crowd of citizens has been in the vicinity of the city jail, watching to see if the police carry any one into the building. At eight o'clock tonight this crowd numbered more than a thousand men. Mayor Cutchin has ordered Captain Francis, of the Roanoke Blues military company, to assemble his men as a precautionary measure.
"By order of the Mayor, all the saloons were closed at eight o'clock tonight."
This was in the issue of Sunday, January 31, 1904 (p. 4). The coolness with which this vile assault is related in the Herald stands in evidence of the fact that the people at large are becoming altogether too used to tales of this character, and, except at the place where the crime is committed, they fail to excite the universal sense of horror that they formerly did.
In the Appendix to the present book, at the close of the volume, I have selected from various sources and newspapers quite a number of cases of this kind, so that the reader, by studying them, may become thoroughly informed as to their brutality, and the various circumstances under which they have occurred. (See Appendix, Note 4, p. 206, et seq.)
In a large proportion of cases if the negro assaulter and murderer is captured by the infuriated mob, a lynching takes place; in other words, the culprit is summarily taken out somewhere and is simply hung, or hung and shot, or hung, shot and tortured. I have taken occasion to illustrate fully by means of reproductions of actual photographs a typical example of one of these lynchings that took place some years ago in the state of Texas, in a town called Paris.
