Lucy E. Parsons

Southern Lynchings

April 1892

Freedom

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.”