nd editors of the South. Speaker Crisp, of the
House of Representatives, who was recently a Judge of the Supreme Court of
Georgia, led in declaring that lynching seldom or never took place, save
for vile crime against women and children. Dr. Hass, editor of the leading
organ of the Methodist Church South, published in its columns that it was
his belief that more than three hundred women had been assaulted by Negro
men within three months. When asked to prove his charges, or give a single
case upon which his "belief" was founded, he said that he could do so, but
the details were unfit for publication. No other evidence but his "belief"
could be adduced to substantiate this grave charge, yet Bishop Haygood, in
the _Forum_ of October, 1893, quotes this "belief" in apology for
lynching, and voluntarily adds: "It is my opinion that this is an
underestimate." The "opinion" of this man, based upon a "belief," had
greater weight coming from a man who has posed as a friend to "Our Brother
in Black," and was accepted as authority. An interview of Miss Frances E.
Willard, the great apostle of temperance, the daughter of abolitionists
and a personal friend and helper of many individual colored people, has
been quoted in support of the utterance of this calumny against a weak and
defenseless race. In the _New York Voice_ of October 23, 1890, after a
tour in the South, where she was told all these things by the "best white
people," she said: "The grogshop is the Negro's center of power. Better
whisky and more of it is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs. The
colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grogshop is its
center of power. The safety of woman, of childhood, the home, is menaced
in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond
the sight of their own roof-tree."

These charges so often reiterated, have had the effect of fastening the
odium upon the race of a peculiar propensity for this foul crime. The
Negro is thus forced to a defense of his good name, and this chapter will
be devoted to the history of some of the cases where assault upon white
women by Negroes is charged. He is not the aggressor in this fight, but
the situation demands that the facts be given, and they will speak for
themselves. Of the 1,115 Negro men, women and children hanged, shot and
roasted alive from January 1, 1882, to January 1, 1894, inclusive, only
348 of that number were charged with rape. Nearly 700 of the