Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men, during the past
thirty years in the South, have come to light, but the statistics as
gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned,
show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been
killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal
execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the
white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that during all
these years, and for all these murders only three white men have been
tried, convicted, and executed. As no white man has been lynched for the
murder of colored people, these three executions are the only instances of
the death penalty being visited upon white men for murdering Negroes.

Naturally enough the commission of these crimes began to tell upon the
public conscience, and the Southern white man, as a tribute to the
nineteenth-century civilization, was in a manner compelled to give excuses
for his barbarism. His excuses have adapted themselves to the emergency,
and are aptly outlined by that greatest of all Negroes, Frederick
Douglass, in an article of recent date, in which he shows that there have
been three distinct eras of Southern barbarism, to account for which three
distinct excuses have been made.

The first excuse given to the civilized world for the murder of
unoffending Negroes was the necessity of the white man to repress and
stamp out alleged "race riots." For years immediately succeeding the war
there was an appalling slaughter of colored people, and the wires usually
conveyed to northern people and the world the intelligence, first, that an
insurrection was being planned by Negroes, which, a few hours later, would
prove to have been vigorously resisted by white men, and controlled with a
resulting loss of several killed and wounded. It was always a remarkable
feature in these insurrections and riots that only Negroes were killed