance of slavery. While
the master was away fighting to forge the fetters upon the slave, he left
his wife and children with no protectors save the Negroes themselves. And
yet during those years of trust and peril, no Negro proved recreant to his
trust and no white man returned to a home that had been dispoiled.

Likewise during the period of alleged "insurrection," and alarming "race
riots," it never occurred to the white man, that his wife and children
were in danger of assault. Nor in the Reconstruction era, when the hue and
cry was against "Negro Domination," was there ever a thought that the
domination would ever contaminate a fireside or strike to death the virtue
of womanhood. It must appear strange indeed, to every thoughtful and
candid man, that more than a quarter of a century elapsed before the Negro
began to show signs of such infamous degeneration.

In his remarkable apology for lynching, Bishop Haygood, of Georgia, says:
"No race, not the most savage, tolerates the rape of woman, but it may be
said without reflection upon any other people that the Southern people are
now and always have been most sensitive concerning the honor of their
women--their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters." It is not the purpose