service. Before the company could be assembled the prisoner had been taken from the jail. A rope was placed about Hamilton’s neck and he was dragged half a block from the jail to a telephone pole opposite the parish courthouse, and strung up. A knife was left sticking in the body.

[Pg 12]Here we have Judge Lynch’s Court in full operation in the execution of one suspected Colored criminal and the manufacture at the same time of a thousand white criminals. This Colored man was only suspected of the usual crime. There was no trial of him to find the facts, not even by Judge Lynch himself. Edward Hamilton might have been guilty and then again he might have been innocent. I think that a private inquiry into his case subsequent to his murder, pointed to his probable innocence. But he was an object of suspicion, and that was enough to justify the act of his murderers. If the mob failed to lynch the guilty and lynched instead an innocent man, it was so much the worse for the innocent man, not at all for the mob, however red their hands were with that innocent man’s blood. Why? Because that innocent man was black, and because his murder helps to uphold white supremacy over millions of people whose only offense is that they are black. Into the violent death of a man like Hamilton there might not be instituted any official inquiry at all in many parts of the South any more than if he had been a horse or a dog. But if there happens to be an official inquiry the usual verdict is that “the deceased came to his death by the hands of a person or persons unknown,” and that ends the matter so far as the Negro is concerned. But it does not end the matter so far as the South is concerned, for the Devil will exact his share of the black deed from that section to the uttermost farthing. What has such a mob done? In the murder of one black man, whether innocent or guilty, the South has, as in the case of Hamilton, made hundreds of white criminals, has tainted the blood of whole communities like Shreveport with the virus of lawlessness and crime. In this same Shreveport there were five colored men lynched in ten days and eight in a year, and one white woman testified at an investigation conducted by the attorney general’s office that she rode in an automobile crowded with men eighteen miles to see an old colored man burned at the stake! Like begets like, and crime crime, and there is no help for it. Because what a state sows that it shall surely reap. If it sow sin it shall reap suffering and shame, and if it sow the wind it shall likewise reap the whirlwind. Is not the South sowing into the souls of both races the seeds of sin and violence, and shall it not then reap its full crop of crime and misery, the wild and anarchic 

 Prev. P 12/15 next