Digital
History>eXplorations>Lynching>The
Debate Over Lynching Begins>Ida Wells
Ida
B. Wells,
A Red Record, 1895
The
white man had no right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still
less has he right to kill him. But the Southern white people had
been educated so long in that school of practice in which might
makes right that they disdained to draw strict lines of action
in dealing with the Negro. In slave times the Negro was kept subservient
and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging,
but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue;
the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.
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”…
Then
came the second excuse, which had its birth during the turbulent
times of reconstruction. By an amendment to the Constitution the
Negro was given the right of franchise, and, theoretically at
least, his ballot became his invaluable emblem of citizenship.
In a government “of the people, for the people, and by the
people,” the Negro’s vote became an important factor
in all matters of state and national politics. But this did not
last long. The southern white man would not consider that the
Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and
the idea of a republican form of government in the southern states
grew into general contempt. It was maintained that “This
is a white man’s government,” and regardless of numbers
the white man should rule. “No Negro domination” became
the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South, and
under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless
mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as
suited their purpose best….
But
it was a bootless strife for colored people. The government which
had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him.
It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which
should have maintained that right. Scourged from his home; hunted
through the swamps; hung by midnight raiders, and openly and openly
murdered in the light of day, the Negro clung to his right of
franchise with a heroism which would have wrung admiration from
the hearts of savages. He believed that in that small white ballot
there was a subtle something that stood for manhood as well as
citizenship, and thousands of brave black men went to their graves,
exemplifying the one by dying for the other.
The
white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence,
intimidation and murder…. With the Southern governments
all subverted and the Negro actually eliminated from all participation
in state and national elections, there could be no longer an excuse
for killing Negroes to prevent “Negro Domination.”
Brutality
still continued; Negroes were whipped, scourged, exiled, shot
and hung whenever and wherever it pleased the white man so to
treat them, and as the civilized world with increasing persistency
held the white people of the South to account for its outlawry,
the murderers invented the third excuse—that Negroes had
to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women. There could
be framed no possible excuse more harmful to the Negro and more
unanswerable if true in its sufficiency for the white man.
Humanity
abhors the assailant of womanhood, and this charge upon the Negro
at once placed him beyond the pale of human sympathy. With such
unanimity, earnestness and apparent candor was this charge made
and reiterated that the world has accepted the story that the
Negro is a monster which the Southern white man has painted him.
And to-day, the Christian world feels, that while lynching is
a crime, and lawlessness and anarchy the certain precursors of
a nation’s fall, it can not by word or deed, extend sympathy
or help to a race of outlaws who might mistake their plea for
justice and deem it an excuse for their continued wrongs.
If
the Southern people in defense of their lawlessness, would tell
the truth and admit that colored men and women are lynched for
almost any offense, from murder to a misdemeanor, there would
not be now the necessity for this defense. But when they intentionally,
maliciously and constantly belie the record and bolster up these
falsehoods by the words of legislators, preachers, governors and
bishops, then the Negro must give to the worlds his side of the
awful story.
A
word as to the charge itself. In considering the third reason
assigned by the Southern white people for the butchery of blacks,
the question must be asked, what the white man means when he charges
the black man with rape. Does he mean the crime which the statutes
of the civilized states describe as such? Not by any means. With
the Southern white man, any mesalliance existing between a white
woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge
of rape. The Southern white man says that it is impossible for
a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored
man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force.
In numerous instances where colored men have been lynched on the
charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching,
and indisputable proven after the victim’s death, that the
relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary
and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge
of assault have been successfully maintained.
It
was for the assertion of this fact, in the defense of her own
race, that the writer hereof became an exile; her property destroyed
and her return to her home forbidden under penalty of death, for
writing the following editorial which was printed in her paper,
the Free Speech, in Memphis, Tenn., May 21, 1892:
“Eight
Negroes lynched since last issue of the ‘Free Speech’
one at Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday morning where the citizens
broke (?) into the penitentiary and got their man; three near
Anniston, Ala., one near New Orleans; and three at Clarksville,
Ga., the last three for killing a white man, and five on the same
old racket—the new alarm about raping white women. The same
programme of hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless
bodies was carried out to the letter. Nobody in this section of
the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape
white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will
over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction;
a 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….
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 own women—their
mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.” It is not the purpose
of this defense to say one word against the white women of the
South. Such need not be said, but it is their misfortune that
the chivalrous white men of that section, in order to escape the
deserved execration of the civilized world, should shield themselves
by their cowardly and infamously false excuse, and call into question
that very honor about which their distinguished priestly apologist
claims they are most sensitive. To justify their own barbarism
they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry
respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it
is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South,
will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very
chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race
or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his
power. That chivalry which is “most sensitive concerning
the honor of women” can hope for but little respect from
the civilized world, when it confines itself entirely to the women
who happen to be white. Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry
which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can
command no honest respect….
The
Negro may not have known what chivalry was, but he knew enough
to preserve inviolate the womanhood of the South which was entrusted
to his hands during the war. The finer sensibilities of his soul
may have been crushed out by years of slavery, but his heart was
full of gratitude to the white women of the North, who blessed
his home and inspired his soul in all these years of freedom.
Faithful to his trust in both of these instances, he should now
have the impartial ear of the civilized world, when he dares to
speak for himself as against the infamy wherewith he stands charged.
It
is his regret, that, in his own defense, he must disclose to the
world the degree of dehumanizing brutality which fixes upon America
the blot of a national crime. Whatever faults and failings other
nations may have in their dealing with their own subjects or with
other people, no other civilized nation stands condemned before
the world with a series of crimes so peculiarly national. It becomes
a painful duty of the Negro to reproduce a record which shows
that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone
murder and defy the contempt of civilization.
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