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Title: Southern Lynchings Author: Lucy E. Parsons Date: April 1892 Language: en Topics: class struggle, working class Source: Freedom Notes: excerpts
Never since the days of the Spartan Helots has history recorded such
brutality as has been ever since the war and as is now being perpetrated
upon the Negro in the South. How easy for us to go to Russia and drop a
tear of sympathy over the persecuted Jew. But a step across Mason’s and
Dixon’s line will bring us upon a scene of horrors before which those of
Russia, bad as they are, pale into insignificance! No irresponsible,
blood-thirsty mobs prowl over Russian territory, lashing and lynching
its citizens. Even the sex which civilization and custom have shielded
from rude assaults are treated as brutally as the men.
Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering,
white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and
strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen
years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice
fled? The eloquence of Wendell Phillips is silent now. John Brown’s body
lies moldering in the grave. But will his spirit lie there moldering,
too? Brutes, inhuman monsters—you heartless brutes—you whom nature forms
by molding you in it, deceive not yourselves by thinking that another
John Brown will not arise.
As one of the speakers so truly said at a meeting of colored citizens
held in this city March 27, to protest against the outrages being
perpetrated in the South upon peaceful citizens simply because they are
Negroes, “The white race furnished us one John Brown; the next must come
from our own race.” The whites of the South are not only sowing the wind
which they will reap in the whirlwind, but the flame which they will
reap in the conflagration, as the following utterances at the meeting
mentioned above would indicate: “Prepare for the crisis. We have stood
this thing long enough. God helps those who help themselves. The crisis
is approaching and we must be prepared.”