“We can not permit incompetency to triumph on the basis that the rulers of the South are sincere in their attempts at law enforcement. Too much emphasis can not be laid on this fact. Respect for the law must be demanded and enforced at all hazards.
“The spread of lynch law all over the land may be looked for if this is done.”
How prophetic these words uttered years ago as the records kept will show.
Before the war and immediately after, Negroes were now and then put to death but the law was generally allowed to take its course.
For rape or attempted rape there were only four Negroes lynched between the years 1830 and 1840. It was not until 1850 to 1860 that lynch law attained any high degree of danger to the success of free government. Out of forty-six Negroes put to death during this time, twenty-six were lynched and twenty legally executed. Nine of those destroyed by mobs were burned at the stake. The crimes with which they were charged were murders of owners and overseers. It does not appear that rape, which is now made the cause of nearly every lynching was very frequent before the war.
It has become the cause or the alleged cause of mob violence only since the year 1871 to any great extent.
Had Martha Schofield’s suggestion, for the interference of the national government in the enforcement of the laws of the country wherever the State proved inefficient to do so been adopted and put into practice, the shame and disgrace which now attaches to American civilization would have no basis or foundation. There would not be as many orphans as there are; there would not be the humiliation and injustices that there are; neither would there be the poverty and misery among the blacks and whites that there are.
The remissness of the national government to supervise wisely the execution of the laws has permitted the officials to do what they accuse the Negro of desiring to do, to take a foot for every inch and a mile for every yard; Discriminatory laws affecting the most vital interest of the colored race have been enacted and generally enforced without the suggestion of a protest from the federal authorities, and many of the national laws that enforced would give great relief to the oppressed are apparently “dead letters,” so far as their practical application is concerned.
In 1885 there were 184 people lynched in this country, 106 white and 78 colored. Ten years later mobs murdered 112 Negroes and 56 whites; in 1892, 100 whites and 155 blacks, making a total of 255. The year following exactly 200 were lynched. In 1905 two were burned at the stake. In 1906 civilized Atlanta, Ga. murdered 28 in one night.
Less than one-third of these lynchings, nearly all of which occurred in the Southern States, were for the alleged crime of rape. No offense at all had been committed by anyone of those mobbed in Atlanta in 1906.