e people were allowed to go on, but after a while the
sport became furious and two men were fatally shot. About the same time,
and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken
from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree. In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro
who had outraged a farmer's wife was captured and burned alive, the
injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire. Just a few days
later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro
was killed. Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the
jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes
who were thought to have been leaders in the killing, lynched them, the
whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not
yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city.
On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal
crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry
Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a
policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received,
seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore
her body to pieces. He was tortured by the child's father, her uncles,
and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons
before he was burned. His stepson, who had refused to tell where he
could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets. Thus the
lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest
crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people. In February, 1893, the
average was very nearly one a day. At the same time injuries inflicted
on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether. Thus at Dickson,
Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars. A fortune-teller told him
that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that
seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a
relative. Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and
outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house.
At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named
Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes
were lynched after the real murderer had escaped. Any relative or other
Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike,
whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man
being shot before he had