Finally, emboldened and inflamed by fiery editorials, radio addresses, pamphlets, posters and platform speeches, a mob seeking to protect white womanhood in Cincinnati attacked a Crookman hospital, drove several women into the streets and set fire to the building. A dozen babies were burned to death and others, hastily removed by their mothers, were recognized as mulattoes. The newspapers published names and addresses. Many of the women were very prominent socially either in their own right or because of their husbands.
The nation was shocked as never before. Republican sentiment began to dwindle. The Republican Executive Committee met and discussed ways and means of combating the trend. Gorman Gay was at his wits' end. Nothing, he thought, could save them except a miracle.
Two flights below in a spacious office sat two of the Republican campaigners, Walter Williams and Joseph Bonds, busily engaged in leading the other workers (who knew better) to believe that they were earning the ten dollars a day they were receiving. The former had passed for a Negro for years on the strength of a part-Negro grandparent and then gone back to the white race when the National Social Equality League was forced to cease operations at the insistence of both the sheriff and the landlord. Joseph Bonds, former head of the Negro Data League who had once been a Negro but thanks to Dr. Crookman was now Caucasian and proud of it, had but recently returned to the North from Atlanta, accompanied by Santop Licorice. Both Mr. Williams and Mr. Bonds had been unable to stomach the Democratic crowd and so had fallen in with the Republicans, who were as different from them as one billiard ball from another. The two gentlemen were in low tones discussing the dilemma of the Republicans, while rustling papers to appear busy.
"Jo, if we could figure out something to turn the tables on these Democrats, we wouldn't have to work for the rest of our lives," Williams observed, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke out of the other corner of his mouth.
"Yes, that's right, Walt, but there ain't a chance in the world. Old Gay is almost crazy, you know. Came in here slamming doors and snapping at everybody this morning," Bonds remarked.
Williams leaned closer to him, lowered his flame-thatched head and then looking to the right and left whispered, "Listen here, do you know where Beard is?"
"No," answered Bonds, starting and looking around to see if anyone was listening. "Where is he?"
"Well, I got a letter from him the other day. He's down there in Richmond doing research work for the Anglo-Saxon Association under that Dr. Buggerie."
"Do they know who he is?"
"Of course they don't. He's been white quite a while now, you know, and of course they'd never connect him with the Dr. Shakespeare A. Beard who used to be one of their most outspoken enemies."