LYNCH IN AMERICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10079, 14 March 1896, Page 2 (Supplement)

LYNCH IN AMERICA.

A SHOCKING LIST.

In spite of all the protests made in the United States anil abroad, there is no diminution of the number of lynching;, and several of those which huvo taken place in the South during the last two or three mouths have been marked by shocking atrocities. It should be noticed, however, that attempts are being made in three or four of the Southern States to restrain lynching mobs and woak officers of the law by new legislation, Tho new Constitution of South Carolina disfranchises a sheriff or

gaoler who permits a prisoner to be lynched, and empowers the relatives of a lynched person to recover damages from the county in which the crime is committed,

The list for the last two months, compiled from the daily reports, is an appalling one. A few examples may be cited. In a rural town near Memphis, Tennessee, a negro, who had assaulted a white girl and had confessed his guilt with respect to another assault— followed by the murder of his victim—was tortured and mutilated by a mob of 300 moil, who completed their work by lunging the man to a telegraph pole. In the Northern Slate of Ohio a mob of fifty men attempted to take froiu a j;aol a murderer who had killed tho superintendent of police in a neighbouring town. Two of the assailants were shot dead by the gaol guards, and that was the end of the affair, although Governor McKinley (of McKinley tariff fame) ordered our the militia to protect the prisoner. There is very little lynching in the no'thern part of th.' country. By far the worst exhibition of brutality in the list it that which was made at Tyler, in the State of Texas, when a negro named Milliard was killed. Ijile a young woman, the wife of a prosperous farmer, was returning from a visit to her mother this fellow attacked her, and her body, horribly mutilated, was found by the side of the road the next day. Bloodhounds were put 011 the negro's track, an i 119 wan captured at. a point twenty miles from the scene of the crime. A mob of 'JOOD men

took him from the officers. The moo then appointed a committee of seven prominent citizens, who should heir testimony. A stenographer was employe 1, and all available evidence was submitted. Tin neirro confessed his guilt, and his confession was taken down in full. The 1 the committee was discharged, and the great crowd carried the wretch to the little city of Tyler. It was voted that he should be burned alive in the public square, A scaffold was quickly erected, Milliard was chained to an iron post which rose from the centre of it, and the husband of his victim applied the torch to tho mass of combustibles around the negro's feet. There, in the presence of 10,000 people, Milliard lingered in agony for half an hour before death came. Photographic views of tho scene were taken from time to time, and two newspapers of this great city—to their everlasting shame be it said—afterward reproduced them in their

pages. A few clays later a mob in the sumo State lynched a negro accused of having driven a waggon over a child, and discovered the following day that they id killed an inno cent man. On the sumo date, in the State of Georgia, a white school teacher, confined in gaol upon the charge that he had assaulted one of his fem.ilo assistants—a man as to whoso guilt there was no doubt— was taken from prison at night and killed by twenty-five masked men. Near the city of Nashville, Tennessee, two negroes who had been convicted in the morning of felonious assault upon white women were taken from the gaol the following night and hanged in the court-house yard. They had been sentence I to be imprisoned for twenty years. The proper development ot the material resources of the South is prevented by a lack of that immigration which has built up the North, and immigration is continually discouraged by this contempt for courts and law.