Digital
History>eXplorations>Lynching>The
Debate Over Lynching Begins>Ray Baker
Ray
Stannard Baker, What is a Lynching?, McClure's Magazine
(February, 1905)
Well,
on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an
absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of
sixteen to twenty - a pronounced feature of every mob - with a
wide fringe of more respectable citizens, their hands in their
pockets and no convictions in their souls, looking on curiously,
helplessly. They gathered hooting around the jail, cowardly, at
first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder as darkness came on
and no move was made to check them. The murder of Collis was not
a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro, Georgia;
these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered
man; it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons
of Springfield; and it included also the sort of idle boys "who
hang around cigar stores," as one observer told me. The newspaper
reports are fond of describing lynching mobs as "made up
of the foremost citizens of the town." In no cases that I
know of, either South or North, has a mob been made up of what
may be called the best citizens; but the best citizens have often
stood afar off "decrying the mob" - as a Springfield
man told me piously - and letting it go on. A mob is the method
by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to
the criminal or irresponsible classes.
And
no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening, apparently,
had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came out
and made a weak speech in which he said he "didn't want to
hurt anybody." They threw stones at him and broke his windows.
The chief of police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not
go near himself. All of these policemen undoubtedly sympathized
with the mob in its efforts to get at the slayer of their brother
officer; at least, they did nothing effective to prevent the lynching.
An appeal was made to the Mayor to order out the engine companies
that water might be turned on the mob. He said he didn't like
to; the hose might be cut! The local militia company was called
to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated, vacillated,
doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had
no ammunition except Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired
into a mob, would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir
that night from the safe and comfortable precincts of their armory.
A
sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators
of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers
who are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not
accustomed to obey it - or who make reservations and exceptions
when they do enforce it or obey it?
When
the sheriff made his speech to the mob, urging them to let the
law take its course they jeered him. The law! When, in the past,
had the law taken its proper course in dark County? Someone shouted,
referring to Dixon:
"He'll
only get fined for shooting in the city limits."
"He'll
get ten days in jail and suspended sentence."
Then
there were voices:
"Let's
go hang Mower and Miller" - the two judges.
This
threat, indeed, was frequently repeated both on the night of the
lynching and on the day following.
So
the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail with a
railroad rail. This jail is said to be the strongest in Ohio,
and having seen it, I can well believe that the report is true.
But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something
a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness
of being right.
They
murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they
dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a
telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver
shots.
That
was the end of that. Mob justice administered. And there the Negro
hung until daylight the next morning - an unspeakably grisly,
dangling horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was
shockingly crooked to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs,
exposed in places his bare body: he dripped blood. And, with the
crowds of men both here and at the morgue where the body was publicly
exhibited, came young boys in knickerbockers, and little girls
and women by scores, horrified but curious. They came even with
baby carriages! Men made jokes: "A dead nigger is a good
nigger." And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most despicable
of all, was congratulating the public:
'"It'll
save the county a lot of money!"
Significant
lessons, these, for the young!
But
the mob wasn't through with its work. Easy people imagine that,
having hanged a Negro, the mob goes quietly about its business;
but that is never the way of the mob. Once released, the spirit
of anarchy spreads and spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished
its full measure of evil.
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