Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/168

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146
THE NEGRO

woman or some one of those who took part in his mutilation? The idea is simply ridiculous from what- ever view-point we may regard it.

As an example of the way women feel upon this question, allow me to quote an account of a lynching that was published in The New York Evening Journal, in its issue of November 9, 1903. It was as follows:—


OH, LET ME KILL THAT NEGRO BRUTE.

——

Former New York Society Woman Wanted Her Assailant

to Die — Tells Her Own Story.

Pass Christian, Miss., Nov. 9.— "Oh, kill him!" cried Mrs. Labouisse, when Sam Adams, the young negro who attacked her in the woods near her home, was brought before her for identification. "Oh, let me kill him ! Let me kill that negro brute!"

It was this dramatic appeal to the men who had captured the negro that brought the feeling of rage against the crime to a white heat and determined a hundred men to hang Adams. His crime was the attempt at the usual one which results generally in lynching in the South, and in every home and every public place, there is but one opinion and that is that the negro met a deserved fate.

For the first time since the crime and its terrible sequel, Mrs. Labouisse, who was formerly Mrs. S. Osgood Pell, of New York, and who, before her marriage, was Miss Isabel Audrey Townsend, was able today to tell her story of the crime. She has been confined to her home in a high state of nervous excitement, but in consequence of the publicity that the