ands were with that innocent man's blood.
Why? Because that innocent man was black, and because his murder helps to
uphold white supremacy over millions of people whose only offense is that
they are black. Into the violent death of a man like Hamilton there might
not be instituted any official inquiry at all in many parts of the South
any more than if he had been a horse or a dog. But if there happens to be
an official inquiry the usual verdict is that "the deceased came to his
death by the hands of a person or persons unknown," and that ends the
matter so far as the Negro is concerned. But it does not end the matter so
far as the South is concerned, for the Devil will exact his share of the
black deed from that section to the uttermost farthing. What has such a
mob done? In the murder of one black man, whether innocent or guilty, the
South has, as in the case of Hamilton, made hundreds of white criminals,
has tainted the blood of whole communities like Shreveport with the virus
of lawlessness and crime. In this same Shreveport there were five colored
men lynched in ten days and eight in a year, and one white woman testified
at an investigation conducted by the attorney general's office that she
rode in an automobile crowded with men eighteen miles to see an old
colored man burned at the stake! Like begets like, and crime crime, and
there is no help for it. Because what a state sows that it shall surely
reap. If it sow sin it shall reap suffering and shame, and if it sow the
wind it shall likewise reap the whirlwind. Is not the South sowing into
the souls of both races the seeds of sin and violence, and shall it not
then reap its full crop of crime and misery, the wild and anarchic harvest
of the whirlwind?

Hard indeed is the lot of the Negro whether in the country or the city of
the South, and in those of the North too for that matter. For wherever he
goes he carries the marks of his race with him, and that is the essence of
his offense in America. His lot is practically the same everywhere. He
faces either in city or country the white man's courts and police power
and race prejudice and his industrial and residential exclusiveness and
jealousies, but above all he faces the white man's church with its
undisguised color-phobia, with its virtual rejection of the brotherhood of
man in respect to all races who happen not to be white. They are in the
regard of this church unclean and socially beyond the pale of its
Christia