action, it is preeminently shown in its reverence, respect and protection
of its womanhood. But the people of Alabama failed to have any regard for
womanhood whatever.

The three men and the woman were put in jail to await trial. A few days
later it was rumored that they were to be subjects of Lynch Law, and, sure
enough, at night a mob of lynchers went to the jail, not to avenge any
awful crime against womanhood, but to kill four people who had been
suspected of setting a house on fire. They were caged in their cells,
helpless and defenseless; they were at the mercy of civilized white
Americans, who, armed with shotguns, were there to maintain the majesty of
American law. And most effectively was their duty done by these splendid
representatives of Governor Fishback's brave and honorable white
southerners, who resent "outside interference." They lined themselves up
in the most effective manner and poured volley after volley into the
bodies of their helpless, pleading victims, who in their bolted prison
cells could do nothing but suffer and die. Then these lynchers went
quietly away and the bodies of the woman and three men were taken out and
buried with as little ceremony as men would bury hogs.

No one will say that the massacre near Memphis in 1894 was any worse than
this bloody crime of Alabama in 1892. The details of this shocking affair
were given to the public by the press, but public sentiment was not moved
to action in the least; it was only a matter of a day's notice and then
went to swell the list of murders which stand charged against the noble,
Christian people of Alabama.


AMERICA AWAKENED