t. Georgia took care
of her in an easier way. Its lynchers put her into an automobile and
placed a rope around her neck, fastened it to a tree, and started the
car from under her, and left her to die. No arrests followed. But why
mention that fact in this case? There are very few instances of mob
murder when white murderers have ever been arrested.

In Oklahoma in 1914, two white men assaulted a seventeen-year-old girl
of color. Her screams brought her brother to the rescue. There was a
fight. He killed one of the men. The next day a mob came to the house
in search of the brother. They could not find him so they killed the
girl. In 1915 a sheriff in Georgia was murdered, and straightway five
Negroes were killed. About a year later it was learned that all five
were innocent. Sometimes "race prejudice" is given as the reason why
certain Negroes were lynched. That probably means that in no such
instance had the lynched Negro committed any offence, or at most none
deserving the death penalty by any legal process.

The next historical question, which Miss Grimke's drama raises, was
pertinently put to the present writer: "Was an educated, high-toned
man like Loving ever lynched?" The answer as to probabilities is
easily made. The American impulse towards mob-murder has always been
strong whenever and wherever the rise of the Negro, either free or
enslaved, has been considered vitally obnoxious to the community. In
the slavery days, Northern mobs prepared often to kill William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other Abolitionists, but they were
foiled every time except when, in 1836, the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a
white Northerner, was killed in Alton, Illinois, for denouncing, in
his own paper, the burning to death of a Negro in Missouri. It was
supposed, however, that the men who shot Lovejoy were Missourians and
not Illinoisans.

The southern temper as to the educated Negroes was certainly voiced to
a large extent, when in the eighties, the librarian of a large library
in a southern town made answer to a question asked by a northern
visitor: "Oh, no, the colored people don't come here to take out
books. We don't believe in social equality, you know." And the Negro
teacher in that town answered thus another Northerner's question: "Why
don't you go there and ask for a book?" "I shouldn't like to do that,
if I am going on living here."

In 1898 there were some terrible race riots in North Carolina. Two
well educated Ne